Gates has sponsored a new Computer Science building at Cambidge University, and has created a massive scholarship fund similar to the whole Rhode scholar business that Oxford's got going on. There's nothing bad with that - on the surface.
Dig a bit deeper: Until about two years ago when I was still there, computer science students at Cambridge would get the full Visual Studio suite for free as a bonus from M$, probably other goodies too. What technologies would they then be more likely to be familiar with when they graduated???
Like all the robber barons before him, Gates is driven by avarice. Don't be fooled by his charity, or consider it harmless. Microsoft will still be around in 40 years' time but Gates won't, and the corporation's influence and guaranteed revenue will still be radiating from the same departments and buildings he financed.
Some people can do that. It's a function of one's biological clock, I guess. I think Margaret Thatcher ran the UK on three hours of sleep a night - which explains a lot.
Well, related to my previous comments the following are some parts of the book that I found really frustrating and made me put it down:
Leibniz, Newton and other Royal Society characters are presented as the 17 century equivalent of hackers. They stay up all night having the time's equivalent of LAN parties, erm, dissecting dogs. The way he describes them, they feel more like MIT sophomores cramming to finish a mid-term CS project than 17th century philosophers. There's just a historic context that makes this parallel a bit silly. I mean, Oxford and Cambridge were monasteries not long before that; a lot of these people probably spent half their day in church and took their religion and Latin pretty seriously. This hardly features in their debates and work in the book. It's all cool for the sake of an exciting story, but, 99% accurate?
The german witch-pagan-forest stuff+drugs+falling down a mine part+ending up covered in phosphorus and bumping into friends underground was, well, just plain crazy, to say the least. Similarily, the siege of Vienna was just too mental. It's this Eurodisney and Hollywood approach to european history that annoyed me - take a swashbuckler, add a Turk with a scimitar and a hot chick, stir vigorously, serve. I mean, it's cool in a Tom Clancy novel or Indiana Jones, but I think Stephenson takes himself too seriously.
Woodhouse's dad dies in a totally random way (blown up or something, if I recall correctly), but his death does not really seem to emotionally register with his son or affect his views or politics (which he never stands up for, at any point halfway through the book, despite frequent proclamations that he was a puritan especially in the Boston part of the story etc.), although, to his credit, I do recall some tears.
Isn't the king of England a bit too accessible for 99% real?
It is impossible to tell that Eliza's character is a woman. She talks, walks, behaves and has sex like a man, and you can tell it's because the book is written by a man who can't write women, let alone 17th century women. That was the case with some of the female characters in Cryptonomicon too
In my view, what's cool about Tolkien is that he never goes into tiny, minute detail in, say, the Silmarillion (an equally complex in number of characters and ambition book). He does not describe every single rock and street on Middle Earth. He often just drops peoples' and places' names as if it's obvious what he means. That, in a sense, makes Middle Earth more real, because your imagination fills in the gaps. On the other hand, Stephenson describes every other building down the Strand, who built it, why there was smoke coming up the chimney, how much gold there was in each basement on Cheapside, what the decoration was like in the local pub etc. It gets frustrating after a while, and just isn't very sophisticated.
Anyway. Perhaps I'm being too anal, but I found my patience wearing thin pretty quickly. it's a big book and demands a lot of attention and time. In short, I think that Stephenson tries to tackle more than he can handle, and gets sidetracked. I think he is aiming too high, trying to write a momentous work, but fails because he gets bogged down too much on pointless details and misses the spirit of the time. I was just dissapointed very early, and gave up.
Actually,yes. Compare the volume of books in your local bookstore today with that of a standard bookstore 30 years ago. Do you think it's possible to have such an increase in volume based on typewriter technology? In fact, any idiot can write and publish a book today. In fact, although not everyone is Dante, it is becoming harder for good writers to gain recognition because most people end up buying crap Tom Clancy books. Hence the death of literature.
So the same paradigm applies to your example too.
