What's new in Schneier's article is that that is pretty clearly debunked. This was a standard GPG/PGP archive which had already been distributed. There was absolutely no reason to hand out the correct password and doing so is a clear breach of IT security norms (never give your password to anybody) for no good reason.
That's not what I saw in Schneier's article at all, nor in the comments. I saw that the file "somehow made its way" into the mirror kit. How was the Guardian supposed to know that they were going to be distributing this exact file, with the exact same password, instead of a file with a different password (as would make more sense, if you want to keep control)? The Guardian didn't release the file, only the password. As long as they kept the file they were given secret (and there's not yet any indication they didn't), they behaved in a reasonable way.
Sure, maybe in hindsight it would have been better to use a modified password in the book, since it doesn't change the story value. In hindsight it might have been better for Julian to make a separate password for each organization as well.
The magic of the 8-bit computers was that they were simple enough to feel like you could get complete mastery of them. You could start with the simple build in BASIC language, and if you want to put something on the screen, you could just PRINT or POKE.
I'd say it was also that there was an easily available language built-in, that you could just use.
Actually, I think that javascript could be the language kids these days grow up with. Every web browser has an interpreter, and it's fairly straightforward to get a brower to interpret it -- it's just that it's not at all obvious. No one is going to stumble upon opening up Notepad, writing javascript, and opening the resulting file in a brower. It seems like Mozilla could do some interesting stuff here...
If the corporation goes bankrupt, then all the execs should be on the streets looking for handouts.
Unfortunately options don't work that way. If the stock tanks, they're worth $0, not negative.
Maybe a better way to structure it would be to offer to match his stock purchase / ownership with options. I.e., if he buys (or already owns) 100,000 shares of stock, they give him 100,000 options. (Or 200,000, or something like that). Then if the stock tanks, he *really* loses something...
I'm intrigued, how did they suggest you choose which should be taken as metaphors and as fact/instructions?
First of all, the purpose of the Genesis account was not to teach biology or astrophysics. The purpose of the Genesis account was to give people an idea of where we came from and what we're here for. The answers Genesis gives: God made everything, he made it to be good ("...and it was good" is repeated several times in the first chapter), and he made humans in his image, to rule over it and take care of it.
Consider the competing mythology by the Babylonians: the earth was made when the god Marduk defeated an enemy by ripping them in half. The two halves of the body became the ground. Men were created when some drops of blood from another god being killed fell to the ground, and started moving around and had life. Then later, after humans had grown in number, the gods noticed and said, "Hey look, these guys will come in handy to be our slaves." Now, what does that story tell you about where the world came from, and what humans are here for?
Secondly, the account itself actually fits very nicely with the scientific account if you take it as a vision seen by someone standing on the surface of the planet. To wit:
In the beginning, the Big Bang. Energy coalesced into particles, particles into matter, matter into bodies of planets and proto-stars. Earth was just a mass of chemicals, with a molten iron core, covered with an unusual amount of organic compounds, probably liquid because the sun hadn't ignited yet.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.
Eventually the sun ignited, and cast light on the earth. An observer standing on the earth would see the light, but would not yet see the sun itself, because the atmosphere would not be clear enough to do so; it wouldn't even be clear enough to see very far in front of you.
Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. Then he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light "day" and the darkness "night."
Eventually the atmosphere developed enough that it became clear, and clouds rose up away from the seas, to the sky. They still covered the sky completely, but now you could actually see in front of you. Somewhere in here life began as single-celled organisms.
Then God said, “Let there be a space between the waters, to separate the waters of the heavens from the waters of the earth.” And that is what happened. God made this space to separate the waters of the earth from the waters of the heavens. God called the space “sky.”
Shifts in tectonic plates eventually form continental land masses. The life that was in the waters adapted to the land, and began to grow into more complex things like vegetation.
