I must assume your signature referred to a104101 but it might have been a122115. The most likely possibility though: 4,8,15,16,20,3,42 doesn't seem to have an entry.
What happens if you are doing an ASCII-art diagram that goes beyond 80 characters, and your editor decides to wrap it?
In my ideal editor (tm) you should be able to include images, tables, even bits of spreadsheets right in with the code and have it all look right.
And I think it is well within our current technology to be able to make editors that store code in some (probably ascii) form and load it in to an editor to be modified along with the current user's preferences about layout, fonts and the like. It is trivial enough to then write it out to a file in a form that a compiler could understand.
Think about this in the right way and it is suddenly evident that we could do quite a bit more - including some very nice things indeed - if we just were willing to take a couple steps in this direction.
Nonsense. Logic is a foundational part of mathematics and has been formalized (several ways) very carefully in terms that are more like mathematics than most anything else.
Sure the philosophers claim a bit of logic as their own, but to the extent that anyone can reason about logic and determine what exactly it says (and does not say) it becomes mathematics. Take, for instance, Godel's proof. It is entirely about logic and logical systems, but is certainly mathematics.
In his Turing award lecture, Juris Hartmanis said that computer science is "the engineering of mathematics". Feels about right to me. After all, just figuring out what a program is doing by reading the code amounts to a mathematical proof, including induction when there are loops or recursion.
And while there are facets of programming that do not involve more than the basics of reasoning about programs, almost everything you do above the simplest level will end up using some facet of mathematics in a crucial way.
There are quite enough simple examples to show this. For instance, suppose you want to generate a random permutation of a set of objects (shuffle a deck of cards...). There are several algorithms to do this and most are incorrect - but to understand why takes a nice (though relatively simple) bit of mathematical reasoning. While, in this case, just knowing that some algorithms are wrong and some right is enough, there is some underlying math that will tell you just how the wrong shuffles go wrong(but it is not at all trivial). In some other problems the math required jumps out much more quickly.
As long as Lem has been mentioned, there is also "Non Serviam" (in "A Perfect Vacuum") in which the "Latest IBM models
have a top capacity of one thousand personoids". Said personoids occupy themselves, among other things, with debating
the existence and nature of God (ie the programmer/person running said IBM).
The notion of tactical nuclear weapons against Iran seems to be (um) not-unpopular among presidential candidates. The only question is how to spin a space elevator so it sounds like a similar threat. But I'm sure our politicians can manage that as they've done similar things in the past. And it would surely be cheaper (short run at least) to destroy another nations elevator (/other competitive space lift facility) than to do it ourselves.
I use (and like) various flavors of unix/linux on various machines and the biggest problem I've had recently is with display resolution and managing to get output from my laptop (Ubuntu 7.04) to a projector. I've tried a variety of settings in xorg.conf and failed utterly. While I understand that this may be in part due to the nature of the video drivers (though I had the same problems with the "nv" and closed "nvidia" drivers), this is one thing that does need to be better managed.
Though, as long as I'm griping, a recent upgrade installed a kernel and modified grub, but didn't install the appropriate initrd file, so the system failed to boot. Not a big problem for me (though I'd prefer that upgrades not modify the grub file - in this case it took the kernel backwards as I'd installed a newer kernel by hand), but I can easily see this making a non-technical user very cranky indeed.
1. A psychological development system comprising triangulation, categorization and interpretation.
2. A psychological development system comprising evaluating at least three things in at least three ways in at least three levels that is repeated at least three times.
Reading the whole thing opens up whole new notions of "what is patentable". Of course, how many people are going to want to do all 81 (3^4) combinations. But it does
raise another question. If I had a system involving two things in two ways at two levels twice, would it be covered? How about 2*3*3*3?
This is Side Five. Follow in your book and repeat after me as we learn three new words in Turkish: Towel, Bath, Border.... May I see your passport, Please.
