I'm sure that's a reference to Star Wars or Star Trek or something, that apparently I'm not nerdy enough to get. Oh well... Anyway- the intent was to reference the movie Me and You and Everyone We Know. Go see it. It's good.
What if Google is doing this for the purpose of doing the greatest good of all? How about this scenario: Google plays along w/Chinese gov't, censors results and becomes super-popular in China, just as it has become everywhere else. Several years later, after the Chinese population have become as completely addicted and dependent upon Google like everyone else in the world, Google tells the Chinese goverment they will not cooperate in their censorship any longer. What is the Chinese government going to do? Suddenly block Google, making their entire citizenry painfully aware of what they're doing? I dunno- I, and most of the people I know, have gotten REALLY used to having Google around. If the US government were to suddenly tell us they would be blocking it, I could imagine people deciding that maybe a revolution was nigh...
I don't think the parent was trying to suggest that any place has had a "99% corruption-free referendum where they decided to cede all control over speech to their central government". He's saying such a referendum would be the only way such control could possibly be considered just. Even then, it wouldn't truly be just unless the decision was unanimous. After all, how free would we be if the majority got to decide what kind of speech the government could censor? If that had been the case 100 years ago, women probably would never have gained suffrage or opportunities, we'd probably still have segregation, homosexuals would have to stay in the closet, non-Christians would have to practice their religions (or lack thereof) in secrecy, and of course any sort of political dissent would be silenced.
I'm not talking about creating Venus's atmosphere. That's only one way things can become uninhabitable for humans. I'm not talking about it turning 900 degrees here or raining sulfuric acid. Venus would be uninhabitable because of the atmospheric pressure alone, anyway. It is not implausible that the Earth could stay roughly the same temperature that it is today and the ecosystem get out of balance to a point where it may even still be habitable for other forms of life, but enough of the planet's oxygen gets locked up somehow to make it insufficiently present in the atmosphere to sustain human life. Recall that just a few miles up from the surface the atmosphere is not oxygen-rich enough to support life. Maybe humanity would go on, but having to carry around an oxygen canister would be a serious drag, and we'd definitely like to avoid that, if we can accurately determine that something we're doing can cause such a thing to happen.
Global warming can not kludge the Earth into a position where it is no longer habitable for humans.
How do you know this? What proof do you have that an increase in temperature can't create a chaotic reaction that spirals out of control? Can you prove that it's impossible for something like an increase in ocean temperature or a decrease in the salinity to cause phytoplankton numbers to plummet, causing our already struggling ocean ecosystem to collapse and surface oxygen levels to plummet, or some similar phenomenon? The amount and kind of activity which humans are presently engaging in is unprecedented in Earth's history, and thus we have no past to reference in predicting what the result of our activity will be. We do know that Earth's ecosystem is extremely complex and chaotic. Waaaaaay too complex and chaotic for anyone to assert that human activity is incapable of altering it significantly. I'm not saying we know for certain that is what is happening here right now, but it's nowhere near being beyond the realm of possibility that humans are the cause of it, or that it could be the beginning of more drastic change. To suggest that it is impossible is naive
Why would a base need to be established, or humans even need to be sent, when all is needed is a robot. If we can send a probe to drive around Mars and take samples and analyze them, or to collect particles from comets and bring them back, we should be capable of sending a robot to the Moon that can mine for He-3, put it in a capsule, and launch it back to Earth, where it could either re-enter the atmosphere to land on US soil or be guided into orbit and then picked up by a shuttle. Or you could even build this Nonexistent Fusion Powerplant in space (hey! on the Moon!) and do what you want with the limitless energy...
If you're behind a firewall, you have to have port 8090 forwarded. This makes the CC useless for most people who are at work or don't know how to configure their routers, which means it's generally useless. Anyone know why they have to use a specific port to accomplish the function of CC?
I'm just not sure that the situation with money is entirely analogous to the situation with voting. With electronic financial transactions, you have 3 parties that are witnessing the agreement, each of which has an interest in it being a fair and equitable transaction. Our banks, we trust, are running on massively parallel and thoroughly backed-up systems, and we trust that they are insured by the FDIC. Even still, many of us continue to insist on paper receipts and statements.