Cryptonomicon was fantastic, but I couldn't get halfway through Quicksilver. The characters are inconsistent and incoherent, particularly the protagonist - who only remembers his religious views when it's convenient for the plot, but otherwise is just a random dude meeting famous peoplem having deep conversations with them and never expresses his own opinions. The view of european history presented is also a caricature, extremely americanised and at times very silly. In addition, alhtough interesting, Stephenson's descriptions present London from the viewpoint of a modern tourist who wants to understand where it all came from. It feels like reading the Lonely Planet guide. And he clearly does not understand Cambridge. Although he talks a lot about Trinity. I doubt he's ever even visited it. 99% crap. Big disappointment.
With all the APIs and IDEs out there today, plus all the free open-source tools available, programming today is much easier than it used to be 20 years ago. Any clever person can do it now, most people will be able to do it soon. The further away our interfaces move from machine code, the less training and in-depth understanding one needs to in order to work with machines. In a few years, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering degrees will only be useful in R&D (and paid accordingly - peanuts here in Europe, compared to e.g. marketing)
The value of any product, service or idea follows a classic introduction - growth - maturity - commoditisation lifecycle. Today, this process is very rapid. As the technologies in which we train become commoditised, so do our degrees. I expect this trend to continue. CS and Electrical Engineering will be increasingly less profitable and hence less appealing.
"coming through an impasse, change; having changed, you can get through" - the i ching
In an effort to control the commercial aspect of the Games, ATHENS 2004 has a limited group of sponsors, half that of previous Games. - athens 2004
we should all support this effort, and perhaps beijing will be even better (though I doubt that neo-capitalist china will follow)
If it means carbon-based organisms similar to the ones on earth, then I think chances that the same kind of thing can be found elsewhere are low indeed. I mean, I bet there's loads of planets roughly similar to earth out there, but in how many of them have similar organic molecules appeared or evolved enough to build something similar to DNA, viruses, bacteria, cells, organisms or anything sentient? I don't think we can assume that life on any other planet will have anything to do with our chemistry biology, let alone the way we interpret, process and exchange information.
If, however, we consider living organisms as having a broader set of properties, such as the ability to create energy from resources in their environment and the ability to replicate, then I think that chances of such systems having formed through natural processes on other solar systems are very high. I bet that most of them, though, haven't discovered (or haven't bothered to discover) radiowaves, and are quite happy hanging out and doing their equivalent of photosynthesis.
The Chinese are not isolating themselves by adopting their own technology standards. 1.2 billion people can quite happily form their own sub-system within the global economy and technology. On the basis of population alone, we should be the ones trying to interface to their protocols.
We (the "West") really need a shift in viewpoint when it comes to China. The world's centre of gravity, in terms of population, is in Asia. What is happening in reality is that, China is isolating the rest of the world, not the other way round. It is rapidly reclaiming the place that it had in world politics before the 19th century - the Middle Kingdom, centre of the world.
"Mao Tse Tung said change must come / change must come through the barrel of a gun" - Alabama 3
That would be true for the FBI and police. The NSA and CIA don't really need to prosecute anyone or prove anything at court, though. They both gather intelligence, and tend to do so in any way the like - the latter generally through the wonderful methods of murder, torture, bribery, extortion, coups and blackmail, all in the interest of US national security. It is almost certain that if they had broken PGP the broad public would be unaware.
The advocates of DRM refuse to realise that what they call piracy cannot be stopped and is going to be a frictional force that they must accept as competition. Fighting it on legal grounds or paying huge R&D costs to develop new, pointless encryption techniques can only help in squeezing their profits more.
You only need one person to legally pay to view the plaintext, even if it is only once. After, that, I can't see a way to stop somebody from copying the decrypted output bit stream/continuous signal. Just intercept and copy bit by bit the input to the DAC in a CD player, or bribe the staff in a cinema in Malaysia and walk in with a digital videocamera. Then make the film available on a peer-to-peer network and stand in front of your mirror laughing satanically, while Hollywood loses revenue desperately needed in funding cocaine habits and shit like Legally Blonde.
There are some very clever people out there with a lot of free time who really, really like the idea of free stuff and enjoy spending a few nights finding exploits in "secret" protocols conceived by dark-suited schmucks with degrees in media studies or marketing dreaming of the perfect cash cow. In addition to these people, there are the pros out there, and they've got perfectly rational financial motives. Pirates make millions, which explains why no encryption has stopped them in the past. All you need is someone with the brains, free time and capital to play around with a soldering iron, some code in C and, voila, mass production.
