This, IIRC, was posted on slashdot and it kind of relates to your post.
The author argues among other things that complete simulation is not necessary, just simulation of certain parts that are being viewed.
The argument is different, of course, but it illustrates the point.
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Earth community when the US Military confirmed that the Earth Simulator was build due to the fact that the Earth will be uninhabitable by 2050. Coming on the heels of a recent National Academy of Sciences report that the average temperature has risen yet again, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. The Earth is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Galaxy-Wide species diversity test.
You don't need to be an expert to predict Earth's future. The hand writing is on the computer simulation: Earth faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Earth because Earth is dying, EARTH IS DEAD! Things are looking very bad for Earth. As many of us are already aware, Earth continues to lose species. Extinction flows like a river of blood.
The rainforest habitats are the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of their area. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time species black rhino and tiger only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Earth is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Earth leader Bush states that there are 7000 species left. How many mammals are there? Let's see. The number of mammal versus amphibian posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 mammal species. Rainforest reptile posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of amphibian posts. Therefore there are about 700 rainforest reptiles. A recent article put mammals at about 80 percent of the species market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 mammal species. This is consistent with the number of mammal Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of the rainforests, abysmal slash and burn agriculture, the drug war and so on, Columbian rainforests went out of business and was taken over by Brazilian rainforests who sell another troubled rainforests to international logging interests. Now Thai forests are also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Earth has steadily declined in wilderness and species. Earth is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Earth is to survive at all it will be among human dilettante dabblers. Earth continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. The simulation confirms it. For all practical purposes, Earth is dead.
Just immagine when people from the virtual Earth start interacting with people from real Earth! This would be amazing!
You could have a paralel slashdot in another earth where people could post and discuss! And you could have it the other way around too! Just immagine some inhabitant from Virtual Earth posting on slashdot on the Real Earth! Can you see the possib$%#GFDID NO CARRIER
What are the UN for? Isn't it supposed to serve the purpose of finding peaceful solutions for conflicts? At least in theory...
It boils down to the point of pure animal instinct: until you realise that your instistence in trying to win is going to inflict some serious phisical harm on you, there is no way in the world you, as a human, will stop fighting to get to the top of the food chain.
You could say "OK, and we just accept it as final", but if you lost, I bet you'd get the little guns again and call the simulation void...
Don't go around propagating the source code for this thing. Millions of people use computers with these operating systems, people spreading the code could easyly being contributing to *MAJOR* problems arising.
This is the kind of site that the mozilla folks should focus on: an appealing product site that shows a different image from the "developer-oriented" or "cutting-edge-freak" current website.
This is a great advantage towards public perception of Mozilla as a very good browser. It shows maturity on a project. Congratulations to all the folks at the Mozilla team and thank you for providing us with a serious browser.
Okay,let's be serious for a moment, guys. There was this week when you had 10 stories from new planets being discovered that probably would lead everyone to "rethink what they know about the universe". Then you had the week of nonsense "ask slashdot" questions. Now we're getting to a point where Slashdot is ceasing to be "News for nerds" go turn into a MS bashing forum. I mean, from "News for nerds" to Linux advocacy to MS bashing, what is this turning into?
Can't you guys be scientificaly honest? These are complex subjects and it's not a question of "wanting" to design a good OS, it's a question of complexity in designing a good OS. Or are you guys just trying to look cool to your friends with that 'anty-MS' stance? Take a look ate the usage logs on Slashdot visitors' OSes. Then come back to tell me that the vast majority is at work and is forced to use Windows. I'll just laugh
I would gladly pay a disuation fee to discuss on slashdot. Wasn't there an ideia like that sometime?
That should explain why is it that Linux is taking so much to catch on the Desktop, right? Understand this: a monopoly can only be mantained if you don't spend half your life pissing off the client base. Linux has been living hanging on the UNIX legacy, and that is the stregth it has. Let us see when Linux starts to have a significant user base on the desktop. Gnome and KDE will have to live with cruff they are creating right now, and will inevitably have to create. Don't let yourself get fooled by thinking that a well made product always get the deserved market share.
Check it
here. Basicaly, the BSD License allows you to do whatever you want with the toaster and the clock. Even sell it. En masse, if you want to. You just can't complain that the free toaster you got doesn't work with your bread size. And you can't say your clock-toaster isn't based on anything, you have to give credit to the authors.