But voting is an entirely different animal- you are collecting information that you have to untie from voters, who are the only people who can tell you if the value is what it's supposed to be. If I write down the name of the candidate I want (or have a computer print it for me) in order for you to negating my vote you have to either
a)destroy my ballot b)erase/change what I wrote c)stuff the box with a phony ballot for your candidate.
All of which are fairly detectable. With electronic voting, all you have to do is
1)flip a bit or two.
Once it's done, who can tell you if it has been altered? We all know how difficult it is to secure digital information, and the average poll worker is not a computer guru. There are just too many avenues for an all-electronic system to screw up, and we've seen it happen time and time again. Hey- maybe it's possible to make an all-electronic system that I will agree is secure. But I haven't seen it, and what governments are implementing now is not it. What we are getting now is pork for Diebold and possibly setting people up for a rigged election, if it hasn't happened already.
That's pretty cool- I wish it had brief summaries of the articles and threaded conversations. Digg, Slashdot, Reddit... they've all got good pieces, but are lacking some feature that the others have...
Okay, you're right- we do trust computers to handle machines and our lives all the time. But we design those machines and have decided that their designs are adequate to serve the functions we are trusting them to do. A voting system that does not have a physically verifiable record is inadequately designed. It is imperative that any voting system have a physical object representing each vote, whose value can be altered neither by accident nor by malice without anyone taking notice. In an all-electronic system, there's nothing to recount if the values have been altered, and detecting manipulation is a lot more difficult. With a paper ballot storing your vote, the votes have to be physically altered, destroyed, or stuffed to change the vote, all of which are a lot easier to detect.
I think we need a system where ballots are printed securely like money, with unique numbers printed on the ballots. Each polling location would be issued a range of ballots and would have to account for each one. At the poll, you insert your ballot into a computer, which serves as an easy interface, in whatever language you want, and prints your selection on the ballot in a form that is both human and machine readable. Separate computers can then count the ballots, some of which should also be randomly hand-counted to make sure the counting machines have not been tampered with.
If we're willing to trust air-traffic control and nuclear ballistic missile command-and-control to computers, I'm not quite sure why voting is such an intrinsically scary proposition.
But we're not, and we don't- both of those systems have manual overrides and people in the loop in case the computers fail. Your electronic voting machine fails and you have nothing to prove it, and no backup of the data even if you know it did. The appropriate question is: We don't trust our air-traffic control or nuclear ballistic missile command-and-control computers enough to leave no room for failure, why should we trust our voting machines any more?
That's great for you, but that doesn't change the point- Whether we're talking about Houston or NJ, nobody runs a school where people can enter and exit the building freely, even if their identity is verified by a iris scan. Do you honestly think with this system installed you can just walk up to a scanner, hold severed head up, have it unlock a door, and then walk up to the classroom and take your kid? No- it's walk up to entry desk, greet clerk, have iris scanned/identity confirmed, "little Billy will be here in just a moment, Mr. Jones", kid gets called from class. Or, in your case, walk up to entry desk, greet clerk, hold up severed head, chase screaming clerk down hall...
that's not what I gathered from the article. Most schools, especially elementary schools, restrict entry to one door, which passes by a front desk. This is where parents usually pick up/drop off kids. Schools here in Houston will scan your DL and hand you a visitor badge. Even if they could just use iris scanning and not require that person sitting at the front desk, they wouldn't do that- they have to make sure you leave ONLY with the kid(s) you're supposed to be picking up, and an iris scanner is not going to do that.
Well, I imagine the person sitting at the front desk would notice someone holding a severed head or eyeballs up to the camera. This isn't something that is being used to keep the school secure without a man in the loop- it's just a method of identity verification. Now, if you could scan someone's iris (or hack into the computer and copy the stored image of their iris) and use that to make contact lenses that will pass iris verification, there might be a problem...
I don't think a Bayesian moderation system would necessarily prevent you from seeing any opposing viewpoints. I often moderate up comments the I disagree with if the submitter has an interesting point, or if it is necessary for some intelligent reply to make sense. I often wish/. had a view where I could see all 3+ comments as well as all their parents. That way, if someone makes an insightful reply I can read what they were replying to without having to open the parent link in another tab or browse at -1. Anyway, like using one for spam, and particularly with something as subjective as comment moderation, the fuzziness of a Bayesian filter means you're always going to have some amount of the stuff that you're trying to filter out get through.
