Many words in one of the syllabic alphabet (katakana) have a pronunciation close to english, as they are foreign words phonetically transcribed in Japanese, like ko-n-pu-ta (computer)
Even without that, it is easy to tell apart the complex ideograms and the syllabic characters, if only because of their frequency of appearance. There are some structures easy to spot : polite forms and declarative sentences end frquently by the same words, etc... There are many structures that are easy to spot. I suspect it is the case in any language. The Voynich doesn't appear to obey to any grammar structure. Such a problem ought to be easy : there is a whole book, presumably about plants, and we don't even manage to find a single common word in all these pages that could possibly mean "plant" ? Or "root" ? Or a single sentence structure common to many places ? My bet is on "nonsense written by someone who wished he could write and had an instability making him believe he could"
The other option is that it Voynich manuscript is nonsense. It could very well be the work of an insane illetrate man (or woman) who wanted to write a book and did.
In May 1961, when the moon race was kickstarted by Kennedy, we knew next to nothing about putting a man on the Moon. We knew it should be possible, in theory. we spent billions and it happened despite the drawbacks.
Use one tenth of the Apollo's program budget, and you'll get self-replicating machines in the next ten years. Give it the same budget and you'll get them in 5 years, with 5 years left to miniaturize.
Self replicating nano-technology is far in the future, it is good NASA looks into it, but there is only one good thing I would take out of his proposal and apply it immediately : robots sent to Mars need to be autonomous. 20-40 minutes of lag is not a good way to drive a rover. Have a dozen of cheap rovers, give them a daily (or even hourly) schedule of things to do, and, for god's sake, let them do their things autonomously ! DARPA's Grand Challenge has proven since 2005 (or was it 2004 ?) that autonomous vehicules in a desert can ride up to 40 mph without problems. At this speed, it takes less than 200 days to go from equator to poles.
And it would be nice to also have robots (or simply landers) dig a good depth of martian ground to see wether it is possible to have good water ice, whether it is electrolysable and/or drinkable, suitable for culture, etc...
"So what, you brought me there and show me this stuff and want me to believe this was there 50 years ago ? How naive of you..."
I also believe they were real, but in today world, I challenge the idea that a picture or a video can be a proof of anything. If there were a conspiration about anything, government-forged clues could be very convincing. During the Parisian trip of the Olympic torch, they have fabricated a false incident, that was filmed about a paraplegic athlete being agressed by a (presumably) fake protestor. It went to the news in China. No European journalists following the torch ever heard about that before reading the news.
No LAN support means that I know I'll enjoy SCII less than Starcraft I. I think I'll pass this one and wait for some people to hack something to make it playable on LAN.
And this piracy thing is strange. When I invite friends, we can play at 8 people on a board game I was the only one to buy. It is strange that multiplayer video games should work another way around.
You decided to have an 'IRL' dinner party, and thinking nothing of it you invite your friend.
That's where the problem is. Would you invite someone who spends his time beating mannequins with a lead pipe pretending to "kill" them in the process ? "Murder simulators" are not interesting because of their murder part, but because they involve an interesting story, tactical and strategical games, etc... I would not invite someone who plays quake during all his free time in a map filled of models of persons he likes just to kill them. It has nothing to do with realism.
The interval between extinctions is 62 million years only if you accept ~30 millions of year of error margin.
The current downfall of biodiversity is really fast compared to the time scale mentioned here. Its most likely reason has two legs, two arms, a big brain and a various set of forest-destroying machines as well as a bad habit of dumping various materials into the ocean.
I think that you did a very interesting job at separating these two kinds of remarks. The thing you added emphasis on are constraints of the human nature, not very specific to hackers. The bold attitudes are what makes a competent developer. A hacker is a good developer that tries to have fun when developing, so he wants recognition, is lazy for repetitive tasks (documentation, procedures) and want to spend more time coding than managing human problems, hence the one-man team.
Sorry about the over-romantic tone, but I would say that the hacker is a developer that broke free of the dull things.
I may sound a bit of an anarchist but here I go...
There is a lot of differences between a hacker and a cowboy. The cowboy want to save the day, the hacker wants to make a shiny piece of thingie that works and does awesome. Not only does he want that, but he alwo wants to get recognition for that. He wants others to use his shiny piece of awesome. Documentations and protocols are a part of the process that is very natural (awesomeness points are awarded for auto-generated usable documentations). The hacker works usually in small teams, most of the time in teams of one. That doesn't change the fact that he is quite able to produce a standard-abiding well-documented thing. Like everyone, he notes in meetings what is important and discards the rest. He mocks regular procedures because if there was an easy procedure for the thing he planned doing, it would lack awesomeness. He will occasionally come up with his own custom-made procedure.
Yeah, ever since I have been into software industry, open source and hacker spaces, I was surprised how incredibly well anarchy suits product development and yields results arguably better than hierarchical organizations.
Why be a drone when you can be a hacker ?