Then God said, “Let the waters beneath the sky flow together into one place, so dry ground may appear.” And that is what happened. God called the dry ground “land” and the waters “seas.” And God saw that it was good. Then God said, “Let the land sprout with vegetation—every sort of seed-bearing plant, and trees that grow seed-bearing fruit. These seeds will then produce the kinds of plants and trees from which they came.” And that is what happened. The land produced vegetation—all sorts of seed-bearing plants, and trees with seed-bearing fruit. Their seeds produced plants and trees of the same kind. And God saw that it was good.
Finally, the atmosphere develops enough that the clouds part; for the first time, an observer standing on the surface of the planet can see the moon, sky, and stars.
Then God said, “Let lights appear in the sky to separate the day from the night. Let them mark
If the operating systems did their jobs properly, security wouldn't be a big issue for most use.
Virtualizaiton provides several things, including platform diversity (running more than one OS at a time), security (protecting things from each other), and reliability (one server crashing is less likely to bring down the other servers on your box).
Obviously running more than one OS at a time can only be done with virtualizaiton.
For the other two things, there is a fundamental tension. Both security and reliability problems boil down to humans making errors. We can do lots of things to try to reduce the errors humans make in programming, but that will only buy you so much. At a certain point, it's just a probabilistic thing. More complex interface, more complex code, and just more code at all, makes it more likely that there will be at least one security or reliability bug that people don't catch. So for both, you really want a system that is a small number of LoC, and with a very simple interface that's easy to reason about.
There's a huge pressure for modern operating systems to expand the interface. There's good reason for that: processes within an operating system are designed to talk to and interact with each other. Enabling them to do so with the maximum richness and flexibility enables richer programming.
But the side effect of this is that they are less secure, just by the laws of probability.
VMMs are designed from the ground up to be as minimal as possible, and to provide as simple an interface as possible. They are not designed to give a rich shared space in which VMs can interact. This means that they have a much smaller "attack surface", and (in the case of microkernel VMMs) a much smaller codebase.
It's doubtful that even if every OS restricted themselves just to an early POSIX interface that they would be able to provide the security, isolation, and robustness that virtual machines can.
And in any case, none of that will allow you to run Windows reliably on Linux, or vice versa.:-)
The hypervizor is the new ring 0. And it's going to evolve into a microkernel and user mode drivers.
Xen already is, in essence, a microkernel, and already has "user-mode" drivers (called "driver domains"). In a 2005 paper, some of the authors of Xen argue that hypervisors are microkernels done right.
It's hard to see how that could apply to Linux running KVM, though.
That's what I'm waiting for, one core OS at boot (specialized BIOS?) on top of which I can install several other OS' and switch between them with a keyboard shortcut.
What you're looking for is called XenClient. It's targeted at laptops, but it should work perfectly well on desktops.
It does, unfortunately, require systems with either VT-d (Intel) or an IOMMU (AMD).
If you say that not all software patents are bad, just most, but fail to give an example, then I'm not convinced either.
The original mp3 audio compression technique represented a non-negligible investment of R&D time and dollars to invent. But once known, it was easy to copy.
The whole point of the patent system is to allow a companies that invest in R&D to be able to recoup that investment.
Yep, we're back to square one. All that will happen now is that patent applications will include bloated calculations to pass the "too complicated for a human" math test. They won't actually be necessary for anything except printing more money...err...getting the math patent approved.
But surely that would make an easy defense against infringement? "Ladies and gentelmen the jury, consider the math in the equation in the patent: [Wild gibberish including lots of greek symbols, imaginary numbers, and infinite series]. Now here is the math in our algorithm: y=2x+1."
I don't think you need a US VPN, I think you just need a US credit card.
I moved to the UK 4 years ago, and I still pay 0.99 USD for songs on iTunes (rather than 0.99 GBP, about 1.58 USD), and I can rent movies just fine. I only need my VPN for Pandora.
If this is the project I'm thinking of, I knew some of the researchers working on the project.
If I remember correctly, the key distinction between this technique and most bipedal walker-runner systems is that the control system is based on feedback mechanisms and first princicples. Most older systems have to place down one foot before picking up the other foot for balance, and if you push it or disrupt its stride in any way, it just fails.