They have had electronic voting systems for ages, and I've never heard bad stuff about it. Maybe they have something to teach here, in terms of audits, standard procedures and transparency.
Brazilian people will know what I'm talking about when I say that everyone takes corruption and influence traffic as something that does exist there, so one would have to be at least a bit carefull when implementing a system that doesn't give you phisical voting cards that you can actualy grab with your hands and show them. People will rightfully be wary of electronic voting systems if things are not transparent.
It basicaly gets down to a matter of convenience. In large countries like China, Canada, USA or Brazil, you'll take a substantial amount of time to know the results of an election in traditional voting systems. Electronic voting solves that. Brazilians know who their next president is going to be a couple of hours after the ballots have closed.
OTOH, it introduces the problem of easy tampering. With voting cards, there needs to be a guy (or a gang of them) that steals the votes while nobody's watching and replaces the same number of votes with the result he wishes, and besides being risky, it does not guarantee a result that he wants. With electronic voting, you can add a couple of zeros here and truncate a couple of zeros there.
How can such a system can be implemented without spartan audits, is beyond me...
You can actualy see how "security" in systems has been uncautiously implemented. With all this hype in the last months since Set. 11 about security, you get government satelite signals hacked.
What is the most ridiculous is that this is some serious stuff. Everyone knows that the military are years ahead of civil society in terms ov technological advancement (OK, maybe they weaken out in a couple of things, but you get the picture). So what do you get when the power to easily interfere in satelite communications is available to civil society? Take some guesses...
Even more than the use that individual citizens could give to it (don't get me started with the "terrorist" stuff, not everybody is as paranoid about it as you american guys. People in Europe don't worry as much as you), I just think of the power that the corporations can acheive trough this.
You should have asked first, but now the harm is done.
First, is it just the money? Can there be another type of compensation? Sometimes people walk away because of project disapointments (good projects that don't get assigned to you). OTOH, there could be other ways of them providing financial benefits (How does free training in a specific area sounds?). Sometimes it's not just money. You use money to buy things like education or satisfaction. If they can provide that directly to you, isn't that worth money?
Second, consider that changing companies isn't smooth. Think about that.
Main point, the reactions to leaving change from company to company depending on their culture, but more on how you present the facts. Here's how:
a) I have this offer of a company that is paying me x more than you are paying me currently. I have decided to take their offer and I expect you understand.
b) As you know, the company has been paying me below market value for these past [insert time measuring unit]. I am now on the verge of starting to consider other offers, because I'd like to stay with the company, but purely financial issues are at stake. You do know how the market prices are. Can we talk this over? (either this or something similar)
This way, risk of harm done is lowered, and you can talk it over. It gets clear that you are OK with them, but that you do have to hunt a big mammal to take your family for dinner.
At this time? You're better off leaving for the new company. Now you are the guy that's "staying with us because we paid him more money". That's what you'll be from now on.
In fact the scientific beauty of chess algorithms is to find the cleanest solution without trying all the others. What is happening here is not very inteligent, not even new. You had Seti@Home showing you could do massive distributed computing, so nothing new here.
The chalenge should be in creating good algorithms to find solutions, like people do. When a human plays a game of chess, he doesn't think of *ALL* possible moves, not by far. He automaticaly focuses on some major moves that seem likely to lead to a victory. This is what makes us different from (most) machines.
The chalenge is here, not in building bigger and bigger machines...
Banks don't often check small amounts. With me they've only checked signatures in checks above 200 Euros. Anything lower than that they'd just paid.
Thing here is that, in order for a system of digital identification to get widespread adoption, the public has to have trust. Who's going to be in favour of a system that people will initially perceive as being insecure (because it's not them that are signing, "it's a computer") , especialy with all the news about trojans and security breaches in networked systems?
The point is that people are on the other side of digital ID, they're not thinking "Oh, good, I can have documents digitaly signed and save me a whole lot of trouble", they're thinking more in the lines of "Hey, and if someone..."
They will have to check and double check and triple check to guarantee that the system is secure, otherwise they will have a very hard time trying to implement it a second time after they loose public trust.
Why are ATM machines and credit cards widely accepted by the public? On top of the convenience, they offer a (limited) liability for the damages that can come from its misusage, otherwise people would carry plain good old-fashioned cash anywhere they went.
OK, this is the point. AOL/Time Warner know that the dotcom bull is over and took a lesson from it. They're now focusing on real stuff^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H more traditional business for what it seems that can in fact atract people, not money making schemes that have no business foundation.
