Once again I find the summary lacking. I had to read TFA to find the actual link to his twitter: http://twitter.com/stevebmicrosoft. There really isn't much there.. which explains why: a) he didn't announce it, and b) why we shouldn't care. Which of course leads to: c) why is this on slashdot?
To keep the diversity up. After this, a Linux story, then five Google and fifteen Apple stories.
No. Pressing Enter was pointless, and clicking through to the page was pointless. Obviously, if I'm taking the trouble to go to a search engine and type in words, I want to search for them. It's idiotic to have to tell the machine that. Likewise, I don't care about the links, I want the page itself, so it makes sense to pull it up right away.
The whole point of having a machine is to automate repetitive tasks, and that's what Google is doing here.
Having read the article, the author was irritated that some listings on craigslist got deleted, thought that it was unfair, and spun that into speculation about how moderation through the crowd might encode some prejudices in some way that he hasn't really thought through.
As an iOS developer - I kind of agree with Apple. I write apps which register URL handlers - and when one clicks on on - I make the *user* validate that this is what they really want to do.
Another way of looking at it: if you've got an app that accepts an URL handler, do you want a braindead OS policy of asking the user for permission every time? Especially when the OS would likely have to ask, "do you wish to open foobar://1233453987039 with Metapie?"
The only way to avoid that would be for the app to register an URL evaluator and an URL security policy, at which point you may as well just have the app make the decision. It doesn't make any sense for this to be handled at the OS level.
Commercial activity doesn't have anything to do with it. The copyright law does not say "except for personal use". It applies regardless of personal or commercial use. If you believe that the copyright law has an exemption for personal use, please show me where it is.
Item 1 from Section 107 explains that a factor of "fair use" is the "purpose and character" of the use, whether it's commercial or not. So it's not an explicit exemption, but you have more of a case to crib something if you're not making money.
Maybe this is covered in the video, but it's a small miracle that I can get a connection out here at all...
But the reality is that most people's systems are compromised already. If we have online voting, the same guys that set up botnets with thousands of systems will have a field day stealing votes.
I don't see how you can do voting online as long as so many clients are hopelessly compromised.
This was the most expensive midterm election cycle ever, even adjusting for inflation. And you can bet grandma wasn't the one forking over the dough. The corporate paymasters are going to be expecting(and almost certainly will get) a huge ROI for their investments.
Visual programming isn't big for the same reason people talk and not use drawings to communicate in day to day life. A decent well explained and understood language is faster, universal and more convenient. Drawings are used in situations where you can't communicate true a spoken or written language.
My first thought was, "hold on, what about Powerpoint?" but then I realized that just proved your point.
Very interesting... After I read the trusting trust paper, I figured the only counter was a clean-room bootstrapping. But if I understand it correctly, DDC is something a motivated hacker could manage.
I suspect the OpenBSD guys are going to love this.
Thanks for digging. It really is amazing how consistently a scientific result is reported as X, and somewhere in a section specifically intended for laymen there clearly says, "We're not claiming X."
But a huge number of systems will fail when the emergency controls are initiated. For instance, all the GPS apps on cellphones will fail without data. And you didn't mention HTTP, and I imagine you know that trying to limit HTTP would bring down virtually the entire web.
As a result, the emergency controls become a big fat target for an attack. You would actually be creating a far worse opportunity for a cyber attack than without any emergency controls at all!
Honestly, in the *worst* case scenario, major servers go offline due to cyber attack and we have to install patches by CDs. We could manage that with far less pain than any kill switch would cause, and certainly with far less expense.
It's not likely our government would abuse it since, really, there's no better signal for gun owners to lock and load like suddenly cutting off the Internet.
It's more that it's a monumentally stupid thing to do. Hey, we're afraid that the Internet will be attacked! Let's put a handful of switches in place that can completely shut it down! But we'll get our very best people to make it totally secure! Aww, they need clearance, okay, our second best people! Aww, a lower bid came in, okay, our third best...
I can imagine how one might try to implement such a thing, but you could do it any number of different ways. I'm pretty sure you're not just going to throw a switch and cut off the power to a bunch of backbone routers. They can't be that dumb, can they?
As I understand, it was originally going to be called a "big honking metal plate" to "bolt on haphazardly", but somehow weaving fabric made marketing happier. Go figure.