Yeah- I've wanted a site like digg/slashdot that worked like this for a while- users can vote on anything, and then anything you haven't voted on is given a score that is calculated according to how the people who most consistently vote in agreement with you score the story/comment. The site is custom-tailored to what you want- People who like stupid crap will mod up stupid crap and get more stupid crap because other people who like stupid crap will have modded up the same stupid crap and more, while people who like good stuff will mod up good stuff and will get more of it because other people who modded up the same stuff that they thought was good will have modded up more stuff that they'll like. It's impervious to trolls or advertisers, because if I don't like advertising, I'll mod all advertising down and thus it will pre-mod stuff with advertising down because other people who hate advertising will have modded it down...
What's weird is that pretty much the only spam I get seems like stuff sent as chaff to throw off bayesian filters. The stuff that reads like zen poetry. It's nonsensical and doesn't appear to be selling me anything. When I do get one that's trying to sell me something, if I follow the link usually the site is down. Spam seems pretty useless to me. Unless people are just using it as a vector to get to people's inboxes or something.
Create a nice VR world and give all the brains WiFi access and you're set
I think I'd want a robotic avatar for the real world. It would be an R/C Me. Advances in materials science, computation, and wireless data transmission would allow me to control my avatar and experience the real world just as if I were there, but if anything happened to my avatar I could just get a new one, because my brain was safely stored in a vat in a vauld deep inside a mountain in Colorado or something.:)
I think the idea is not that the ship is carrying a layer of glue in addition to its normal layer of shielding, but that the fibers of the shield are impregnated with the glue. It would might add a little to the weight, but if it allowed the surface to recover from significant damage or cut down on the cost of restoring the shuttle between flights, it might be worth whatever the cost in weight is. It's worth looking into, anyway, which is all I think the ESA is doing...
I don't think we could actually generate enough particles floating around out there to make the situation so bad as to "trap" us here for any amount of time. We'll probably just have to design cheap little flying robots that we can release at LEO en masse that can identify pieces of junk, home in on them, and then nudge them into swiftly decaying orbits. That, or make the hulls of our ships tougher...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure that's a reference to Star Wars or Star Trek or something, that apparently I'm not nerdy enough to get. Oh well... Anyway- the intent was to reference the movie Me and You and Everyone We Know. Go see it. It's good.
What if Google is doing this for the purpose of doing the greatest good of all? How about this scenario: Google plays along w/Chinese gov't, censors results and becomes super-popular in China, just as it has become everywhere else. Several years later, after the Chinese population have become as completely addicted and dependent upon Google like everyone else in the world, Google tells the Chinese goverment they will not cooperate in their censorship any longer. What is the Chinese government going to do? Suddenly block Google, making their entire citizenry painfully aware of what they're doing? I dunno- I, and most of the people I know, have gotten REALLY used to having Google around. If the US government were to suddenly tell us they would be blocking it, I could imagine people deciding that maybe a revolution was nigh...
I don't think the parent was trying to suggest that any place has had a "99% corruption-free referendum where they decided to cede all control over speech to their central government". He's saying such a referendum would be the only way such control could possibly be considered just. Even then, it wouldn't truly be just unless the decision was unanimous. After all, how free would we be if the majority got to decide what kind of speech the government could censor? If that had been the case 100 years ago, women probably would never have gained suffrage or opportunities, we'd probably still have segregation, homosexuals would have to stay in the closet, non-Christians would have to practice their religions (or lack thereof) in secrecy, and of course any sort of political dissent would be silenced.
They could also ))<>((
I'm not talking about creating Venus's atmosphere. That's only one way things can become uninhabitable for humans. I'm not talking about it turning 900 degrees here or raining sulfuric acid. Venus would be uninhabitable because of the atmospheric pressure alone, anyway. It is not implausible that the Earth could stay roughly the same temperature that it is today and the ecosystem get out of balance to a point where it may even still be habitable for other forms of life, but enough of the planet's oxygen gets locked up somehow to make it insufficiently present in the atmosphere to sustain human life. Recall that just a few miles up from the surface the atmosphere is not oxygen-rich enough to support life. Maybe humanity would go on, but having to carry around an oxygen canister would be a serious drag, and we'd definitely like to avoid that, if we can accurately determine that something we're doing can cause such a thing to happen.
Global warming can not kludge the Earth into a position where it is no longer habitable for humans.