"No 'new economy' here, nothing to see, please move on..."
So, like all you are aware of, citizens from European countries have phisical and economic mobility troughout the member states. And we have a common currency now too. So, since Belgium already has a system like this too, the next logical step would be to implement this troughout the whole Europe, which I bet has already been tought.
Any other European country that has a system like this? What are the chances of all these systems being interchangeable?
It's nice that a government from another member state can digitaly ID you... isn't it?:-)
I know you americans don't have ID cards, but we have them in Portugal and allways had, so we don't tend to consider them as forms of major control, even though they are.
The point here is that if you loose your wallet and someone gets ahold of your ID card, you can be in a lot of trouble if it gets misused.
I have heard of stories from people I know that lost their ID and found themselves being chased by stores that claimed people had bought stuff there, paid the first entrance fee and never paid the rest. And that is the least that you can expect, even if you report your ID being missed 5 minutes after you loose it.
We, at least, don't have that many legal mechanisms to prevent situations like those, but I would bet it's a matter of time until there is a case of stolen digital ID.
The German government, by giving incentive to open source applications like encription and security are aware of these problems. So if they actualy exist? They existed well before things went digital, so you can expect a few cases of stolen ID before things get smooth.
Nice move here in Europe, btw. First GEANT, now this, really love the way things are popping up after a lot of foundation work.
Actualy, there is. I don't know what it's called, but at least here in Portugal they were planning on putting on the market some disposable breathalyzers. You'd just use them once and throw them away, and eve though their accuracy is not top-level, you can get a pretty good idea if you've drank over the legal limits. They're suposed to be cheap and available in gas stations. Pretty good, if you ask me. At least takes care of the mental excuse for drinking that extra 'ilegal' beer because you "don't know if you've gone too far already".
Slashdot Mirror
It's espionage, get over it.
Funny how white cops started shooting black kids as soon as camera phones became available.
This, IIRC, was posted on slashdot and it kind of relates to your post.
The author argues among other things that complete simulation is not necessary, just simulation of certain parts that are being viewed.
The argument is different, of course, but it illustrates the point.
US Military has now confirmed : Earth Is Dying
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Earth community when the US Military confirmed that the Earth Simulator was build due to the fact that the Earth will be uninhabitable by 2050. Coming on the heels of a recent National Academy of Sciences report that the average temperature has risen yet again, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. The Earth is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Galaxy-Wide species diversity test.
You don't need to be an expert to predict Earth's future. The hand writing is on the computer simulation: Earth faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Earth because Earth is dying, EARTH IS DEAD! Things are looking very bad for Earth. As many of us are already aware, Earth continues to lose species.
Extinction flows like a river of blood.
The rainforest habitats are the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of their area. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time species black rhino and tiger only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Earth is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Earth leader Bush states that there are 7000 species left. How many mammals are there? Let's see. The number of mammal versus amphibian posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 mammal species. Rainforest reptile posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of amphibian posts. Therefore there are about 700 rainforest reptiles. A recent article put mammals at about 80 percent of the species market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 mammal species. This is consistent with the number of mammal Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of the rainforests, abysmal slash and burn agriculture, the drug war and so on, Columbian rainforests went out of business and was taken over by Brazilian rainforests who sell another troubled rainforests to international logging interests. Now Thai forests are also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Earth has steadily declined in wilderness and species. Earth is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Earth is to survive at all it will be among human dilettante dabblers. Earth continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. The simulation confirms it. For all practical purposes, Earth is dead.
You mean there is still chance of me getting a girlfriend on this second earth?
Where do I get my visa?
Just immagine when people from the virtual Earth start interacting with people from real Earth! This would be amazing!
You could have a paralel slashdot in another earth where people could post and discuss! And you could have it the other way around too! Just immagine some inhabitant from Virtual Earth posting on slashdot on the Real Earth!
Can you see the possib$%#GFDID NO CARRIER
Pretty much useless, if you ask me.
What are the UN for? Isn't it supposed to serve the purpose of finding peaceful solutions for conflicts? At least in theory...
It boils down to the point of pure animal instinct: until you realise that your instistence in trying to win is going to inflict some serious phisical harm on you, there is no way in the world you, as a human, will stop fighting to get to the top of the food chain.
You could say "OK, and we just accept it as final", but if you lost, I bet you'd get the little guns again and call the simulation void...
Really.