Let's face it. The chances of any method of DRM eliminating "piracy" are very slim. Free content, in its many forms, is here to stay.
Given that from what it seems the US + coalition did not have any eyes and ears on the ground in the -stans on the 11th, I guess a lot of the (at least, initial) intelligence must have come from satellites...
Does anyone know what resolution you could get from a spy satellite? Does anyone know what sets the resolution limit - the optics or image processing? I bet a combination of RF/IR/visible photos of the region could give you shitloads of info about what's Out There.
I read somewhere that bin Laden does not use any electrical devices in fear of detection. Personally, I am not sure about that - he'd need to coordinate activities and keep some intelligence channels to keep up to date. Unless he's doing things the Pony Express way, he must maintain some sort of telecoms. That's perhaps where an EP-3E would be handy...
Let's hope the US can infiltrate bin Laden's network, compromise his crypto and communications, and screw with his and his friends' heads until they mess up their operations big time, Cryptonomicon way. That would be the best way to catch bin Laden and put an end the entire Catch-22 situation of having to drop both Cruise missiles and aid on the poor Afghans' heads. And, hey, the boys and girls at Langley have probably been working hard on it the last few weeks, but that's the war we don't and won't hear about.
Why would that be ridiculous? The United Nations themselves confirmed [bbc] the deaths. Perhaps these people were still in the building (apparently, asleep when it collapsed on them) because they, well, fairly reasonably, would assume that the coalition would not bomb a UN site? That would make it a much safer place to spend the night than anywhere else.
Yet another tragedy in the long list that we've witnessed in the past few weeks...
You are right, this thing is an utter bitch in terms of infection rate, it's more or less taken down all our unpatched servers here (d'oh!) and shut down our external email for a day. However, it doesn't seem to be making too much damage apart from taking up bandwidth and CPU time and increasing log size.
I'm getting really paranoid. Could it be that it may be going for a denial of service attack, like Code Red?
That would certainly be a step up from your current state.
Hey, I'm not saying that we should remain indifferent or not get angry. I'm saying is that having seen how determined these people are, the only way to avoid more events like that is to focus on an intelligent solution to this problem that targets the right people, not ethnic or religious groups. Forgive me for pressing the point that we have to avoid being biased, but I think that this is the biggest mistake one can make at the moment.
No. Historically, such events have been someone else's problem. Not anymore. This was our own personal Krystallnacht.
From a purely American viewpoint, yes, that is a big difference. From a broader perspective, we've just witnessed the first case of war against an opponent who is not an easily-defined entity and is not located in one particular place. Nobody knows how to fight such an opponent, but I'd suspect that old rules do not apply. In this case there is no Germany to bomb or beach to land. What do you do when the people you are after are sparsely scaterred around the world?
Yes. Read that quote again. Then read Mein Kampf. Then tell me the difference.
The views in that quote are based on a religious arguement, the views expressed by Hitler in Mein Kampf were political. In my view, that is a huge difference. Their similarity starts and ends in the fact that they are both extreme and dangerous.
The above quotation that you seem to consider as representative of the Muslim world is in fact the view of an extremist who believes in "the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion" (Webster's Dictionary definition of the term terrorism). This is as flawed as thinking that McVeigh's opinions represent the opinion of americans. If this what you think Islam is then that is precisely the point I'm trying to get across.
The main ostrich in this case has been the United States with its stubborn insistance of treating Arabs diplomatically as if they were represented by such radical elements, filtered down to popular culture in the stereotype of the wackos shown in Hollywood films like the Delta Force and The Siege. The fact that freaks like bin Landen and Saddam Hussain enjoy such enormous support in their countries is a direct consequence of this dead-end diplomatic stance, which has been followed by the United States in the Middle East for decades.
And what exactly does Neville Chamberlain have to do with this anyway? Are you really comparing Islam to fascism, bin Laden to Hitler, 2001 to 1939? Do you really see a relation between what happenned on September 11th and anything else that has ever happened before in modern history? That would scare me shitless.
