Depending on how cheaply they can reproduce a field, we could be seeing these types of devices practically everywhere. Suddenly I don't think Star Trek is too far fetched...
Well, even though they didn't provide pictures, I imagine that the area in which the plasma actually resides is not very big. It may not be too difficult to produce a plasma curtain to block off a 1-2 cm^2 entry point into a particle accelerator, but I wager it would be very difficult to produce the same effect uniformly over a 1 m^2 door opening. I don't know much about plasma physics, but I have a suspicion that a big honkin' 1m^2 sheet of plasma isn't going to be magically stable.
I think the Star Trek force fields are still a long, long way off, if they're even possible at all.
Re:Demonstrating my ignorance....
on
Latest SCO News
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· Score: 1
I kinda figured SCO wouldn't volunteer the info. The reason I was wondering about the traceability of the contributions (wherever they came from) is pretty much what you stated: presumably SCO has done some reasearch to find out when (allegedly) their code was introduced into the kernel. Unless they are pretty sure that it can't be traced back to them or their employees, I can't imagine why they're bold enough to try and take this to court.
Maybe they believe somebody will fold and pay up (or buy out) before they have to reveal where the code is.
I hope this does go to court, so that it's possible to objectively determine what actually happened. If SCO has a valid claim, then the open source community will probably learn some needed lessons about tracking contributors. If SCO is doing something unethical here, then they need to be punished for it - and I'm sure the response of their customers and stockholders will overshadow the punishment dealt out by the courts.
Demonstrating my ignorance....
on
Latest SCO News
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· Score: 2, Interesting
So if SCO made contributions to the Linux kernel, and those contributions are now in the official distribution, is there a record somewhere of SCO (or their employees) contributing said code? I am pretty much in the dark as to how closely Linux contributions are tracked.
My understanding is that the GNU/FSF folks are pretty meticulous about obtaining releases and documenting contributors, and I expect that they do that for precisely this sort of situation. I am just not aware of whether or not Linus and company do the same for the Linux kernel
EMP was the first thing that came to mind when I saw the article. If you're fighting an enemy that has no compunction about using nukes, then they can make at least some of this fancy hardware useless. But then again, nuclear weapons tend to make a lot of things useless by physically destroying them. (Just to save someone the trouble of correcting me, I know EMP has a greater area of effect than the radiation and shock wave, and I know there are non-nuclear means of generating an EMP capable of disabling electronic hardware.)
EMP aside, the not-so-reliable weapons systems of today will pave the way for reliable versions in the future. History is full of examples where newfangled technology was introduced to the battlefield, and probably got a lot of people killed, but the lessons learned from it eventually resulted in reliable weapons or defenses that provided an advantage. That's just the way things seem to work.
How unfair...what about those that want both their penises and breasts enlarged? I'm sure there's a market for it, otherwise I wouldn't get fifty of each offer every day.:)
Be thankful that you're only having to deal with some jokes about white trash, rather than still dealing with the after-effects of hundreds of years of social injustice.
At the peril of being flagged as "Offtopic," "Troll -INF," or "Flamebait," I must say that most of the 'white trash' jokes/comments I hear are nowhere near as hurtful and hate-filled as when I hear people use the word 'nigger' or some other similar expression. Most often I hear "white trash" comments made by white folk - as in this case.
I can understand some people being bent out of shape over what they perceive to be a double standard (i.e., anyone can make fun of whites and it's ok), because (usually) they only know their side of the story. As someone else has said, it's to be expected that the members of the least oppressed group - that has done the most oppressing in the last few centuries, btw - are going to get treated this way by those groups that were (or perceive themselves to have been) oppressed by them. That's just human nature, I think.
I do find it interesting that someone on slashdot was able to read an article about someone trying to crush Linux, that said article contained a quote by Linus, and the thing they choose to comment on is his use of the phrase "white trash.":)
[Micheal] Overly said a review of the code by anyone other than a judge "means absolutely, positively nothing" in determining the merit of SCO's claims. So basically, the word from a legal expert is 'lets get this to court, shall we?'
I just hope it's a judge that has a clue about code. <sarcasm> And I'm sure there's a lot of those available. </sarcasm>
Seriously, though, has anyone ever sat in on a case where something technical was involved? I sat on a jury where some scientific evidence was presented, and I know the entire presentation went right over the heads of almost everyone on the jury. Fortunately someone on the jury knew enough to get the judge to ask a question about some aspect of the evidence; the answer of the expert witness pretty much demonstrated that he was misrepresenting some of the results of his tests. I always worry about there not being a clueful person involved in technical cases, because people can make really irrational decisions when they're swamped with stuff they don't understand.