Don't go around propagating the source code for this thing. Millions of people use computers with these operating systems, people spreading the code could easyly being contributing to *MAJOR* problems arising.
My 0.02
This is the kind of site that the mozilla folks should focus on: an appealing product site that shows a different image from the "developer-oriented" or "cutting-edge-freak" current website.
This is a great advantage towards public perception of Mozilla as a very good browser. It shows maturity on a project. Congratulations to all the folks at the Mozilla team and thank you for providing us with a serious browser.
Okay,let's be serious for a moment, guys. There was this week when you had 10 stories from new planets being discovered that probably would lead everyone to "rethink what they know about the universe". Then you had the week of nonsense "ask slashdot" questions. Now we're getting to a point where Slashdot is ceasing to be "News for nerds" go turn into a MS bashing forum. I mean, from "News for nerds" to Linux advocacy to MS bashing, what is this turning into?
Can't you guys be scientificaly honest? These are complex subjects and it's not a question of "wanting" to design a good OS, it's a question of complexity in designing a good OS. Or are you guys just trying to look cool to your friends with that 'anty-MS' stance? Take a look ate the usage logs on Slashdot visitors' OSes. Then come back to tell me that the vast majority is at work and is forced to use Windows. I'll just laugh
I would gladly pay a disuation fee to discuss on slashdot. Wasn't there an ideia like that sometime?
That should explain why is it that Linux is taking so much to catch on the Desktop, right? Understand this: a monopoly can only be mantained if you don't spend half your life pissing off the client base.
Linux has been living hanging on the UNIX legacy, and that is the stregth it has. Let us see when Linux starts to have a significant user base on the desktop. Gnome and KDE will have to live with cruff they are creating right now, and will inevitably have to create.
Don't let yourself get fooled by thinking that a well made product always get the deserved market share.
Check it here. Basicaly, the BSD License allows you to do whatever you want with the toaster and the clock. Even sell it. En masse, if you want to. You just can't complain that the free toaster you got doesn't work with your bread size. And you can't say your clock-toaster isn't based on anything, you have to give credit to the authors.
That's where they should take a lesson from.
They have had electronic voting systems for ages, and I've never heard bad stuff about it. Maybe they have something to teach here, in terms of audits, standard procedures and transparency.
Brazilian people will know what I'm talking about when I say that everyone takes corruption and influence traffic as something that does exist there, so one would have to be at least a bit carefull when implementing a system that doesn't give you phisical voting cards that you can actualy grab with your hands and show them. People will rightfully be wary of electronic voting systems if things are not transparent.
It basicaly gets down to a matter of convenience. In large countries like China, Canada, USA or Brazil, you'll take a substantial amount of time to know the results of an election in traditional voting systems. Electronic voting solves that. Brazilians know who their next president is going to be a couple of hours after the ballots have closed.
OTOH, it introduces the problem of easy tampering. With voting cards, there needs to be a guy (or a gang of them) that steals the votes while nobody's watching and replaces the same number of votes with the result he wishes, and besides being risky, it does not guarantee a result that he wants. With electronic voting, you can add a couple of zeros here and truncate a couple of zeros there.
How can such a system can be implemented without spartan audits, is beyond me...
You can actualy see how "security" in systems has been uncautiously implemented. With all this hype in the last months since Set. 11 about security, you get government satelite signals hacked.
What is the most ridiculous is that this is some serious stuff. Everyone knows that the military are years ahead of civil society in terms ov technological advancement (OK, maybe they weaken out in a couple of things, but you get the picture). So what do you get when the power to easily interfere in satelite communications is available to civil society? Take some guesses...
Even more than the use that individual citizens could give to it (don't get me started with the "terrorist" stuff, not everybody is as paranoid about it as you american guys. People in Europe don't worry as much as you), I just think of the power that the corporations can acheive trough this.
Yeah, Detroit, Robocop, stuff. Call me insane.
You should have asked first, but now the harm is done.
First, is it just the money? Can there be another type of compensation? Sometimes people walk away because of project disapointments (good projects that don't get assigned to you). OTOH, there could be other ways of them providing financial benefits (How does free training in a specific area sounds?). Sometimes it's not just money. You use money to buy things like education or satisfaction. If they can provide that directly to you, isn't that worth money?
Second, consider that changing companies isn't smooth. Think about that.