This one is much more flexible. That's why it can run or change stride -- like you, it calculates the necessary adjustments real-time (albeit only in 2 dimensions). There's a video of the previous incarnation of this which shows one of the researchers coming up and shoving the robot as it's walking, and it just adjusts its stride the way a human would if it had been shoved when walking. Most systems (as I understand it) would have fallen down. If you look at a video, you can see that the speed and stride is changing as it runs as well.
And FB requires you to use your real name as well. Somehow it has failed to keep it from growing pretty big.
The thing with nonymity (as opposed to anonymity): the normal social conventions keeping people from acting like total asshats actually work. If there are actual consequences for what you say, people are more likely to act responsibly. Now, there are obviously bad sides of nonymity; those same social conventions can have nasty side effects, and the consequences of saying something can often make someone not say something at all.
But you have to choose one or the other -- have the good and bad effects of anonymity (freedom to express yourself because you know there won't be consequences; freedom to act like an asshat because you know there won't be consequences) or have the good and bad effects of nonymity (People are more well-behaved and polite, because they know there will be consequences; people can't share certain things because they know there will be consequences). Some communities choose anonymity; Google chose nonymity. You're free to make your own website if you wish.
This is something that we are seeing more and more, like in UK with the creation of the Lib Dems. The creation of new parties, so-called centrists but mostly taking votes on the left, ensuring the election of conservatives, or at least of a coalition government dominated by the conservatives.
Ah, fascinating sir. Thank you for that bit of insight.
Kahlil Byrd, the C.E.O. of Americans Elect, speaking from its swank offices, financed with some serious hedge-fund money, a stone’s throw from the White House.
I disagree with the logic Dawkins uses there. He's talking about measuring precision (getting the same result twice). But that won't tell you anything about accuracy (getting the "right answer"), and it also won't tell you anything about outliers. It may well be that most judges would be able to find the truth more reliably than most juries; but imagine the damage that a single "rogue judge" could do -- a judge with outrageous prejudices, or an axe to grind, or who was just a sadist. A bad jury will happen once and is then disbanded; judges stay a *long* time. And even apart from that, you'll rarely (at least in this context) get 12 people who together are as extreme as a single person. And that's not to mention the dangers of having a very self-selective, isolated profession like the judiciary drifting away from the moral or ethical sense of the rest of the culture (or failing to follow the culture, e.g., when it decides that hanging is not a reasonable punishment for petty theft).
It may be that democracy is a bad form of government; but so far it seems less bad than all the other forms of government we've tried.
Perhaps a better method would be to have the judges separately write down the verdict they would have given based on the evidence, before the jury reports; and then compare the results across the whole nation. I think it's true that the judiciary as a whole have a better understanding of the law, logic, and so on; it would be interesting to see the results.
And re the OJ Simpson trial: I think it likely that two juries would have come to the same verdict. From what I understand, what the defense showed was that the police framed OJ. You can indeed frame someone who is guilty, and when you catch them doing it, the only option is to let the guilty go free.
I think that some people need to make masks that look just like Kaprielian, and probably her boss, and some of the local senators, and get "caught" by some of these cameras doing something that results in automatic suspension of a license. Then we'll see how long the "It's just inconvenient" attitude lasts.
In Michigan several years ago they passed a law that allowed a policeman to cut up your driving license right in front of you if you were caught driving drunk. That law was struck down as being unconstitutional, because even though the cop was right there and could smell the alcohol on your breath and hear your slurred speech, a cop is not judge and jury; you still have a right to due process under the law. If that was unconstitutional, I can't see how this isn't as well.
The problem is the education system, that doesn't teach even basic numerical reasoning to people who need to use it all the time.
I wouldn't call the Base rate fallacy basic numerical reasoning. I didn't learn about baysean probability until my senior year, and I didn't hear about the base rate fallacy until I was a researcher.
Maybe a better technique would be to say there's an "effective true positive accuracy", which varies depending on the circumstances. Maybe have it as a feature of the software, that you have to enter in certain settings (i.e., population of US 300m, number of suspects searching for: 1000), and then when you get a positive, under the match flag up the effective accuracy. (E.g., "Match! Effective accuracy: 2.3%, based on population of 300m and search space of 10000). That would make it clear to everyone operating it that even though you have a match, the person you're talking to is *potentially* a terrorist, but *probably not*.