With respect to the zealots in question, they have already shown that they are extremely intelligent from the complexity of their operation. As for whether they are sober or not, within their cultural frame of reference these people could well be considered so. And that is precisely why the entire world needs to remain so.
I don't see anything about "exterminating all non-Muslims around the world" in this:
"the World Islamic Front for jihad against Jews and Crusaders, have, by the grace of God Almighty, issued a crystal clear fatwa calling on the Nation to carry on jihad aimed at liberating Islamic holy sites, and the Ancient House (The Holy Ka'aba), and Al-Aksa Mosque and all Islamic lands." (from Bin Laden's interview on your link)
This passage sets bin Laden's mission statement as liberating Islamic sites. I think that it's high time America gave a long, hard try in understanding of the Islamic world a bit better and accepting how crap its Middle Eastern policies have been.
Not all Muslims are psycho freaks that want to wage a holy war. The term jihad had been dead literally since the 10th centrury before the same abysmal US policies of interference in the Middle East that trained and funded bin Laden's fight against the Soviets drove a lot of (even moderate) Muslims from the Middle East to South East Asia to dispair.
BOTH the Jews and the Palestinians have a lot of blood on their hands, and the US also carries a lot of responsibility for this. Using terms such as "crusade", "extermination" and "jihad" at this stage is the most dangerous thing we can do. This is a time for sober thought and intelligent action.
Slashdot Mirror
> I don't believe that we have any other issue than > economy. You don't say.
Why exactly is buy nothing day economic terrorism? Who's terrified by the thought of people buying nothing?
Gates has sponsored a new Computer Science building at Cambidge University, and has created a massive scholarship fund similar to the whole Rhode scholar business that Oxford's got going on. There's nothing bad with that - on the surface.
Dig a bit deeper: Until about two years ago when I was still there, computer science students at Cambridge would get the full Visual Studio suite for free as a bonus from M$, probably other goodies too. What technologies would they then be more likely to be familiar with when they graduated???
Like all the robber barons before him, Gates is driven by avarice. Don't be fooled by his charity, or consider it harmless. Microsoft will still be around in 40 years' time but Gates won't, and the corporation's influence and guaranteed revenue will still be radiating from the same departments and buildings he financed.
Some people can do that. It's a function of one's biological clock, I guess. I think Margaret Thatcher ran the UK on three hours of sleep a night - which explains a lot.
Hi Luke.
Well, related to my previous comments the following are some parts of the book that I found really frustrating and made me put it down:
Anyway. Perhaps I'm being too anal, but I found my patience wearing thin pretty quickly. it's a big book and demands a lot of attention and time. In short, I think that Stephenson tries to tackle more than he can handle, and gets sidetracked. I think he is aiming too high, trying to write a momentous work, but fails because he gets bogged down too much on pointless details and misses the spirit of the time. I was just dissapointed very early, and gave up.
Actually,yes. Compare the volume of books in your local bookstore today with that of a standard bookstore 30 years ago. Do you think it's possible to have such an increase in volume based on typewriter technology? In fact, any idiot can write and publish a book today. In fact, although not everyone is Dante, it is becoming harder for good writers to gain recognition because most people end up buying crap Tom Clancy books. Hence the death of literature. So the same paradigm applies to your example too.
Cryptonomicon was fantastic, but I couldn't get halfway through Quicksilver. The characters are inconsistent and incoherent, particularly the protagonist - who only remembers his religious views when it's convenient for the plot, but otherwise is just a random dude meeting famous peoplem having deep conversations with them and never expresses his own opinions. The view of european history presented is also a caricature, extremely americanised and at times very silly. In addition, alhtough interesting, Stephenson's descriptions present London from the viewpoint of a modern tourist who wants to understand where it all came from. It feels like reading the Lonely Planet guide. And he clearly does not understand Cambridge. Although he talks a lot about Trinity. I doubt he's ever even visited it. 99% crap. Big disappointment.