Hopefully the fair use of and/or similarity between two works of literature provides a good model for the judge to use to make a decision. I would hate to see something like this get screwed up because it was presided over by a judge that can't set the timer on his/her VCR, let alone make sense of kernel code.
The freedom aspect of a project like this was the first thing that came to my mind. While people may argue about whether they're choosing the right transmission methods or whether it will work well or not, I think the fact that someone is willing try it is a good thing.
I'm not much on conspiracy theories and doomsaying, but if the US government continues to grant itself increasing power to invade our privacy, I would expect to see projects like this proliferate. You're going to force my ISP to spy on me? I'll just use the public wifi network. It may be a long time before a network like this would rival the internet, but it would be nice to have some alternatives in the works.
The second paragraph of the "long and dense article" strikes me as hyperbole. I haven't noticed that my computer's "operation has become brittle and unreliable" or that it "crash[es] or freeze[s] up regularly." I have not experienced the "annual outlays for maintenance, repairs and operations" that "far exceed total hardware and software costs, for both individuals and corporations."
Since this is/. I feel compelled to say this: "Gee, sounds like these guys are Windows users." Haha. But, to be fair, I have to say that - in my experience, at least - Windows2000 has been pretty stable both at home and at work. My computers seem to me to have become more stable and reliable over the years.
But maybe my computers have become more stable because I learned to not tweak on them all the time. As long as my system works, I leave it the hell alone. I don't install the "latest and greatest M$ service pack" (or Linux kernel, for that matter) unless it fixes a bug or security vulnerability that actually affects me. I don't download and install every cutesy program I see. My computer is a tool I need to do my job - and since I've started treating it as such, it seems to work pretty damn well.
Of course they still need to learn to design with the user in mind. Make the software easy to use and install. The shorter the learning curve the better the design. And for gods sake write things that are what the end user wants... not what you want them to have. There is nothing more irritating to me then an arrogant nerd who can't understand why nobody will listen to him.
Maybe I've just missed the point of open source stuff over the last few years, but I always thought the idea was that people contribute to an OS project because it scratches their itch. For example, I find an open source database I would like to use in a project, but I need to tweak on it a bit to make it work on my platform, so I make the tweaks and contribute them to the commons.
I don't care if Joe Sixpack can't use the database, but then again I'm not going to whine because nobody but 'geeks' uses it. I know there are people that whine because nobody uses their hard-to-understand project, and they need to either stop whining or spend some time making their stuff more usable.
Companies worry about market penetration and product name recognition - and making money. When I work on a project, I usually only worry about the first two if I'm also worried about the last one. And most of the time, I'm just learning something cool, not trying to displace some commercial product. I don't like it when people like Uncle Pru get on their high horse and tell me that my goal should be to 'write things that are what the end user wants.'
I'll give you that a fusion reactor is going to be more difficult to control than a fission reactor, but that wasn't exactly what I meant. My point (probably badly stated) was that we don't currently know how to handle a sustained fusion reaction, but once we do, there will probably be a period of just a few decades during which reactor designs are modified to provide much greater stability and ease of control. No matter how revolutionary and complex something seems to be today, it will probably become a "commonplace and everyday" engineering topic taught in 4-year colleges within a century.
Still, I doubt it will take significantly less than a 6-billion node cluster of human brains to run any realistic fusion reactor.;) I know that wasn't the point you were trying to make, but I thought I'd throw it out anyway.
Thanks for the link to the Jet project; I haven't kept up with fusion research in a while. Now you've probably shot my weekend all to hell.:)
But they mention the use of Fusion. The explanation is that fusion power is a very tricky process to regulate, to the humans are used as a massive parallel computer to control the real power plant.
As long as we're in futuristic speculation mode, I suppose we can speculate that a fusion reactor would be difficult to control. Somehow I doubt it will be so tricky to regulate; the tricky part is initially figuring out how to build machinery to take advantage of some physical process. Once you get the basic idea out of the way, it seems that a baseline of control practices builds up relatively quickly, and controlling the process is much easier.
Personally, I don't care much for in-depth explanations of holes in movies (or any other fictional stories, or that matter). They usually get too convoluted to be any fun after a certain point. In-depth discussions of real-world issues or philosophies brought up by said stories? I love those. Trying to justify away the literal meaning of a 5-second statement in a movie is (to me, at least) like trying to justify a literal interpretation of a religious text. Just not worth the effort. Probably kinda like this post that I'm spending way too much time writing.:)
I quit visiting fool.com because they went with the obnoxious ads and decided to lock everyone but paid members out of anything remotely useful. Everything started going downhill when they moved their radio show over to that state-run radio station.;)
I still use weather.com, since it seems they stopped doing popups lately. They were just about to get dropped from my toolbar before that.