Err...exactly why is there a choice to vote in Spanish or English?
I mean...is it not a requirement for those coming to this country, to attain citizenship to show on the exams, a proficiency in English??
And you do have to be a citizen of the US in order to vote, don't you?
The US is unique in that a woman can come here as a tourist, bear a child, and then take the child back to her country. Even if the child never sets foot in the US, he or she is a full US citizen with all the privileges and (theoretically) the responsibilities.
It seems like if gravity affects the time traveler, so should all the other forces. Isn't the end result of what you're saying that the time traveler doesn't travel through time, but merely has a change of consciousness? His body would decay, all the normal changes over time would happen, it would just seem faster, like he had slept through life?
Say in the normal case we travel through time at some constant velocity X along the time vector. (I think X is actually c - the sum of spatial vectors?) So I figured that if our time traveler is travelling quickly through time, there'd be much less of an effect. If you were moving at 10 times the normal time vector, you could go forward 10 years and only age a year; the whole time you'd see the outside world moving at high speed. Incidentally, I *think* gravity would only have 1/10th the effect, but not sure at all on that one.
If, OTOH, you used the instantaneous (or near-instantaneous) model of time travel, where you send a leader through first, you wouldn't have that issue. The leader would experience the full time traveled, but when it reached its destination it would pull you through at a high temporal velocity through a (hopefully) survivable route.
Under that model, to go back a significant way in time, you'd shoot drones through and see what happened to them, much like Stargate. But if they had to travel back through normal time, you'd be limited by how many you could bring with you and the wear and tear of floating around for years and years.
Otherwise, if his physical body is somehow immune to everything, and doesn't age as he travels, why does gravity affect it? If a chair is moved into his gravity-path as he travels, does he bump it? Does the chair's gravity affect him?
Using the slow model of time travel, I think if something ran into you, it would affect you. You might want a proper vehicle for protection, and it might make more sense to stay in orbit. You would also run the risk of being seen; going backwards would make it very difficult to avoid changing the timeline by being spotted.
Strictly, it's flight distance, but I've always heard pilots talk about flight time since most flying is at cruising speed and consumes a relatively constant amount of fuel. A bee is probably measuring blood sugar. Either way, they still get to choose their route and that's not in the TSP description.
And heuristics (whether biological or not) produce non-optimal solutions, so they don't count. Non-optimal, even close to optimal, simply isn't allowed in the problem specs. It's extremely useful to rewrite TSP as TSP' to allow heuristic solutions, but TSP' is fundamentally different from TSP as it's not an NP-complete problem any more.
That's another reason to be cautiously skeptical of this article: if a bee can really find *optimal* solutions, we need to start taking their brains apart because solving an NP-complete problem so quickly would be a total revolution in computer science. We don't know that it can't be done, but we've certainly had no luck so far.
And if you really want to look at what the bees are doing, they have to account for flowers with more or less nectar, and they're considering energy spent flying rather than simple distance, so their problem is: given this budget of energy, and this list of known routes and amounts of nectar, construct a sortie that will find the most nectar possible. That's sounding less and less like the TSP.
If you travel back in time to the exact same spot, just in a different time, then (unless you're REALLY precise on the exact time of day and year), you'll most likely end up floating in space. People who make time travel movies don't seem to realize that the earth moves around its axis and around the sun. The spot I'm standing on right now will be vaccum in just a few minutes.
If Marty had went back to a different time of year without a space suit, Biff would have been the least of his worries.
Just because you're moving through time, there's no reason why you shouldn't be affected by gravity. As you go back through the years, you'd continually be pulled to the Earth's surface.
Now, instantaneous time travel wouldn't have that advantage, but then that's the same problem as a transporter trying to move someone from a planet's surface directly into a ship in orbit.
But an instantaneous time travelling device might send out a "leader", the way lightning does before it strikes, and the actual travel happens in the return stroke; that leader could be an entity affected by gravity. So that could explain how the device stays in the same gravity well, and roughly on the same location.
Is it possible that the honey bees aren't really solving the Traveling Salesmen problem at all, but rather employ some sort of unknown heuristic that leads to solutions that's close enough to optimal for it to look like that they've solved it?