They have no incentive to hire more workers, because it means higher costs. Currently they have a good income by rubber stamping everything but the costs of these patents are conveyed to the consumers. Unless their mandate is changed, they won't reform.
Yeah, some kind of feedback is always necessary. I'd always thought that if a patent was invalidated, that the Patent Office should have to pay a fine of twice (or perhaps more) what they gained from granting the patent in the first place. Then there'd actually be some incentive to only grant patents that are unlikely to be overturned.
Or perhaps better yet, make it adversarial: If someone successfully invalidates a patent, the PO has to pay that person's court costs. Now there's actually a market for people to pro-actively look for bad patents to overturn.
If bad patents were less costly to overturn (or if the cost were born by the PO rather than the person being sued by the patent holder), then bad patents would be less valuable; and people wouldn't be flooding the patent office with patents, and the volume would go down, so they could actually have some chance of looking at the patents they have. Everyone wins. Except the patent trolls, that is.
I understood your argument up to this point, but then you had to resort to a "he didn't add this to minix until 20 years after it was started, so he must suck" argument which, in spite of it being dressed up in technical language is another "argument against the man" (i.e. Ad Hominem) attack against someone who has spoke out against Linux.
It wasn't an ad hominem attack. It's about the "True Believer" nature I've seen in many people who work on microkernels (including Tanenbaum and some guys I've met working on L4). The main argument against microkernels is that most of the people trying to implement them are more interested in academic concepts, and are completely uninterested in actually making something that works well. Paging is basic operating system functionality. If you've had an OS for 20 years and have either been unable to implement paging, or didn't think that paging was an important capability to prioritize, then I think there's something wrong with your judgement.
Now someone else responded that Minix 1 and 2 were only meant to be teaching tools, and 3 is his first attempt at making something useful. Maybe there's something to that. If I were to write the post again, I probably wouldn't include that jibe.
More specifically I was referring to the translators which run in userspace on HURD.
OK, so what's this translator about and why does it make HURD so much awesomer?:-)
I did some research, and according to this article, although OSX does use Mach, it is nonetheless not a microkernel:
Once again, just for good measure: Mac OS X is not based on a microkernel architecture, and has never used Mach as a microkernel. Apple's XNU kernel is larger than many monolithic kernels, and does not suffer from the intractable performance failure the world associates with Mach microkernel research.
Apple has incorporated progress the Mach project made in development of Mach 3.0, but nothing changed: Mac OS X still does not have a microkernel architecture. Its XNU kernel is not implemented as a microkernel. Apple does not use Mach as a microkernel.
you make this assertion that it is "just a microkernel" and then you proceed to tear that concept apart.
I made an assumption because GGP didn't explain himself. If he doesn't want people to misunderstand him then he needs to be more explicit.
In any case, I didn't tear the idea apart. I said that historically, the experience of people using microkernels has been (1) they're really slow, and (2) they're more complicated to program because of the isolation / message passing architectures, and thus more prone to bugs. I admitted that I didn't know anything about Hurd, but said that the burden of proof is on the Hurd community to show that these problems are no longer valid. That was an open invitation to Hurd supporters to bring out the facts and set me straight.
What I've gotten so far (including you) is mostly people saying that CPUs are so fast these days that the extra overhead doesn't matter. No explanation of how Hurd is technically better (other than "it's a microkernel"), no comparison of difficultly in design or programming in the full microkernel environment compared to a monolithic kernel like Linux or the *BSDs, and no real quantification of ways in which the extra overhead / complexity is worth the cost.
No, I haven't read the design docs. It's not my job to look at every half-baked idea out there to see if it's worth considering. And I've heard a lot of microkernel fanboi stuff in my time; I'm skeptical and a bit jaded wrt microkernels. If you and/or the Hurd community want Hurd to get more "buy-in" from the FLOSS community in general, you need to be better evangelists -- understand where the skeptics are coming from, and come armed with facts and arguments that are persuasive and attractive. "The architecture on which HURD is based is technically superior to Linux" is not an attractive or informative statement.