As has been said many times before, any site that hosts these kinds of ads is probably going to regret it long term. But then again, I've seen too many businesses that were very short-sighted. They need a pair of those magic business binoculars...and a roll of quarters.
I usually come to/. to get geeky news. You know, learn about cool new toys, read people's M$-bashing, RMS-bashing, Linux-evangelizing comments, that kind of stuff. I'm not seeing how this fits in. Maybe I'm just too narrow-minded in wanting only nerdy things on a nerdy site.
How well does this program and GunCash work with online banking systems?
Just a guess here, but I would expect that GunCash could be very helpful when you want to make large withdrawals, even from banks where you don't have an account.
The question of whether computers can be conscious has not been answered, and may never be answered. I don't even think a suitable definition of the term has been found and agreed upon. And if a person ever does answer the question for real, I can guarantee it won't be a philosopher. Most likely it will be the computer scientist who programs the first conscious computer.
Unless consciousness turns out to be something relatively simple, I don't know that "program" would be the appropriate verb to describe the creation of a conscious computer. I would expect that if we should ever develop a computer system that might appear to be 'conscious,' it would be nearly as complicated as a human brain, and its operation would be just as hard to explain. It might even come about as an accident, like some of the singularity folks have proposed, although I would imagine that it would probably happen in the equipment of someone trying to create an AI.
As someone else posted, I think not nearly enough credit is given to the sheer complexity of the 'non-quantum' aspects of the brain; although I'd like to think we're so 'special' that you have to have quantum magic going on to explain consciousness, I'm not so sure that's really the case. (I am not a physicist or computer scientist, BTW).
Personally, I'd love to have a ringside seat to watch the first conscious computer debate with one or more philosophers as to whether it's conscious or not.;)
Sorry, I've been reading slashdot too much and must append such an item to all lists I encounter.:P
And it's not stealing, it's copyright infringement.;)
Seriously, though, I think using commercial software still won't cover all the bases. Alea said, "I can find commercial solutions (often specific to a particular domain)..." which I would assume means that there don't appear to be any general-purpose experiment packages.
As some others have already posted, 'experiments' can cover a wide range of things, and I can imagine that making a general-purpose experiment harness would be a tall order. Having such a thing would be useful for some of the work I do, but I have not had the time (and probably don't have the ability) to try to put together something that can help manage and automate experiments (or sensor data processing jobs, in my case). This is one of those problems which I 'feel' has to have a solution, but I know it's currently beyond my capability to figure out how it should work.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, even though they didn't provide pictures, I imagine that the area in which the plasma actually resides is not very big. It may not be too difficult to produce a plasma curtain to block off a 1-2 cm^2 entry point into a particle accelerator, but I wager it would be very difficult to produce the same effect uniformly over a 1 m^2 door opening. I don't know much about plasma physics, but I have a suspicion that a big honkin' 1m^2 sheet of plasma isn't going to be magically stable.
I think the Star Trek force fields are still a long, long way off, if they're even possible at all.I kinda figured SCO wouldn't volunteer the info. The reason I was wondering about the traceability of the contributions (wherever they came from) is pretty much what you stated: presumably SCO has done some reasearch to find out when (allegedly) their code was introduced into the kernel. Unless they are pretty sure that it can't be traced back to them or their employees, I can't imagine why they're bold enough to try and take this to court. Maybe they believe somebody will fold and pay up (or buy out) before they have to reveal where the code is.
I hope this does go to court, so that it's possible to objectively determine what actually happened. If SCO has a valid claim, then the open source community will probably learn some needed lessons about tracking contributors. If SCO is doing something unethical here, then they need to be punished for it - and I'm sure the response of their customers and stockholders will overshadow the punishment dealt out by the courts.
So if SCO made contributions to the Linux kernel, and those contributions are now in the official distribution, is there a record somewhere of SCO (or their employees) contributing said code? I am pretty much in the dark as to how closely Linux contributions are tracked.