Main point, the reactions to leaving change from company to company depending on their culture, but more on how you present the facts. Here's how:
a) I have this offer of a company that is paying me x more than you are paying me currently. I have decided to take their offer and I expect you understand.
b) As you know, the company has been paying me below market value for these past [insert time measuring unit]. I am now on the verge of starting to consider other offers, because I'd like to stay with the company, but purely financial issues are at stake. You do know how the market prices are. Can we talk this over? (either this or something similar)
This way, risk of harm done is lowered, and you can talk it over. It gets clear that you are OK with them, but that you do have to hunt a big mammal to take your family for dinner.
At this time? You're better off leaving for the new company. Now you are the guy that's "staying with us because we paid him more money". That's what you'll be from now on.
It will be rather scarry if Europe adopts a stance like that. At least the American government can't do whatever they please whenever they like.
In Europe people tend to be a bit more critical towards the govenment's actions, let's see if it's realy important.
In fact the scientific beauty of chess algorithms is to find the cleanest solution without trying all the others. What is happening here is not very inteligent, not even new. You had Seti@Home showing you could do massive distributed computing, so nothing new here.
The chalenge should be in creating good algorithms to find solutions, like people do. When a human plays a game of chess, he doesn't think of *ALL* possible moves, not by far. He automaticaly focuses on some major moves that seem likely to lead to a victory. This is what makes us different from (most) machines.
The chalenge is here, not in building bigger and bigger machines...
If you don't know how to dance, it's the floor's fault. If you don't get it, mod it offtopic.
Slashdot...
Banks don't often check small amounts. With me they've only checked signatures in checks above 200 Euros. Anything lower than that they'd just paid.
Thing here is that, in order for a system of digital identification to get widespread adoption, the public has to have trust . Who's going to be in favour of a system that people will initially perceive as being insecure (because it's not them that are signing, "it's a computer") , especialy with all the news about trojans and security breaches in networked systems?
The point is that people are on the other side of digital ID, they're not thinking "Oh, good, I can have documents digitaly signed and save me a whole lot of trouble", they're thinking more in the lines of "Hey, and if someone..."
They will have to check and double check and triple check to guarantee that the system is secure, otherwise they will have a very hard time trying to implement it a second time after they loose public trust.
Why are ATM machines and credit cards widely accepted by the public? On top of the convenience, they offer a (limited) liability for the damages that can come from its misusage, otherwise people would carry plain good old-fashioned cash anywhere they went.
Why is the previous funny?... Oh well...
OK, this is the point. AOL/Time Warner know that the dotcom bull is over and took a lesson from it. They're now focusing on real stuff^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H more traditional business for what it seems that can in fact atract people, not money making schemes that have no business foundation.
"No 'new economy' here, nothing to see, please move on..."
So, like all you are aware of, citizens from European countries have phisical and economic mobility troughout the member states. And we have a common currency now too. So, since Belgium already has a system like this too, the next logical step would be to implement this troughout the whole Europe, which I bet has already been tought.
Any other European country that has a system like this? What are the chances of all these systems being interchangeable?
It's nice that a government from another member state can digitaly ID you... isn't it? :-)
Lay
Weakly typed languages will bring us armageddon
...after all?
I know you americans don't have ID cards, but we have them in Portugal and allways had, so we don't tend to consider them as forms of major control, even though they are.
The point here is that if you loose your wallet and someone gets ahold of your ID card, you can be in a lot of trouble if it gets misused.
I have heard of stories from people I know that lost their ID and found themselves being chased by stores that claimed people had bought stuff there, paid the first entrance fee and never paid the rest. And that is the least that you can expect, even if you report your ID being missed 5 minutes after you loose it.
We, at least, don't have that many legal mechanisms to prevent situations like those, but I would bet it's a matter of time until there is a case of stolen digital ID.
The German government, by giving incentive to open source applications like encription and security are aware of these problems. So if they actualy exist? They existed well before things went digital, so you can expect a few cases of stolen ID before things get smooth.
Nice move here in Europe, btw. First GEANT, now this, really love the way things are popping up after a lot of foundation work.
Lay
Weakly typed languages will bring us armageddon
Actualy, there is. I don't know what it's called, but at least here in Portugal they were planning on putting on the market some disposable breathalyzers. You'd just use them once and throw them away, and eve though their accuracy is not top-level, you can get a pretty good idea if you've drank over the legal limits. They're suposed to be cheap and available in gas stations. Pretty good, if you ask me. At least takes care of the mental excuse for drinking that extra 'ilegal' beer because you "don't know if you've gone too far already".