With all the APIs and IDEs out there today, plus all the free open-source tools available, programming today is much easier than it used to be 20 years ago. Any clever person can do it now, most people will be able to do it soon. The further away our interfaces move from machine code, the less training and in-depth understanding one needs to in order to work with machines. In a few years, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering degrees will only be useful in R&D (and paid accordingly - peanuts here in Europe, compared to e.g. marketing)
The value of any product, service or idea follows a classic introduction - growth - maturity - commoditisation lifecycle. Today, this process is very rapid. As the technologies in which we train become commoditised, so do our degrees. I expect this trend to continue. CS and Electrical Engineering will be increasingly less profitable and hence less appealing. "coming through an impasse, change; having changed, you can get through" - the i ching
In an effort to control the commercial aspect of the Games, ATHENS 2004 has a limited group of sponsors, half that of previous Games. - athens 2004 we should all support this effort, and perhaps beijing will be even better (though I doubt that neo-capitalist china will follow)
If it means carbon-based organisms similar to the ones on earth, then I think chances that the same kind of thing can be found elsewhere are low indeed. I mean, I bet there's loads of planets roughly similar to earth out there, but in how many of them have similar organic molecules appeared or evolved enough to build something similar to DNA, viruses, bacteria, cells, organisms or anything sentient? I don't think we can assume that life on any other planet will have anything to do with our chemistry biology, let alone the way we interpret, process and exchange information.
If, however, we consider living organisms as having a broader set of properties, such as the ability to create energy from resources in their environment and the ability to replicate, then I think that chances of such systems having formed through natural processes on other solar systems are very high. I bet that most of them, though, haven't discovered (or haven't bothered to discover) radiowaves, and are quite happy hanging out and doing their equivalent of photosynthesis.
Elected?
We (the "West") really need a shift in viewpoint when it comes to China. The world's centre of gravity, in terms of population, is in Asia. What is happening in reality is that, China is isolating the rest of the world, not the other way round. It is rapidly reclaiming the place that it had in world politics before the 19th century - the Middle Kingdom, centre of the world.
"Mao Tse Tung said change must come / change must come through the barrel of a gun" - Alabama 3
(no, I am not Chinese)
That would be true for the FBI and police. The NSA and CIA don't really need to prosecute anyone or prove anything at court, though. They both gather intelligence, and tend to do so in any way the like - the latter generally through the wonderful methods of murder, torture, bribery, extortion, coups and blackmail, all in the interest of US national security. It is almost certain that if they had broken PGP the broad public would be unaware.
There is no subsitute for good foreign policy.
On the article, they say it can go down stairs and stuff. I wonder - can it go up?
Yeah!
The advocates of DRM refuse to realise that what they call piracy cannot be stopped and is going to be a frictional force that they must accept as competition. Fighting it on legal grounds or paying huge R&D costs to develop new, pointless encryption techniques can only help in squeezing their profits more.
You only need one person to legally pay to view the plaintext, even if it is only once. After, that, I can't see a way to stop somebody from copying the decrypted output bit stream/continuous signal. Just intercept and copy bit by bit the input to the DAC in a CD player, or bribe the staff in a cinema in Malaysia and walk in with a digital videocamera. Then make the film available on a peer-to-peer network and stand in front of your mirror laughing satanically, while Hollywood loses revenue desperately needed in funding cocaine habits and shit like Legally Blonde .
There are some very clever people out there with a lot of free time who really, really like the idea of free stuff and enjoy spending a few nights finding exploits in "secret" protocols conceived by dark-suited schmucks with degrees in media studies or marketing dreaming of the perfect cash cow. In addition to these people, there are the pros out there, and they've got perfectly rational financial motives. Pirates make millions, which explains why no encryption has stopped them in the past. All you need is someone with the brains, free time and capital to play around with a soldering iron, some code in C and, voila, mass production.
Let's face it. The chances of any method of DRM eliminating "piracy" are very slim. Free content, in its many forms, is here to stay.
Given that from what it seems the US + coalition did not have any eyes and ears on the ground in the -stans on the 11th, I guess a lot of the (at least, initial) intelligence must have come from satellites...
Does anyone know what resolution you could get from a spy satellite? Does anyone know what sets the resolution limit - the optics or image processing? I bet a combination of RF/IR/visible photos of the region could give you shitloads of info about what's Out There.