The architecture on which HURD is based is technically superior to Linux.
Why is it superior? Just because it's a microkernel?
Microkernels were the darling of OS research for almost the entirely of the 90's. But by the end of the 90's, most researchers had had enough. The alleged gains in configurability, reliability, security, and so on never materialized; but what never disappeared was the fact that they were stinking slow. Context switching is a fundamental limitation of such an architecture. And from what I've heard, a lot more complicated to program -- which leads to more programming errors and ugly performance hacks to compensate for any potential increase in reliability, security and so on they might have gained.
It's possible that Hurd has managed to overcome these limitations. But it has definitely earned its reputation of being slow and cumbersome; if that has changed, the burden of proof is on the Hurd community.
There are a few True Believers out there, still working on Hurd and Minix and L4 and the like, but they have yet to produce anything shown to be worth using.
I think the fact that Andrew Tanenbaum riduculed Linux in 1993 for being an "outdated architecture", when Minix just got paging working last year after 20 years of development, encapsulates my point completely.
If this guy has seriously worn a colander on his head whenever outside of his house for three years, I will totally support his right to wear a colander in his license photo.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not what I saw in Schneier's article at all, nor in the comments. I saw that the file "somehow made its way" into the mirror kit. How was the Guardian supposed to know that they were going to be distributing this exact file, with the exact same password, instead of a file with a different password (as would make more sense, if you want to keep control)? The Guardian didn't release the file, only the password. As long as they kept the file they were given secret (and there's not yet any indication they didn't), they behaved in a reasonable way.
Sure, maybe in hindsight it would have been better to use a modified password in the book, since it doesn't change the story value. In hindsight it might have been better for Julian to make a separate password for each organization as well.
I'd say it was also that there was an easily available language built-in, that you could just use.
Actually, I think that javascript could be the language kids these days grow up with. Every web browser has an interpreter, and it's fairly straightforward to get a brower to interpret it -- it's just that it's not at all obvious. No one is going to stumble upon opening up Notepad, writing javascript, and opening the resulting file in a brower. It seems like Mozilla could do some interesting stuff here...
Unfortunately options don't work that way. If the stock tanks, they're worth $0, not negative.
Maybe a better way to structure it would be to offer to match his stock purchase / ownership with options. I.e., if he buys (or already owns) 100,000 shares of stock, they give him 100,000 options. (Or 200,000, or something like that). Then if the stock tanks, he *really* loses something...
First of all, the purpose of the Genesis account was not to teach biology or astrophysics. The purpose of the Genesis account was to give people an idea of where we came from and what we're here for. The answers Genesis gives: God made everything, he made it to be good ("...and it was good" is repeated several times in the first chapter), and he made humans in his image, to rule over it and take care of it.
Consider the competing mythology by the Babylonians: the earth was made when the god Marduk defeated an enemy by ripping them in half. The two halves of the body became the ground. Men were created when some drops of blood from another god being killed fell to the ground, and started moving around and had life. Then later, after humans had grown in number, the gods noticed and said, "Hey look, these guys will come in handy to be our slaves." Now, what does that story tell you about where the world came from, and what humans are here for?
Secondly, the account itself actually fits very nicely with the scientific account if you take it as a vision seen by someone standing on the surface of the planet. To wit:
In the beginning, the Big Bang. Energy coalesced into particles, particles into matter, matter into bodies of planets and proto-stars. Earth was just a mass of chemicals, with a molten iron core, covered with an unusual amount of organic compounds, probably liquid because the sun hadn't ignited yet.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.
Eventually the sun ignited, and cast light on the earth. An observer standing on the earth would see the light, but would not yet see the sun itself, because the atmosphere would not be clear enough to do so; it wouldn't even be clear enough to see very far in front of you.
Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. Then he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light "day" and the darkness "night."