This article is fundamentally misstating the TSP. If it were the TSP, the bees wouldn't get to choose their route.
As other bees come in and report their route taken and pollen collected, another bee will put bits of those routes together. (Which would be the surprisingly difficult part to me, since the bees are doing some pretty complicated vector algebra.) But a bee is going to have a budget of so much daylight and will attempt to maximize the amount of nectar it collects in that time, given the bits of routes collected by other bees and its own scouting. But it's not given a list of points it has to hit, it picks its list from a larger list of points. That's fundamentally different from the TSP, even solving it by heuristic.
Finally, who wants to compare their code reuse to a crappy junk food chain? I'd rather think of myself as a professional that earns commensurate pay than a junk food server who needs to be trained to ask "would you like fries with that?".
TFA has it backwards; the whole point of UNIX utilities is that there are thousands of them, not a handful.
If you just combine just a few primitive operations you get something like LISP, a wonderful thing to be sure, but it's the opposite of what the article is advocating.
I'll give you another reason why diesels are nice: they don't quit. I was driving a rather large truck when (thanks to an idiot mechanic) an electrical problem caused a fire in the engine compartment. As various wires burned through, one by one everything died but the engine kept going; pretty much the only way to kill a diesel is to flood it with water.
The reason I think diesels haven't caught on in passenger cars is that while swapping out a petrol engine for a diesel one will improve your score on road tests, it will be underpowered. So you adjust the gear ratios down to maintain acceleration, and now you're revving higher at cruising speed... end result, for real driving, the diesel isn't doing much better than the petrol, and it's more dangerous with tricky merges / passing. Obviously, for some countries where there's a high density of slower moving traffic they might make more sense.
So back in the days of cassettes and VHS, everyone could share their entire music / video collection with anyone else in the world, more or less instantly, and there was no degradation in quality?
Slashdot Mirror
Once again I find the summary lacking. I had to read TFA to find the actual link to his twitter: http://twitter.com/stevebmicrosoft. There really isn't much there.. which explains why: a) he didn't announce it, and b) why we shouldn't care. Which of course leads to: c) why is this on slashdot?
To keep the diversity up. After this, a Linux story, then five Google and fifteen Apple stories.
"First, pressing Enter was too much work..."
No. Pressing Enter was pointless, and clicking through to the page was pointless. Obviously, if I'm taking the trouble to go to a search engine and type in words, I want to search for them. It's idiotic to have to tell the machine that. Likewise, I don't care about the links, I want the page itself, so it makes sense to pull it up right away.
The whole point of having a machine is to automate repetitive tasks, and that's what Google is doing here.
...not having RTFA, that the article is bogus.
Who's with me?
Having read the article, the author was irritated that some listings on craigslist got deleted, thought that it was unfair, and spun that into speculation about how moderation through the crowd might encode some prejudices in some way that he hasn't really thought through.
So, it's not bogus so much as half-baked.
As an iOS developer - I kind of agree with Apple. I write apps which register URL handlers - and when one clicks on on - I make the *user* validate that this is what they really want to do.
Another way of looking at it: if you've got an app that accepts an URL handler, do you want a braindead OS policy of asking the user for permission every time? Especially when the OS would likely have to ask, "do you wish to open foobar://1233453987039 with Metapie?"
The only way to avoid that would be for the app to register an URL evaluator and an URL security policy, at which point you may as well just have the app make the decision. It doesn't make any sense for this to be handled at the OS level.
Commercial activity doesn't have anything to do with it. The copyright law does not say "except for personal use". It applies regardless of personal or commercial use. If you believe that the copyright law has an exemption for personal use, please show me where it is.
Item 1 from Section 107 explains that a factor of "fair use" is the "purpose and character" of the use, whether it's commercial or not. So it's not an explicit exemption, but you have more of a case to crib something if you're not making money.
If things get so bad that Switzerland is getting nuked, then my data will be one of the least of my worries.
If a nuclear war has you stuck in a bunker for ten years, you're going to want your porn stash.
Maybe this is covered in the video, but it's a small miracle that I can get a connection out here at all...
But the reality is that most people's systems are compromised already. If we have online voting, the same guys that set up botnets with thousands of systems will have a field day stealing votes.