I might be more interested (and look at it more carefully) if the fractogene site didn't look like half of the crank science
web sites around. Using nice buzz words like "self similarity" and "fractal". And "reverberates" just makes me think of
someone talking about "good vibrations".
The science may be good - I am not a biologist and really didn't read much past the first page,
but the presentation is enough to drive away anyone who has ever visited timecube or similar
sites.
Somehow, I suspect that any redesign would bring out all the special-interest groups, the rich corporations and the nutters big time. We'd get a redesign, but it would be specified so that unsolicited email (not "spam", of course) from large corporations would get favorable treatment, so that towns could censor (that whole local values thing the supreme court put into place) all incoming and outgoing traffic, so that politicians could take over the internet at any time for any reason.
For my part, I think I'd rather not.
Perhaps everyone should patent their own genomes. (Would the lack of having the actual sequence be a problem for the patent office? Hard to believe.) Then everyone could sue everyone else for infringing.
My reaction to this is mixed. First, I'm suspicious of this kind of sweeping patent protection in general. And it is far from clear (in the cited article at least) that they actually have such a genome yet, so patent protection seems strange. "We think we are going to do this, so grant us a patent."
On the other hand it may take 20 years or so to actually be able to use this kind of technology in meaningful ways (and have drugs produced this way approved by the government). So granting patent protection now means that it would expire just about the time that people might be able to take advantage of it.
On the other other hand, if they really are patenting the idea, they'll probably re-patent (or extend the patent with new claims or however that works) any usable variation when they actually get it so they're likely to find ways to stretch such patent protection out for quite a while.
I believe it is already the case that at least some contractors working for the government are covered by the same rules as the government itself. That's why black budgets, high levels of secrecy, second hand contracting (the government contracts to company A and company A contracts to company B) and other steps would be taken both to hide the actions of the government and to put in that second level of distance.
Doing this correctly allows the president (for example) to say something like "No US government people or funds are being used to... " and be speaking a kind of truth. They would not be directly used.
And given the actions of the courts recently, I suspect the courts would buy this indirection as a perfectly legitimate defense.
Damn, meant to hit Preview, but hit submit instead. Lets see if I can post a (slightly cleaned up) revision to that.
For me the the most interesting idea to come of this is that the government may be limited legally in the actions they can take directly, but may not be so limited if they hire someone to do it for them. For example, even if Congress finds within themselves their proper share of courage, independence, responsibility and ethics and manages to remember the constitution and that the american people are its primary concern (and not the american corporations) and manages to take the right kinds of actions - restore Habeas Corpus, prohibit torture, keep american soldiers out of a stupid war.... The administration will probably just hire all those nice things out to "independent contractors" who, by being just that, independent, will not be subject to the constitution and any laws applying to the government. Make it all happen in another country (or a ship outside american waters) and Hey Presto! legal torture and So Much More. Because it is not the government doing it. (On a similar note, there've been several stories recently about the government doing just that - hiring independents to try to destabilize Iran.)
Similarly, one can imagine contracting out censorship. The government itself may restricted by the constitution from wide scale censorship (though they seem to do just that with impunity) but surely they could use black budgets to hire people (for example, the recently featured warriors for innocence) to do it for them, or even, one might imagine, paying CNN, Fox news, and similar organizations to carefully pass over the kind of story that would give the government a black eye. And every time someone cried out "Censorship", the courts and lots of people (you see it all the time here on/.) would say : "It isn't censorship if the government isn't doing it."
And, of course, they're quite correct : it wouldn't be the government, at least not directly.
Local governments or police departments might also manage this. I don't know that they can do it directly, but a bit of under the table funding for photographers catching people doing stuff that the local city administrators might find annoying (or even persuading some local rich person/company with the same kinds of interest to pay for the same thing) could go a very long ways.
And no, this is not necessarily the kinds of actions I can only imagine a Republican administration doing. The Democrats are equally in love with power. And the libertarians would probably start with such actions - just because they fit in with their general philosophy.