How do you know this? What proof do you have that an increase in temperature can't create a chaotic reaction that spirals out of control? Can you prove that it's impossible for something like an increase in ocean temperature or a decrease in the salinity to cause phytoplankton numbers to plummet, causing our already struggling ocean ecosystem to collapse and surface oxygen levels to plummet, or some similar phenomenon? The amount and kind of activity which humans are presently engaging in is unprecedented in Earth's history, and thus we have no past to reference in predicting what the result of our activity will be. We do know that Earth's ecosystem is extremely complex and chaotic. Waaaaaay too complex and chaotic for anyone to assert that human activity is incapable of altering it significantly. I'm not saying we know for certain that is what is happening here right now, but it's nowhere near being beyond the realm of possibility that humans are the cause of it, or that it could be the beginning of more drastic change. To suggest that it is impossible is naive
Why would a base need to be established, or humans even need to be sent, when all is needed is a robot. If we can send a probe to drive around Mars and take samples and analyze them, or to collect particles from comets and bring them back, we should be capable of sending a robot to the Moon that can mine for He-3, put it in a capsule, and launch it back to Earth, where it could either re-enter the atmosphere to land on US soil or be guided into orbit and then picked up by a shuttle. Or you could even build this Nonexistent Fusion Powerplant in space (hey! on the Moon!) and do what you want with the limitless energy...
If you're behind a firewall, you have to have port 8090 forwarded. This makes the CC useless for most people who are at work or don't know how to configure their routers, which means it's generally useless. Anyone know why they have to use a specific port to accomplish the function of CC?
Yeah... that'd be a great chance for MS to work on Microsoft Photo Editor!
I'm just not sure that the situation with money is entirely analogous to the situation with voting. With electronic financial transactions, you have 3 parties that are witnessing the agreement, each of which has an interest in it being a fair and equitable transaction. Our banks, we trust, are running on massively parallel and thoroughly backed-up systems, and we trust that they are insured by the FDIC. Even still, many of us continue to insist on paper receipts and statements.
But voting is an entirely different animal- you are collecting information that you have to untie from voters, who are the only people who can tell you if the value is what it's supposed to be. If I write down the name of the candidate I want (or have a computer print it for me) in order for you to negating my vote you have to either
a)destroy my ballot
b)erase/change what I wrote
c)stuff the box with a phony ballot for your candidate.
All of which are fairly detectable. With electronic voting, all you have to do is
1)flip a bit or two.
Once it's done, who can tell you if it has been altered? We all know how difficult it is to secure digital information, and the average poll worker is not a computer guru. There are just too many avenues for an all-electronic system to screw up, and we've seen it happen time and time again. Hey- maybe it's possible to make an all-electronic system that I will agree is secure. But I haven't seen it, and what governments are implementing now is not it. What we are getting now is pork for Diebold and possibly setting people up for a rigged election, if it hasn't happened already.
That's pretty cool- I wish it had brief summaries of the articles and threaded conversations. Digg, Slashdot, Reddit... they've all got good pieces, but are lacking some feature that the others have...
Okay, you're right- we do trust computers to handle machines and our lives all the time. But we design those machines and have decided that their designs are adequate to serve the functions we are trusting them to do. A voting system that does not have a physically verifiable record is inadequately designed. It is imperative that any voting system have a physical object representing each vote, whose value can be altered neither by accident nor by malice without anyone taking notice. In an all-electronic system, there's nothing to recount if the values have been altered, and detecting manipulation is a lot more difficult. With a paper ballot storing your vote, the votes have to be physically altered, destroyed, or stuffed to change the vote, all of which are a lot easier to detect.
I think we need a system where ballots are printed securely like money, with unique numbers printed on the ballots. Each polling location would be issued a range of ballots and would have to account for each one. At the poll, you insert your ballot into a computer, which serves as an easy interface, in whatever language you want, and prints your selection on the ballot in a form that is both human and machine readable. Separate computers can then count the ballots, some of which should also be randomly hand-counted to make sure the counting machines have not been tampered with.
If we're willing to trust air-traffic control and nuclear ballistic missile command-and-control to computers, I'm not quite sure why voting is such an intrinsically scary proposition.
But we're not, and we don't- both of those systems have manual overrides and people in the loop in case the computers fail. Your electronic voting machine fails and you have nothing to prove it, and no backup of the data even if you know it did. The appropriate question is: We don't trust our air-traffic control or nuclear ballistic missile command-and-control computers enough to leave no room for failure, why should we trust our voting machines any more?