I would add that the last elections were characterized by massive arrest of opposition candidates in the last weeks before elections. The fact alone that this did not happen this time is a sign that the government had another way of cheating. Really, Iran is not used to 'fair elections'. Journalists can't work right now so they can't find confirmation of a persistent rumor, but it is said that national counting offices were run over by militants during the counting and that after that the trend changed.
I don't wether to agree or disagree with your point. Rather I'll try to complement it.
"violent fantasies of power and grandeur" is, indeed, a natural wish that probably lurks into our reptilian brain. It is a natural inclination of humans and the cause of many evils. I can understand that the government tries to tune it down, but unless we do brain surgery on every newborn, it will fail.
It can, however, provide ways to fullfill "violent fantasies of power and grandeur" that harms no one, that doesn't require to invent ennemies in the population or to run in the streets with a crowbar. Games provide such a way. In a game I can kill hundreds of ennemies per second, I can manage a kingdom, I can wage a war, I can do kung fu, without hurting anyone. The government does not want less violent games, it wants more.
But some unfortunate people have a hard time discerning the border between reality and fiction. More frequently, some people will think that the self-image of power and grandeur that they build in games can be transposed in reality, leading to various violent behavior. What the government wants, in complement with violent games, is a mandatory psychology class for all students that explains the basics of human behavior. How ego works, the various bias we have when perceiving others and ourselves, the values we transpose from fantasies to the real world, and yes, what we tend to crave for: "power and grandeur" and how almost every media play on that desire to addict us.
In the climate change debate, there are no places for sanity anymore. For years scientists have tried to warn politicians that *maybe* we ought to be *careful* about some *possible* consequences of our wastes and pollution. Every one dismissed them. Then, for right or wrong (I think for right but who knows), comes the IPCC and Al Gore. They put the scientific argument in the closet, took a deep breath and shouted PAAAAAANIIIIIICC ! And finally got some politicians to take actions. In the 70s you were a irresponsible hippy if you studied sea level rises or the downfall of biodiversity, now you are a irresponsible lackey of oil interest if you examine the various cataclysmic claims and propose to refine a model in the way that seems to minimize the IPCC conclusions.
Big financial and political interests have now come into play, rational public debate is out.
Slashdot Mirror
Many words in one of the syllabic alphabet (katakana) have a pronunciation close to english, as they are foreign words phonetically transcribed in Japanese, like ko-n-pu-ta (computer)
Even without that, it is easy to tell apart the complex ideograms and the syllabic characters, if only because of their frequency of appearance. There are some structures easy to spot : polite forms and declarative sentences end frquently by the same words, etc... There are many structures that are easy to spot. I suspect it is the case in any language. The Voynich doesn't appear to obey to any grammar structure. Such a problem ought to be easy : there is a whole book, presumably about plants, and we don't even manage to find a single common word in all these pages that could possibly mean "plant" ? Or "root" ? Or a single sentence structure common to many places ? My bet is on "nonsense written by someone who wished he could write and had an instability making him believe he could"
The other option is that it Voynich manuscript is nonsense. It could very well be the work of an insane illetrate man (or woman) who wanted to write a book and did.
In May 1961, when the moon race was kickstarted by Kennedy, we knew next to nothing about putting a man on the Moon. We knew it should be possible, in theory. we spent billions and it happened despite the drawbacks.
Use one tenth of the Apollo's program budget, and you'll get self-replicating machines in the next ten years. Give it the same budget and you'll get them in 5 years, with 5 years left to miniaturize.
That, or we could wonder how a super-Tuna could destroy Tokyo. Probably with attached laser-beams...
Self replicating nano-technology is far in the future, it is good NASA looks into it, but there is only one good thing I would take out of his proposal and apply it immediately : robots sent to Mars need to be autonomous. 20-40 minutes of lag is not a good way to drive a rover. Have a dozen of cheap rovers, give them a daily (or even hourly) schedule of things to do, and, for god's sake, let them do their things autonomously ! DARPA's Grand Challenge has proven since 2005 (or was it 2004 ?) that autonomous vehicules in a desert can ride up to 40 mph without problems. At this speed, it takes less than 200 days to go from equator to poles.
And it would be nice to also have robots (or simply landers) dig a good depth of martian ground to see wether it is possible to have good water ice, whether it is electrolysable and/or drinkable, suitable for culture, etc...
Well, they did not go to the Moon using existing technology...
"So what, you brought me there and show me this stuff and want me to believe this was there 50 years ago ? How naive of you..."
I also believe they were real, but in today world, I challenge the idea that a picture or a video can be a proof of anything. If there were a conspiration about anything, government-forged clues could be very convincing. During the Parisian trip of the Olympic torch, they have fabricated a false incident, that was filmed about a paraplegic athlete being agressed by a (presumably) fake protestor. It went to the news in China. No European journalists following the torch ever heard about that before reading the news.
No LAN support means that I know I'll enjoy SCII less than Starcraft I. I think I'll pass this one and wait for some people to hack something to make it playable on LAN.
And this piracy thing is strange. When I invite friends, we can play at 8 people on a board game I was the only one to buy. It is strange that multiplayer video games should work another way around.
You decided to have an 'IRL' dinner party, and thinking nothing of it you invite your friend.