I don't see how you can do voting online as long as so many clients are hopelessly compromised.
this one cost 25% more than 2006
We all know that a highly contested midterm election is going to be expensive, that's not in contention.
You're claiming that it's being bankrolled by "corporate paymasters" who will get a "huge ROI." Evidence, please.
This was the most expensive midterm election cycle ever, even adjusting for inflation. And you can bet grandma wasn't the one forking over the dough. The corporate paymasters are going to be expecting(and almost certainly will get) a huge ROI for their investments.
Evidence, please.
Visual programming isn't big for the same reason people talk and not use drawings to communicate in day to day life. A decent well explained and understood language is faster, universal and more convenient. Drawings are used in situations where you can't communicate true a spoken or written language.
My first thought was, "hold on, what about Powerpoint?" but then I realized that just proved your point.
Very interesting... After I read the trusting trust paper, I figured the only counter was a clean-room bootstrapping. But if I understand it correctly, DDC is something a motivated hacker could manage.
I suspect the OpenBSD guys are going to love this.
Thanks for digging. It really is amazing how consistently a scientific result is reported as X, and somewhere in a section specifically intended for laymen there clearly says, "We're not claiming X."
But a huge number of systems will fail when the emergency controls are initiated. For instance, all the GPS apps on cellphones will fail without data. And you didn't mention HTTP, and I imagine you know that trying to limit HTTP would bring down virtually the entire web.
As a result, the emergency controls become a big fat target for an attack. You would actually be creating a far worse opportunity for a cyber attack than without any emergency controls at all!
Honestly, in the *worst* case scenario, major servers go offline due to cyber attack and we have to install patches by CDs. We could manage that with far less pain than any kill switch would cause, and certainly with far less expense.
This would never be abused, would it?
It's not likely our government would abuse it since, really, there's no better signal for gun owners to lock and load like suddenly cutting off the Internet.
It's more that it's a monumentally stupid thing to do. Hey, we're afraid that the Internet will be attacked! Let's put a handful of switches in place that can completely shut it down! But we'll get our very best people to make it totally secure! Aww, they need clearance, okay, our second best people! Aww, a lower bid came in, okay, our third best...
I'm certainly not aware of what a killswitch is.
I can imagine how one might try to implement such a thing, but you could do it any number of different ways. I'm pretty sure you're not just going to throw a switch and cut off the power to a bunch of backbone routers. They can't be that dumb, can they?
As I understand, it was originally going to be called a "big honking metal plate" to "bolt on haphazardly", but somehow weaving fabric made marketing happier. Go figure.
So this is the developer's version of SELinux.
Err...exactly why is there a choice to vote in Spanish or English?
I mean...is it not a requirement for those coming to this country, to attain citizenship to show on the exams, a proficiency in English??
And you do have to be a citizen of the US in order to vote, don't you?
The US is unique in that a woman can come here as a tourist, bear a child, and then take the child back to her country. Even if the child never sets foot in the US, he or she is a full US citizen with all the privileges and (theoretically) the responsibilities.
It seems like if gravity affects the time traveler, so should all the other forces. Isn't the end result of what you're saying that the time traveler doesn't travel through time, but merely has a change of consciousness? His body would decay, all the normal changes over time would happen, it would just seem faster, like he had slept through life?
Say in the normal case we travel through time at some constant velocity X along the time vector. (I think X is actually c - the sum of spatial vectors?) So I figured that if our time traveler is travelling quickly through time, there'd be much less of an effect. If you were moving at 10 times the normal time vector, you could go forward 10 years and only age a year; the whole time you'd see the outside world moving at high speed. Incidentally, I *think* gravity would only have 1/10th the effect, but not sure at all on that one.
If, OTOH, you used the instantaneous (or near-instantaneous) model of time travel, where you send a leader through first, you wouldn't have that issue. The leader would experience the full time traveled, but when it reached its destination it would pull you through at a high temporal velocity through a (hopefully) survivable route.
Under that model, to go back a significant way in time, you'd shoot drones through and see what happened to them, much like Stargate. But if they had to travel back through normal time, you'd be limited by how many you could bring with you and the wear and tear of floating around for years and years.
Otherwise, if his physical body is somehow immune to everything, and doesn't age as he travels, why does gravity affect it? If a chair is moved into his gravity-path as he travels, does he bump it? Does the chair's gravity affect him?