Eventually the atmosphere developed enough that it became clear, and clouds rose up away from the seas, to the sky. They still covered the sky completely, but now you could actually see in front of you. Somewhere in here life began as single-celled organisms.
Then God said, “Let there be a space between the waters, to separate the waters of the heavens from the waters of the earth.” And that is what happened. God made this space to separate the waters of the earth from the waters of the heavens. God called the space “sky.”
Shifts in tectonic plates eventually form continental land masses. The life that was in the waters adapted to the land, and began to grow into more complex things like vegetation.
Then God said, “Let the waters beneath the sky flow together into one place, so dry ground may appear.” And that is what happened. God called the dry ground “land” and the waters “seas.” And God saw that it was good. Then God said, “Let the land sprout with vegetation—every sort of seed-bearing plant, and trees that grow seed-bearing fruit. These seeds will then produce the kinds of plants and trees from which they came.” And that is what happened. The land produced vegetation—all sorts of seed-bearing plants, and trees with seed-bearing fruit. Their seeds produced plants and trees of the same kind. And God saw that it was good.
Finally, the atmosphere develops enough that the clouds part; for the first time, an observer standing on the surface of the planet can see the moon, sky, and stars.
Then God said, “Let lights appear in the sky to separate the day from the night. Let them mark
Virtualizaiton provides several things, including platform diversity (running more than one OS at a time), security (protecting things from each other), and reliability (one server crashing is less likely to bring down the other servers on your box).
Obviously running more than one OS at a time can only be done with virtualizaiton.
For the other two things, there is a fundamental tension. Both security and reliability problems boil down to humans making errors. We can do lots of things to try to reduce the errors humans make in programming, but that will only buy you so much. At a certain point, it's just a probabilistic thing. More complex interface, more complex code, and just more code at all, makes it more likely that there will be at least one security or reliability bug that people don't catch. So for both, you really want a system that is a small number of LoC, and with a very simple interface that's easy to reason about.
There's a huge pressure for modern operating systems to expand the interface. There's good reason for that: processes within an operating system are designed to talk to and interact with each other. Enabling them to do so with the maximum richness and flexibility enables richer programming.
But the side effect of this is that they are less secure, just by the laws of probability.
VMMs are designed from the ground up to be as minimal as possible, and to provide as simple an interface as possible. They are not designed to give a rich shared space in which VMs can interact. This means that they have a much smaller "attack surface", and (in the case of microkernel VMMs) a much smaller codebase.
It's doubtful that even if every OS restricted themselves just to an early POSIX interface that they would be able to provide the security, isolation, and robustness that virtual machines can.
And in any case, none of that will allow you to run Windows reliably on Linux, or vice versa. :-)
Xen already is, in essence, a microkernel, and already has "user-mode" drivers (called "driver domains"). In a 2005 paper, some of the authors of Xen argue that hypervisors are microkernels done right.
It's hard to see how that could apply to Linux running KVM, though.
What you're looking for is called XenClient. It's targeted at laptops, but it should work perfectly well on desktops.
It does, unfortunately, require systems with either VT-d (Intel) or an IOMMU (AMD).
The original mp3 audio compression technique represented a non-negligible investment of R&D time and dollars to invent. But once known, it was easy to copy.
The whole point of the patent system is to allow a companies that invest in R&D to be able to recoup that investment.
But surely that would make an easy defense against infringement? "Ladies and gentelmen the jury, consider the math in the equation in the patent: [Wild gibberish including lots of greek symbols, imaginary numbers, and infinite series]. Now here is the math in our algorithm: y=2x+1."
I don't think you need a US VPN, I think you just need a US credit card. I moved to the UK 4 years ago, and I still pay 0.99 USD for songs on iTunes (rather than 0.99 GBP, about 1.58 USD), and I can rent movies just fine. I only need my VPN for Pandora.
If this is the project I'm thinking of, I knew some of the researchers working on the project.
If I remember correctly, the key distinction between this technique and most bipedal walker-runner systems is that the control system is based on feedback mechanisms and first princicples. Most older systems have to place down one foot before picking up the other foot for balance, and if you push it or disrupt its stride in any way, it just fails.