For the the most interesting idea to come of this is that the government may be limited legally (increasingly not, admittedly) in the actions they can take directly, but may not be so limited if they hire someone to do it for them. For example, even if Congress gathers finds within themselves a bit of responsibility, ethics and manages to remember the constitution and the american people, and manages to restore Habeas Corpus and prohibit torture, the administration will probably just hire it out to "independent contractors" who, by being just that, independent, will not be subject to such laws. Make it all happen in another country (or a ship outside american waters) and Hey Presto! legal torture.
Similarly, one can imagine contracting out censorship. The government itself may not be able to censor anything, but surely they could use black budgets to hire people (for example, the recently featured warriors for innocence) to do it for them, or even, one might imagine, paying CNN and Fox news to carefully pass over the kind of story that would give the government a black eye. And every time someone cried out "Censorship" people (you see it all the time here on/.) would say : "It isn't censorship if the government isn't doing it."
And it wouldn't be the government, at least not directly.
Even local governments or police departments might manage this. I don't think they can do it directly, but a bit of under the table funding for photographers catching people doing stuff that the local city administrators might find annoying (or even persuading some local rich person/company with the same kinds of interest to pay for the same thing) could go a very long ways.
And no, this is not necessarily the kinds of actions I can only imagine a Republican administration doing. The Democrats are equally in love with power. And the libertarians would probably start with such actions - just cuz they fit in with their general philosophy.
With all the implications for privacy, which are being discussed already, this raises a couple of other questions :
The Wired site clearly says that pictures of the Brooklyn tunnel are on the site, but that taking such pictures has been illegal since 9/11. Doesn't this point up the absurdity of such a law? Clearly, not only is it quite feasible for people to take pictures, it is quite feasible to take many illegal pictures and publish them on the web without being noticed.
There is also a picture of what seems to be police making a stop/arrest which the caption says "has since been removed". Does this mean that it may now be difficult to take and publish pictures of the police doing things? There are any number of stories around of police threatening people who take their pictures with various things, so this does not seem unlikely. But contrast it to the widespread collection of images of everyone else.
In particular (considering the above) will police be able to use images of possible crimes being committed as evidence?
Slashdot Mirror
Potential impeachment of a wanna-be tyrant and his sock-puppet?
I must assume your signature referred to a104101 but it might have been a122115. The most likely possibility though: 4,8,15,16,20,3,42 doesn't seem to have an entry.
In my ideal editor (tm) you should be able to include images, tables, even bits of spreadsheets right in with the code and have it all look right.
And I think it is well within our current technology to be able to make editors that store code in some (probably ascii) form and load it in to an editor to be modified along with the current user's preferences about layout, fonts and the like. It is trivial enough to then write it out to a file in a form that a compiler could understand.
Think about this in the right way and it is suddenly evident that we could do quite a bit more - including some very nice things indeed - if we just were willing to take a couple steps in this direction.
Nonsense. Logic is a foundational part of mathematics and has been formalized (several ways) very carefully in terms that are more like mathematics than most anything else. Sure the philosophers claim a bit of logic as their own, but to the extent that anyone can reason about logic and determine what exactly it says (and does not say) it becomes mathematics. Take, for instance, Godel's proof. It is entirely about logic and logical systems, but is certainly mathematics.
And while there are facets of programming that do not involve more than the basics of reasoning about programs, almost everything you do above the simplest level will end up using some facet of mathematics in a crucial way.
There are quite enough simple examples to show this. For instance, suppose you want to generate a random permutation of a set of objects (shuffle a deck of cards...). There are several algorithms to do this and most are incorrect - but to understand why takes a nice (though relatively simple) bit of mathematical reasoning. While, in this case, just knowing that some algorithms are wrong and some right is enough, there is some underlying math that will tell you just how the wrong shuffles go wrong(but it is not at all trivial). In some other problems the math required jumps out much more quickly.