That's where the problem is. Would you invite someone who spends his time beating mannequins with a lead pipe pretending to "kill" them in the process ? "Murder simulators" are not interesting because of their murder part, but because they involve an interesting story, tactical and strategical games, etc... I would not invite someone who plays quake during all his free time in a map filled of models of persons he likes just to kill them. It has nothing to do with realism.
Is it really flamebait to say that humans are the most likely cause of biodiversity downfall ?
Please refrain from using complex arguments. Complexity has a known liberal bias. Let's stay objective.
The interval between extinctions is 62 million years only if you accept ~30 millions of year of error margin.
The current downfall of biodiversity is really fast compared to the time scale mentioned here. Its most likely reason has two legs, two arms, a big brain and a various set of forest-destroying machines as well as a bad habit of dumping various materials into the ocean.
I think that you did a very interesting job at separating these two kinds of remarks. The thing you added emphasis on are constraints of the human nature, not very specific to hackers. The bold attitudes are what makes a competent developer. A hacker is a good developer that tries to have fun when developing, so he wants recognition, is lazy for repetitive tasks (documentation, procedures) and want to spend more time coding than managing human problems, hence the one-man team.
Sorry about the over-romantic tone, but I would say that the hacker is a developer that broke free of the dull things.
There is the "us" and there is the "them". What is confusing you ?
I may sound a bit of an anarchist but here I go...
There is a lot of differences between a hacker and a cowboy. The cowboy want to save the day, the hacker wants to make a shiny piece of thingie that works and does awesome. Not only does he want that, but he alwo wants to get recognition for that. He wants others to use his shiny piece of awesome. Documentations and protocols are a part of the process that is very natural (awesomeness points are awarded for auto-generated usable documentations). The hacker works usually in small teams, most of the time in teams of one. That doesn't change the fact that he is quite able to produce a standard-abiding well-documented thing. Like everyone, he notes in meetings what is important and discards the rest. He mocks regular procedures because if there was an easy procedure for the thing he planned doing, it would lack awesomeness. He will occasionally come up with his own custom-made procedure.
Yeah, ever since I have been into software industry, open source and hacker spaces, I was surprised how incredibly well anarchy suits product development and yields results arguably better than hierarchical organizations.
Why be a drone when you can be a hacker ?
... they announced that they bought 3Drealms and will be releasing Duke Nukem Forever by Fall 2009
I would add that the last elections were characterized by massive arrest of opposition candidates in the last weeks before elections. The fact alone that this did not happen this time is a sign that the government had another way of cheating. Really, Iran is not used to 'fair elections'. Journalists can't work right now so they can't find confirmation of a persistent rumor, but it is said that national counting offices were run over by militants during the counting and that after that the trend changed.
They renamed file-sharing into "piracy". When do we start renaming copyright claims into "extorsion" ?
I'll say it when there will be one.
It is not very hard to serve files in a secure fashion.
I don't wether to agree or disagree with your point. Rather I'll try to complement it.
"violent fantasies of power and grandeur" is, indeed, a natural wish that probably lurks into our reptilian brain. It is a natural inclination of humans and the cause of many evils. I can understand that the government tries to tune it down, but unless we do brain surgery on every newborn, it will fail.
It can, however, provide ways to fullfill "violent fantasies of power and grandeur" that harms no one, that doesn't require to invent ennemies in the population or to run in the streets with a crowbar. Games provide such a way. In a game I can kill hundreds of ennemies per second, I can manage a kingdom, I can wage a war, I can do kung fu, without hurting anyone. The government does not want less violent games, it wants more.
But some unfortunate people have a hard time discerning the border between reality and fiction. More frequently, some people will think that the self-image of power and grandeur that they build in games can be transposed in reality, leading to various violent behavior. What the government wants, in complement with violent games, is a mandatory psychology class for all students that explains the basics of human behavior. How ego works, the various bias we have when perceiving others and ourselves, the values we transpose from fantasies to the real world, and yes, what we tend to crave for: "power and grandeur" and how almost every media play on that desire to addict us.
In the climate change debate, there are no places for sanity anymore. For years scientists have tried to warn politicians that *maybe* we ought to be *careful* about some *possible* consequences of our wastes and pollution. Every one dismissed them. Then, for right or wrong (I think for right but who knows), comes the IPCC and Al Gore. They put the scientific argument in the closet, took a deep breath and shouted PAAAAAANIIIIIICC ! And finally got some politicians to take actions. In the 70s you were a irresponsible hippy if you studied sea level rises or the downfall of biodiversity, now you are a irresponsible lackey of oil interest if you examine the various cataclysmic claims and propose to refine a model in the way that seems to minimize the IPCC conclusions.
Big financial and political interests have now come into play, rational public debate is out.
Most important option missing : Stop making more than 1 baby per couple !
SSD are also silent, do not warm too much, are resistant to shocks, are smaller...
This is how you justify the ten-fold increase in price.
Presumably with their users' consent...
Plus, many web companies prefer to use cookies. Tracking via IP always causes troubles.
That's called donation work, I know at least one small game company that works fine this way.