This one is much more flexible. That's why it can run or change stride -- like you, it calculates the necessary adjustments real-time (albeit only in 2 dimensions). There's a video of the previous incarnation of this which shows one of the researchers coming up and shoving the robot as it's walking, and it just adjusts its stride the way a human would if it had been shoved when walking. Most systems (as I understand it) would have fallen down. If you look at a video, you can see that the speed and stride is changing as it runs as well.
Sorry I can't give better refs. :-)
And FB requires you to use your real name as well. Somehow it has failed to keep it from growing pretty big. The thing with nonymity (as opposed to anonymity): the normal social conventions keeping people from acting like total asshats actually work. If there are actual consequences for what you say, people are more likely to act responsibly. Now, there are obviously bad sides of nonymity; those same social conventions can have nasty side effects, and the consequences of saying something can often make someone not say something at all. But you have to choose one or the other -- have the good and bad effects of anonymity (freedom to express yourself because you know there won't be consequences; freedom to act like an asshat because you know there won't be consequences) or have the good and bad effects of nonymity (People are more well-behaved and polite, because they know there will be consequences; people can't share certain things because they know there will be consequences). Some communities choose anonymity; Google chose nonymity. You're free to make your own website if you wish.
No, but I saw it on the FB status updates of many of my friends.
Geography fail: Syria isn't in Africa.
Ah, fascinating sir. Thank you for that bit of insight.
[Emphasis mine]
I disagree with the logic Dawkins uses there. He's talking about measuring precision (getting the same result twice). But that won't tell you anything about accuracy (getting the "right answer"), and it also won't tell you anything about outliers. It may well be that most judges would be able to find the truth more reliably than most juries; but imagine the damage that a single "rogue judge" could do -- a judge with outrageous prejudices, or an axe to grind, or who was just a sadist. A bad jury will happen once and is then disbanded; judges stay a *long* time. And even apart from that, you'll rarely (at least in this context) get 12 people who together are as extreme as a single person. And that's not to mention the dangers of having a very self-selective, isolated profession like the judiciary drifting away from the moral or ethical sense of the rest of the culture (or failing to follow the culture, e.g., when it decides that hanging is not a reasonable punishment for petty theft).
It may be that democracy is a bad form of government; but so far it seems less bad than all the other forms of government we've tried.
Perhaps a better method would be to have the judges separately write down the verdict they would have given based on the evidence, before the jury reports; and then compare the results across the whole nation. I think it's true that the judiciary as a whole have a better understanding of the law, logic, and so on; it would be interesting to see the results.
And re the OJ Simpson trial: I think it likely that two juries would have come to the same verdict. From what I understand, what the defense showed was that the police framed OJ. You can indeed frame someone who is guilty, and when you catch them doing it, the only option is to let the guilty go free.
I think that some people need to make masks that look just like Kaprielian, and probably her boss, and some of the local senators, and get "caught" by some of these cameras doing something that results in automatic suspension of a license. Then we'll see how long the "It's just inconvenient" attitude lasts.
In Michigan several years ago they passed a law that allowed a policeman to cut up your driving license right in front of you if you were caught driving drunk. That law was struck down as being unconstitutional, because even though the cop was right there and could smell the alcohol on your breath and hear your slurred speech, a cop is not judge and jury; you still have a right to due process under the law. If that was unconstitutional, I can't see how this isn't as well.
I wouldn't call the Base rate fallacy basic numerical reasoning. I didn't learn about baysean probability until my senior year, and I didn't hear about the base rate fallacy until I was a researcher.
Maybe a better technique would be to say there's an "effective true positive accuracy", which varies depending on the circumstances. Maybe have it as a feature of the software, that you have to enter in certain settings (i.e., population of US 300m, number of suspects searching for: 1000), and then when you get a positive, under the match flag up the effective accuracy. (E.g., "Match! Effective accuracy: 2.3%, based on population of 300m and search space of 10000). That would make it clear to everyone operating it that even though you have a match, the person you're talking to is *potentially* a terrorist, but *probably not*.