And no new "Daily Show" tonight. One can, thus, only imagine the fun Jon Stewart would have.
According to Andy Grove (Intel co-founder) "Hardware is nothing but frozen software.", so they are selling software, "frozen software".
As long as Lem has been mentioned, there is also "Non Serviam" (in "A Perfect Vacuum") in which the "Latest IBM models have a top capacity of one thousand personoids". Said personoids occupy themselves, among other things, with debating the existence and nature of God (ie the programmer/person running said IBM).
The notion of tactical nuclear weapons against Iran seems to be (um) not-unpopular among presidential candidates. The only question is how to spin a space elevator so it sounds like a similar threat. But I'm sure our politicians can manage that as they've done similar things in the past. And it would surely be cheaper (short run at least) to destroy another nations elevator (/other competitive space lift facility) than to do it ourselves.
I use (and like) various flavors of unix/linux on various machines and the biggest problem I've had recently is with display resolution and managing to get output from my laptop (Ubuntu 7.04) to a projector. I've tried a variety of settings in xorg.conf and failed utterly. While I understand that this may be in part due to the nature of the video drivers (though I had the same problems with the "nv" and closed "nvidia" drivers), this is one thing that does need to be better managed.
Though, as long as I'm griping, a recent upgrade installed a kernel and modified grub, but didn't install the appropriate initrd file, so the system failed to boot. Not a big problem for me (though I'd prefer that upgrades not modify the grub file - in this case it took the kernel backwards as I'd installed a newer kernel by hand), but I can easily see this making a non-technical user very cranky indeed.
Reading the whole thing opens up whole new notions of "what is patentable". Of course, how many people are going to want to do all 81 (3^4) combinations. But it does raise another question. If I had a system involving two things in two ways at two levels twice, would it be covered? How about 2*3*3*3?
Obligatory obscure quote:
This is Side Five. Follow in your book and repeat after me as we learn three new words in Turkish: Towel, Bath, Border.... May I see your passport, Please.
Thats because all the poles are on the left hand side of the plane.
I might be more interested (and look at it more carefully) if the fractogene site didn't look like half of the crank science web sites around. Using nice buzz words like "self similarity" and "fractal". And "reverberates" just makes me think of someone talking about "good vibrations".
The science may be good - I am not a biologist and really didn't read much past the first page, but the presentation is enough to drive away anyone who has ever visited timecube or similar sites.
Nice post. And me without mod points.
Somehow, I suspect that any redesign would bring out all the special-interest groups, the rich corporations and the nutters big time. We'd get a redesign, but it would be specified so that unsolicited email (not "spam", of course) from large corporations would get favorable treatment, so that towns could censor (that whole local values thing the supreme court put into place) all incoming and outgoing traffic, so that politicians could take over the internet at any time for any reason. For my part, I think I'd rather not.
Perhaps everyone should patent their own genomes. (Would the lack of having the actual sequence be a problem for the patent office? Hard to believe.) Then everyone could sue everyone else for infringing.
How do you know that this has not already occurred? Provides a simple (albeit paranoid) answer to all those holes that let botnets flourish.
My reaction to this is mixed. First, I'm suspicious of this kind of sweeping patent protection in general. And it is far from clear (in the cited article at least) that they actually have such a genome yet, so patent protection seems strange. "We think we are going to do this, so grant us a patent."
On the other hand it may take 20 years or so to actually be able to use this kind of technology in meaningful ways (and have drugs produced this way approved by the government). So granting patent protection now means that it would expire just about the time that people might be able to take advantage of it.
On the other other hand, if they really are patenting the idea, they'll probably re-patent (or extend the patent with new claims or however that works) any usable variation when they actually get it so they're likely to find ways to stretch such patent protection out for quite a while.