Using the slow model of time travel, I think if something ran into you, it would affect you. You might want a proper vehicle for protection, and it might make more sense to stay in orbit. You would also run the risk of being seen; going backwards would make it very difficult to avoid changing the timeline by being spotted.
Strictly, it's flight distance, but I've always heard pilots talk about flight time since most flying is at cruising speed and consumes a relatively constant amount of fuel. A bee is probably measuring blood sugar. Either way, they still get to choose their route and that's not in the TSP description.
And heuristics (whether biological or not) produce non-optimal solutions, so they don't count. Non-optimal, even close to optimal, simply isn't allowed in the problem specs. It's extremely useful to rewrite TSP as TSP' to allow heuristic solutions, but TSP' is fundamentally different from TSP as it's not an NP-complete problem any more.
That's another reason to be cautiously skeptical of this article: if a bee can really find *optimal* solutions, we need to start taking their brains apart because solving an NP-complete problem so quickly would be a total revolution in computer science. We don't know that it can't be done, but we've certainly had no luck so far.
And if you really want to look at what the bees are doing, they have to account for flowers with more or less nectar, and they're considering energy spent flying rather than simple distance, so their problem is: given this budget of energy, and this list of known routes and amounts of nectar, construct a sortie that will find the most nectar possible. That's sounding less and less like the TSP.
If you travel back in time to the exact same spot, just in a different time, then (unless you're REALLY precise on the exact time of day and year), you'll most likely end up floating in space. People who make time travel movies don't seem to realize that the earth moves around its axis and around the sun. The spot I'm standing on right now will be vaccum in just a few minutes.
If Marty had went back to a different time of year without a space suit, Biff would have been the least of his worries.
Just because you're moving through time, there's no reason why you shouldn't be affected by gravity. As you go back through the years, you'd continually be pulled to the Earth's surface.
Now, instantaneous time travel wouldn't have that advantage, but then that's the same problem as a transporter trying to move someone from a planet's surface directly into a ship in orbit.
But an instantaneous time travelling device might send out a "leader", the way lightning does before it strikes, and the actual travel happens in the return stroke; that leader could be an entity affected by gravity. So that could explain how the device stays in the same gravity well, and roughly on the same location.
Is it possible that the honey bees aren't really solving the Traveling Salesmen problem at all, but rather employ some sort of unknown heuristic that leads to solutions that's close enough to optimal for it to look like that they've solved it?
This article is fundamentally misstating the TSP. If it were the TSP, the bees wouldn't get to choose their route.
As other bees come in and report their route taken and pollen collected, another bee will put bits of those routes together. (Which would be the surprisingly difficult part to me, since the bees are doing some pretty complicated vector algebra.) But a bee is going to have a budget of so much daylight and will attempt to maximize the amount of nectar it collects in that time, given the bits of routes collected by other bees and its own scouting. But it's not given a list of points it has to hit, it picks its list from a larger list of points. That's fundamentally different from the TSP, even solving it by heuristic.
Finally, who wants to compare their code reuse to a crappy junk food chain? I'd rather think of myself as a professional that earns commensurate pay than a junk food server who needs to be trained to ask "would you like fries with that?".
TFA has it backwards; the whole point of UNIX utilities is that there are thousands of them, not a handful.
If you just combine just a few primitive operations you get something like LISP, a wonderful thing to be sure, but it's the opposite of what the article is advocating.
I'll give you another reason why diesels are nice: they don't quit. I was driving a rather large truck when (thanks to an idiot mechanic) an electrical problem caused a fire in the engine compartment. As various wires burned through, one by one everything died but the engine kept going; pretty much the only way to kill a diesel is to flood it with water.
The reason I think diesels haven't caught on in passenger cars is that while swapping out a petrol engine for a diesel one will improve your score on road tests, it will be underpowered. So you adjust the gear ratios down to maintain acceleration, and now you're revving higher at cruising speed... end result, for real driving, the diesel isn't doing much better than the petrol, and it's more dangerous with tricky merges / passing. Obviously, for some countries where there's a high density of slower moving traffic they might make more sense.
So back in the days of cassettes and VHS, everyone could share their entire music / video collection with anyone else in the world, more or less instantly, and there was no degradation in quality?