My understanding is that the GNU/FSF folks are pretty meticulous about obtaining releases and documenting contributors, and I expect that they do that for precisely this sort of situation. I am just not aware of whether or not Linus and company do the same for the Linux kernel
EMP was the first thing that came to mind when I saw the article. If you're fighting an enemy that has no compunction about using nukes, then they can make at least some of this fancy hardware useless. But then again, nuclear weapons tend to make a lot of things useless by physically destroying them. (Just to save someone the trouble of correcting me, I know EMP has a greater area of effect than the radiation and shock wave, and I know there are non-nuclear means of generating an EMP capable of disabling electronic hardware.)
EMP aside, the not-so-reliable weapons systems of today will pave the way for reliable versions in the future. History is full of examples where newfangled technology was introduced to the battlefield, and probably got a lot of people killed, but the lessons learned from it eventually resulted in reliable weapons or defenses that provided an advantage. That's just the way things seem to work.
Heh, make that "both their penis and breasts enlarged." I'll be off to take some remedial English classes now, thank you very much. :)
How unfair...what about those that want both their penises and breasts enlarged? I'm sure there's a market for it, otherwise I wouldn't get fifty of each offer every day. :)
I can understand some people being bent out of shape over what they perceive to be a double standard (i.e., anyone can make fun of whites and it's ok), because (usually) they only know their side of the story. As someone else has said, it's to be expected that the members of the least oppressed group - that has done the most oppressing in the last few centuries, btw - are going to get treated this way by those groups that were (or perceive themselves to have been) oppressed by them. That's just human nature, I think.
I do find it interesting that someone on slashdot was able to read an article about someone trying to crush Linux, that said article contained a quote by Linus, and the thing they choose to comment on is his use of the phrase "white trash."
Seriously, though, has anyone ever sat in on a case where something technical was involved? I sat on a jury where some scientific evidence was presented, and I know the entire presentation went right over the heads of almost everyone on the jury. Fortunately someone on the jury knew enough to get the judge to ask a question about some aspect of the evidence; the answer of the expert witness pretty much demonstrated that he was misrepresenting some of the results of his tests. I always worry about there not being a clueful person involved in technical cases, because people can make really irrational decisions when they're swamped with stuff they don't understand.
Hopefully the fair use of and/or similarity between two works of literature provides a good model for the judge to use to make a decision. I would hate to see something like this get screwed up because it was presided over by a judge that can't set the timer on his/her VCR, let alone make sense of kernel code.
Heh. You're assuming that you're attempting to decompile something that had human-understandable source to start with. :)
The freedom aspect of a project like this was the first thing that came to my mind. While people may argue about whether they're choosing the right transmission methods or whether it will work well or not, I think the fact that someone is willing try it is a good thing.
I'm not much on conspiracy theories and doomsaying, but if the US government continues to grant itself increasing power to invade our privacy, I would expect to see projects like this proliferate. You're going to force my ISP to spy on me? I'll just use the public wifi network. It may be a long time before a network like this would rival the internet, but it would be nice to have some alternatives in the works.
The second paragraph of the "long and dense article" strikes me as hyperbole. I haven't noticed that my computer's "operation has become brittle and unreliable" or that it "crash[es] or freeze[s] up regularly." I have not experienced the "annual outlays for maintenance, repairs and operations" that "far exceed total hardware and software costs, for both individuals and corporations."
Since this is /. I feel compelled to say this: "Gee, sounds like these guys are Windows users." Haha. But, to be fair, I have to say that - in my experience, at least - Windows2000 has been pretty stable both at home and at work. My computers seem to me to have become more stable and reliable over the years.
But maybe my computers have become more stable because I learned to not tweak on them all the time. As long as my system works, I leave it the hell alone. I don't install the "latest and greatest M$ service pack" (or Linux kernel, for that matter) unless it fixes a bug or security vulnerability that actually affects me. I don't download and install every cutesy program I see. My computer is a tool I need to do my job - and since I've started treating it as such, it seems to work pretty damn well.
Maybe I've just missed the point of open source stuff over the last few years, but I always thought the idea was that people contribute to an OS project because it scratches their itch. For example, I find an open source database I would like to use in a project, but I need to tweak on it a bit to make it work on my platform, so I make the tweaks and contribute them to the commons.
I don't care if Joe Sixpack can't use the database, but then again I'm not going to whine because nobody but 'geeks' uses it. I know there are people that whine because nobody uses their hard-to-understand project, and they need to either stop whining or spend some time making their stuff more usable.
Companies worry about market penetration and product name recognition - and making money. When I work on a project, I usually only worry about the first two if I'm also worried about the last one. And most of the time, I'm just learning something cool, not trying to displace some commercial product. I don't like it when people like Uncle Pru get on their high horse and tell me that my goal should be to 'write things that are what the end user wants.'