I believe it is already the case that at least some contractors working for the government are covered by the same rules as the government itself. That's why black budgets, high levels of secrecy, second hand contracting (the government contracts to company A and company A contracts to company B) and other steps would be taken both to hide the actions of the government and to put in that second level of distance.
Doing this correctly allows the president (for example) to say something like "No US government people or funds are being used to ... " and be speaking a kind of truth. They would not be directly used.
And given the actions of the courts recently, I suspect the courts would buy this indirection as a perfectly legitimate defense.
Damn, meant to hit Preview, but hit submit instead. Lets see if I can post a (slightly cleaned up) revision to that.
For me the the most interesting idea to come of this is that the government may be limited legally in the actions they can take directly, but may not be so limited if they hire someone to do it for them. For example, even if Congress finds within themselves their proper share of courage, independence, responsibility and ethics and manages to remember the constitution and that the american people are its primary concern (and not the american corporations) and manages to take the right kinds of actions - restore Habeas Corpus, prohibit torture, keep american soldiers out of a stupid war.... The administration will probably just hire all those nice things out to "independent contractors" who, by being just that, independent, will not be subject to the constitution and any laws applying to the government. Make it all happen in another country (or a ship outside american waters) and Hey Presto! legal torture and So Much More. Because it is not the government doing it. (On a similar note, there've been several stories recently about the government doing just that - hiring independents to try to destabilize Iran.)
Similarly, one can imagine contracting out censorship. The government itself may restricted by the constitution from wide scale censorship (though they seem to do just that with impunity) but surely they could use black budgets to hire people (for example, the recently featured warriors for innocence) to do it for them, or even, one might imagine, paying CNN, Fox news, and similar organizations to carefully pass over the kind of story that would give the government a black eye. And every time someone cried out "Censorship", the courts and lots of people (you see it all the time here on /.) would say : "It isn't censorship if the government isn't doing it."
And, of course, they're quite correct : it wouldn't be the government, at least not directly.
Local governments or police departments might also manage this. I don't know that they can do it directly, but a bit of under the table funding for photographers catching people doing stuff that the local city administrators might find annoying (or even persuading some local rich person/company with the same kinds of interest to pay for the same thing) could go a very long ways.
And no, this is not necessarily the kinds of actions I can only imagine a Republican administration doing. The Democrats are equally in love with power. And the libertarians would probably start with such actions - just because they fit in with their general philosophy.
For the the most interesting idea to come of this is that the government may be limited legally (increasingly not, admittedly) in the actions they can take directly, but may not be so limited if they hire someone to do it for them. For example, even if Congress gathers finds within themselves a bit of responsibility, ethics and manages to remember the constitution and the american people, and manages to restore Habeas Corpus and prohibit torture, the administration will probably just hire it out to "independent contractors" who, by being just that, independent, will not be subject to such laws. Make it all happen in another country (or a ship outside american waters) and Hey Presto! legal torture.
Similarly, one can imagine contracting out censorship. The government itself may not be able to censor anything, but surely they could use black budgets to hire people (for example, the recently featured warriors for innocence) to do it for them, or even, one might imagine, paying CNN and Fox news to carefully pass over the kind of story that would give the government a black eye. And every time someone cried out "Censorship" people (you see it all the time here on /.) would say : "It isn't censorship if the government isn't doing it."
And it wouldn't be the government, at least not directly.
Even local governments or police departments might manage this. I don't think they can do it directly, but a bit of under the table funding for photographers catching people doing stuff that the local city administrators might find annoying (or even persuading some local rich person/company with the same kinds of interest to pay for the same thing) could go a very long ways.
And no, this is not necessarily the kinds of actions I can only imagine a Republican administration doing. The Democrats are equally in love with power. And the libertarians would probably start with such actions - just cuz they fit in with their general philosophy.
Phew, a narrow escape at being Godwinned with references to brown shirts. Glad we missed that.
With all the implications for privacy, which are being discussed already, this raises a couple of other questions :