Yeah, some kind of feedback is always necessary. I'd always thought that if a patent was invalidated, that the Patent Office should have to pay a fine of twice (or perhaps more) what they gained from granting the patent in the first place. Then there'd actually be some incentive to only grant patents that are unlikely to be overturned.
Or perhaps better yet, make it adversarial: If someone successfully invalidates a patent, the PO has to pay that person's court costs. Now there's actually a market for people to pro-actively look for bad patents to overturn.
If bad patents were less costly to overturn (or if the cost were born by the PO rather than the person being sued by the patent holder), then bad patents would be less valuable; and people wouldn't be flooding the patent office with patents, and the volume would go down, so they could actually have some chance of looking at the patents they have. Everyone wins. Except the patent trolls, that is.
It wasn't an ad hominem attack. It's about the "True Believer" nature I've seen in many people who work on microkernels (including Tanenbaum and some guys I've met working on L4). The main argument against microkernels is that most of the people trying to implement them are more interested in academic concepts, and are completely uninterested in actually making something that works well. Paging is basic operating system functionality. If you've had an OS for 20 years and have either been unable to implement paging, or didn't think that paging was an important capability to prioritize, then I think there's something wrong with your judgement.
Now someone else responded that Minix 1 and 2 were only meant to be teaching tools, and 3 is his first attempt at making something useful. Maybe there's something to that. If I were to write the post again, I probably wouldn't include that jibe.
OK, so what's this translator about and why does it make HURD so much awesomer? :-)
I did some research, and according to this article, although OSX does use Mach, it is nonetheless not a microkernel:
I made an assumption because GGP didn't explain himself. If he doesn't want people to misunderstand him then he needs to be more explicit.
In any case, I didn't tear the idea apart. I said that historically, the experience of people using microkernels has been (1) they're really slow, and (2) they're more complicated to program because of the isolation / message passing architectures, and thus more prone to bugs. I admitted that I didn't know anything about Hurd, but said that the burden of proof is on the Hurd community to show that these problems are no longer valid. That was an open invitation to Hurd supporters to bring out the facts and set me straight.
What I've gotten so far (including you) is mostly people saying that CPUs are so fast these days that the extra overhead doesn't matter. No explanation of how Hurd is technically better (other than "it's a microkernel"), no comparison of difficultly in design or programming in the full microkernel environment compared to a monolithic kernel like Linux or the *BSDs, and no real quantification of ways in which the extra overhead / complexity is worth the cost.
No, I haven't read the design docs. It's not my job to look at every half-baked idea out there to see if it's worth considering. And I've heard a lot of microkernel fanboi stuff in my time; I'm skeptical and a bit jaded wrt microkernels. If you and/or the Hurd community want Hurd to get more "buy-in" from the FLOSS community in general, you need to be better evangelists -- understand where the skeptics are coming from, and come armed with facts and arguments that are persuasive and attractive. "The architecture on which HURD is based is technically superior to Linux" is not an attractive or informative statement.
Why is it superior? Just because it's a microkernel?
Microkernels were the darling of OS research for almost the entirely of the 90's. But by the end of the 90's, most researchers had had enough. The alleged gains in configurability, reliability, security, and so on never materialized; but what never disappeared was the fact that they were stinking slow. Context switching is a fundamental limitation of such an architecture. And from what I've heard, a lot more complicated to program -- which leads to more programming errors and ugly performance hacks to compensate for any potential increase in reliability, security and so on they might have gained.
It's possible that Hurd has managed to overcome these limitations. But it has definitely earned its reputation of being slow and cumbersome; if that has changed, the burden of proof is on the Hurd community.
There are a few True Believers out there, still working on Hurd and Minix and L4 and the like, but they have yet to produce anything shown to be worth using.
I think the fact that Andrew Tanenbaum riduculed Linux in 1993 for being an "outdated architecture", when Minix just got paging working last year after 20 years of development, encapsulates my point completely.
If this guy has seriously worn a colander on his head whenever outside of his house for three years, I will totally support his right to wear a colander in his license photo.
But not, he's a big fat hypocrite.