That's great for you, but that doesn't change the point- Whether we're talking about Houston or NJ, nobody runs a school where people can enter and exit the building freely, even if their identity is verified by a iris scan. Do you honestly think with this system installed you can just walk up to a scanner, hold severed head up, have it unlock a door, and then walk up to the classroom and take your kid? No- it's walk up to entry desk, greet clerk, have iris scanned/identity confirmed, "little Billy will be here in just a moment, Mr. Jones", kid gets called from class. Or, in your case, walk up to entry desk, greet clerk, hold up severed head, chase screaming clerk down hall...
that's not what I gathered from the article. Most schools, especially elementary schools, restrict entry to one door, which passes by a front desk. This is where parents usually pick up/drop off kids. Schools here in Houston will scan your DL and hand you a visitor badge. Even if they could just use iris scanning and not require that person sitting at the front desk, they wouldn't do that- they have to make sure you leave ONLY with the kid(s) you're supposed to be picking up, and an iris scanner is not going to do that.
Well, I imagine the person sitting at the front desk would notice someone holding a severed head or eyeballs up to the camera. This isn't something that is being used to keep the school secure without a man in the loop- it's just a method of identity verification. Now, if you could scan someone's iris (or hack into the computer and copy the stored image of their iris) and use that to make contact lenses that will pass iris verification, there might be a problem...
I don't think a Bayesian moderation system would necessarily prevent you from seeing any opposing viewpoints. I often moderate up comments the I disagree with if the submitter has an interesting point, or if it is necessary for some intelligent reply to make sense. I often wish /. had a view where I could see all 3+ comments as well as all their parents. That way, if someone makes an insightful reply I can read what they were replying to without having to open the parent link in another tab or browse at -1. Anyway, like using one for spam, and particularly with something as subjective as comment moderation, the fuzziness of a Bayesian filter means you're always going to have some amount of the stuff that you're trying to filter out get through.
Yeah- I've wanted a site like digg/slashdot that worked like this for a while- users can vote on anything, and then anything you haven't voted on is given a score that is calculated according to how the people who most consistently vote in agreement with you score the story/comment. The site is custom-tailored to what you want- People who like stupid crap will mod up stupid crap and get more stupid crap because other people who like stupid crap will have modded up the same stupid crap and more, while people who like good stuff will mod up good stuff and will get more of it because other people who modded up the same stuff that they thought was good will have modded up more stuff that they'll like. It's impervious to trolls or advertisers, because if I don't like advertising, I'll mod all advertising down and thus it will pre-mod stuff with advertising down because other people who hate advertising will have modded it down...
No- most of the time they're sites that give 404's...
(minus the energy of any photons emitted by light-producing components)
Even the photons would likely end up getting absorbed by something in the room, thus being converted back to heat, no?
What's weird is that pretty much the only spam I get seems like stuff sent as chaff to throw off bayesian filters. The stuff that reads like zen poetry. It's nonsensical and doesn't appear to be selling me anything. When I do get one that's trying to sell me something, if I follow the link usually the site is down. Spam seems pretty useless to me. Unless people are just using it as a vector to get to people's inboxes or something.
Does this mean we would do well to be offering aid in the form of shoes and perhaps encouraging paved walkways in poorer countries?
Create a nice VR world and give all the brains WiFi access and you're set
:)
I think I'd want a robotic avatar for the real world. It would be an R/C Me. Advances in materials science, computation, and wireless data transmission would allow me to control my avatar and experience the real world just as if I were there, but if anything happened to my avatar I could just get a new one, because my brain was safely stored in a vat in a vauld deep inside a mountain in Colorado or something.
I think the idea is not that the ship is carrying a layer of glue in addition to its normal layer of shielding, but that the fibers of the shield are impregnated with the glue. It would might add a little to the weight, but if it allowed the surface to recover from significant damage or cut down on the cost of restoring the shuttle between flights, it might be worth whatever the cost in weight is. It's worth looking into, anyway, which is all I think the ESA is doing...
I don't think we could actually generate enough particles floating around out there to make the situation so bad as to "trap" us here for any amount of time. We'll probably just have to design cheap little flying robots that we can release at LEO en masse that can identify pieces of junk, home in on them, and then nudge them into swiftly decaying orbits. That, or make the hulls of our ships tougher...