Sadly, their grammar and syntax in that article shine when compared to things written (in English) by Americans.
I'll give you that a fusion reactor is going to be more difficult to control than a fission reactor, but that wasn't exactly what I meant. My point (probably badly stated) was that we don't currently know how to handle a sustained fusion reaction, but once we do, there will probably be a period of just a few decades during which reactor designs are modified to provide much greater stability and ease of control. No matter how revolutionary and complex something seems to be today, it will probably become a "commonplace and everyday" engineering topic taught in 4-year colleges within a century.
Still, I doubt it will take significantly less than a 6-billion node cluster of human brains to run any realistic fusion reactor. ;) I know that wasn't the point you were trying to make, but I thought I'd throw it out anyway.
Thanks for the link to the Jet project; I haven't kept up with fusion research in a while. Now you've probably shot my weekend all to hell. :)
As long as we're in futuristic speculation mode, I suppose we can speculate that a fusion reactor would be difficult to control. Somehow I doubt it will be so tricky to regulate; the tricky part is initially figuring out how to build machinery to take advantage of some physical process. Once you get the basic idea out of the way, it seems that a baseline of control practices builds up relatively quickly, and controlling the process is much easier.
Personally, I don't care much for in-depth explanations of holes in movies (or any other fictional stories, or that matter). They usually get too convoluted to be any fun after a certain point. In-depth discussions of real-world issues or philosophies brought up by said stories? I love those. Trying to justify away the literal meaning of a 5-second statement in a movie is (to me, at least) like trying to justify a literal interpretation of a religious text. Just not worth the effort. Probably kinda like this post that I'm spending way too much time writing. :)
I wonder if they have urban legends debunkery in the Matrix as well?
More like Cybermen with more hoses and better makeup.
I quit visiting fool.com because they went with the obnoxious ads and decided to lock everyone but paid members out of anything remotely useful. Everything started going downhill when they moved their radio show over to that state-run radio station. ;)
I still use weather.com, since it seems they stopped doing popups lately. They were just about to get dropped from my toolbar before that.
As has been said many times before, any site that hosts these kinds of ads is probably going to regret it long term. But then again, I've seen too many businesses that were very short-sighted. They need a pair of those magic business binoculars...and a roll of quarters.
I usually come to /. to get geeky news. You know, learn about cool new toys, read people's M$-bashing, RMS-bashing, Linux-evangelizing comments, that kind of stuff. I'm not seeing how this fits in. Maybe I'm just too narrow-minded in wanting only nerdy things on a nerdy site.
Dude, you didn't get the email about the Secret Raging Geekery Underground hate list feed? You are so out of the loop.
Hemos is like a lot of sci-fi fans: he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on.
:)
That's the most concise description of many sci-fi fans I think I've ever seen. I think I'll have to file that one away for future use.
Unless consciousness turns out to be something relatively simple, I don't know that "program" would be the appropriate verb to describe the creation of a conscious computer. I would expect that if we should ever develop a computer system that might appear to be 'conscious,' it would be nearly as complicated as a human brain, and its operation would be just as hard to explain. It might even come about as an accident, like some of the singularity folks have proposed, although I would imagine that it would probably happen in the equipment of someone trying to create an AI.
As someone else posted, I think not nearly enough credit is given to the sheer complexity of the 'non-quantum' aspects of the brain; although I'd like to think we're so 'special' that you have to have quantum magic going on to explain consciousness, I'm not so sure that's really the case. (I am not a physicist or computer scientist, BTW).
Personally, I'd love to have a ringside seat to watch the first conscious computer debate with one or more philosophers as to whether it's conscious or not. ;)
4. Profit!!!!
Sorry, I've been reading slashdot too much and must append such an item to all lists I encounter. :P
And it's not stealing, it's copyright infringement. ;)
Seriously, though, I think using commercial software still won't cover all the bases. Alea said, "I can find commercial solutions (often specific to a particular domain)..." which I would assume means that there don't appear to be any general-purpose experiment packages.
As some others have already posted, 'experiments' can cover a wide range of things, and I can imagine that making a general-purpose experiment harness would be a tall order. Having such a thing would be useful for some of the work I do, but I have not had the time (and probably don't have the ability) to try to put together something that can help manage and automate experiments (or sensor data processing jobs, in my case). This is one of those problems which I 'feel' has to have a solution, but I know it's currently beyond my capability to figure out how it should work.
Maybe the existence of a Java-based national ID card is the unspeakable concept mentioned in the Guide.