I read somewhere that bin Laden does not use any electrical devices in fear of detection. Personally, I am not sure about that - he'd need to coordinate activities and keep some intelligence channels to keep up to date. Unless he's doing things the Pony Express way, he must maintain some sort of telecoms. That's perhaps where an EP-3E would be handy...
Let's hope the US can infiltrate bin Laden's network, compromise his crypto and communications, and screw with his and his friends' heads until they mess up their operations big time, Cryptonomicon way. That would be the best way to catch bin Laden and put an end the entire Catch-22 situation of having to drop both Cruise missiles and aid on the poor Afghans' heads. And, hey, the boys and girls at Langley have probably been working hard on it the last few weeks, but that's the war we don't and won't hear about.
Why would that be ridiculous? The United Nations themselves confirmed [bbc] the deaths. Perhaps these people were still in the building (apparently, asleep when it collapsed on them) because they, well, fairly reasonably, would assume that the coalition would not bomb a UN site? That would make it a much safer place to spend the night than anywhere else.
Yet another tragedy in the long list that we've witnessed in the past few weeks...
You are right, this thing is an utter bitch in terms of infection rate, it's more or less taken down all our unpatched servers here (d'oh!) and shut down our external email for a day. However, it doesn't seem to be making too much damage apart from taking up bandwidth and CPU time and increasing log size.
I'm getting really paranoid. Could it be that it may be going for a denial of service attack, like Code Red?Fair point.
Hey, I'm not saying that we should remain indifferent or not get angry. I'm saying is that having seen how determined these people are, the only way to avoid more events like that is to focus on an intelligent solution to this problem that targets the right people, not ethnic or religious groups. Forgive me for pressing the point that we have to avoid being biased, but I think that this is the biggest mistake one can make at the moment.
From a purely American viewpoint, yes, that is a big difference. From a broader perspective, we've just witnessed the first case of war against an opponent who is not an easily-defined entity and is not located in one particular place. Nobody knows how to fight such an opponent, but I'd suspect that old rules do not apply. In this case there is no Germany to bomb or beach to land. What do you do when the people you are after are sparsely scaterred around the world?
The views in that quote are based on a religious arguement, the views expressed by Hitler in Mein Kampf were political. In my view, that is a huge difference. Their similarity starts and ends in the fact that they are both extreme and dangerous.
The above quotation that you seem to consider as representative of the Muslim world is in fact the view of an extremist who believes in "the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion" (Webster's Dictionary definition of the term terrorism). This is as flawed as thinking that McVeigh's opinions represent the opinion of americans. If this what you think Islam is then that is precisely the point I'm trying to get across.
The main ostrich in this case has been the United States with its stubborn insistance of treating Arabs diplomatically as if they were represented by such radical elements, filtered down to popular culture in the stereotype of the wackos shown in Hollywood films like the Delta Force and The Siege. The fact that freaks like bin Landen and Saddam Hussain enjoy such enormous support in their countries is a direct consequence of this dead-end diplomatic stance, which has been followed by the United States in the Middle East for decades.
And what exactly does Neville Chamberlain have to do with this anyway? Are you really comparing Islam to fascism, bin Laden to Hitler, 2001 to 1939? Do you really see a relation between what happenned on September 11th and anything else that has ever happened before in modern history? That would scare me shitless.
With respect to the zealots in question, they have already shown that they are extremely intelligent from the complexity of their operation. As for whether they are sober or not, within their cultural frame of reference these people could well be considered so. And that is precisely why the entire world needs to remain so.
This passage sets bin Laden's mission statement as liberating Islamic sites. I think that it's high time America gave a long, hard try in understanding of the Islamic world a bit better and accepting how crap its Middle Eastern policies have been.
Not all Muslims are psycho freaks that want to wage a holy war. The term jihad had been dead literally since the 10th centrury before the same abysmal US policies of interference in the Middle East that trained and funded bin Laden's fight against the Soviets drove a lot of (even moderate) Muslims from the Middle East to South East Asia to dispair.
BOTH the Jews and the Palestinians have a lot of blood on their hands, and the US also carries a lot of responsibility for this. Using terms such as "crusade", "extermination" and "jihad" at this stage is the most dangerous thing we can do. This is a time for sober thought and intelligent action.