We know the world can't sustain a population of seven billion people all living the all-electric 21st century Western lifestyle. The question is, do we aim to cut the population to about 2.5 - 3G and keep our gadgets -- or let it grow past 10G and become relegated to the level of subsistence farmers, scratching out a meagre living in the dirt?
I used to hear that sort of argument back in the '60s, when the world population had just hit 3 billion. We were supposed to be starving and choking to death on air pollution long before now.
Surprise: Air and water are far cleaner in the developed world now than then. Still plenty of food to go around, despite a 6B world population, etc.
It seems technology improves with time in other ways than just scale. Meanwhile, the populations of developed countries actually fall short of replacement - with the continued expansion only the result of immigration.
Now there will no doubt be a limit to how much the earth can support. (If nothing else, eventually there'd be no room to stand.) But the doomsayers' extrapolations have been laughably wrong, decade after decade, and the methodology of the current crop seems no better (in fact far worse) than those of previous decades.
So I think it's a bit premature to start talking about requiring 2/3 of the human race to be liquidated if the remainder are to have technology. (However, switching from technological farming to subsistence farming would be a very effective way to bring about such a die-back.)
Indeed. Even nuclear waste degrades with time. Heavy metals last forever.
(Or at least as long as the rest of the planet, or the continent the landfill is on. So don't give me the so-far unproven "proton decay" argument or talk about the landfill being recycled with the rest of the crust by geological plate subduction.)
= = = =
IMHO, though, a greater cost is the energy and waste from building the replacement computer. Do that half as often and you save a bunch of energy as well as cutting waste in half.
(It's a pity the people trying to kick carpools out of the diamond lane and reserve them for hybrids don't count the environmental and energy costs of building the hybrids and scrapping their corpses.)
In the US it's possible (for at least the major utilities and other large businesses) to tap your checking account with just your account number, bank routing number, and name.
While the article is indeed lacking technical details, the vague refrences to infringing on usage of voicemail and call-waiting really shows how desperate they are to crush vonage and anyone else in the VoIP services market. Features such as this are in use by every other telco, both small and large, on the planet.
This is why, IMHO, "emulating, on a computer and/or a computer network, a well-known process or business method" should not, in itself be patentable.
If there is something innovative about the WAY it is done there MIGHT be an invention. But just doing on a computer and/or a computer network what is done without one is "obvious to one versed in the art".
What if Office or IE or Lookout won't run under Secure Vista but Open Office and Firefox etc. will ?
We can all dream of that.
But I sincerely doubt that the government-mandated configurations will disable the basic Microsoft applications - at least until they decide, deliberately, to move to some other (and designated) toolset.
The text starts out making it sound like it's got a cluster of FPGAs, reconfigurable on the fly, for the bulk of its structure (or at least the data path).
But by the time they're done they could even be talking about the Siemens/Infineon TriCore (an embedded processor core with an feature-rich instruction set suitable for process control, serious crunch, or DSP).
For the vast majority of that fifteen thousand years you speak of, music wasn't a service that people (regular folk, that is) provided each other at all. For the lion's share of the first 14/15ths, nearly all music was for religious purposes, so at best it was a service by people for their gods, not for each other.
We have no clue of that whatsoever.
What we DO have for most of that time is the some buried artifacts and the speculations of anthropologists as to how they were used. Anthropologists tend to assign a religious meaning to anything they can't explain otherwise.
For much of the fraction where we DO have a historic record that record was written primarily by members of the ruling classes and/or the clergy.
And for the recent few centuries, where we have a more complete historical record, what do we see?
- Work songs.
- Sea Chanteys.
- Love songs.
- Drinking songs.
- Marching songs.
- Battle songs.
- Pro-establishment propaganda songs.
- Political protest and satire songs.
- Oral history (such as epic poetry and nursery rhymes) set to music.
- Teaching songs (lessons and mnemonics set to music).
- Herder and hunter self-entertainment songs.
- Lullabies.
I could go on for a while.
Even from the leading edge of recorded history we have minstrel figures like Orpheus and the "panpipes" of the fauns (indicating that herders were playing them even back then). And what religious-celebratory significance can you assign to Pythagoras' mathematical studies of stringed-instrument resonance and musical structure?
Meanwhile we have a sampling of religions and find that they run a gamut from using music in their celebrations to attempting to ban it altogether.
My take:
I'd bet that music is as old as language and may predate it. And that it's the "love song" that made it a pervasive characteristic of humans: Those who could make music had an easier time mating and raising children.
Sorry about the "adjective" part. (I started responding to one of the followup comments and pulled the "verbing an adjective" from there.)
"Open Source" is a noun phrase so verbing it is a proper construction of hacker slang. This seems appropriate, given that the whole open source movement was started by one or more of the original MIT Hackers. Since one of them coined it, and they habitually also used nouns as verbs (and vice-versa), they automatically coined the verb form simultaneously. This makes it proper even in Standard English.
Open source is not a verb, dammit. Try "Microsoft to make FoxFro open source" or something like that. Arrgh!
I was under the impression that verbing adjectives was a construction in mainstream American English that is recognized as legitimate even by academics. (Verbing nouns is a legitimate construction in hacker slang, but that's a separate issue.)
However, even if it wasn't, American English does NOT have a regulatory body. It is, and always has been, what the users make of it. Academics must continuously research and document its changes - rather than prescribing it (and using legal power to enforce it) ala the French Academy.
("Standard English", on the other hand, is a construction that an east-coast self-proclaimed elite attempted {with much success} to foist on the rest of the country via the {largely governmentally-supported} school systems, in order to establish their version of the language as that of a ruling class and marginalize the speakers of the other local dialects and pronunciation variants. Fortunately for midwesterners, the advent of broadcast radio led to the standardization of THEIR pronunciation variant by the budding broadcast industry, due to its understandability by the largest population of listeners.)
"Records never came with any such restrictions," I said. She replied, "Well they were supposed to, but we weren't able to enforce those licenses back then, and now we can"
And here you all thought that you owned all those 8 track tapes, when in fact you're just storing them for the company that made them.
I've seen some of my grandparents' early 45s and they did indeed have a label with a license printed on them. It said things like RCA owned the record and the music on it and all you had was a license to listen to it under certain terms yadda yadda.
(I think one of the terms was that it had to be a genuine RCA branded player, too. Shades of the CSS licensing scheme! Also mattress tags and video tape "FBI warnings".)
... let me go ahead and burst your bubble... MAC addresses are not globally unique. They only have to be unique within a lan segment -- with a wrinkle or two from other uses (licenses keys attached to MACs, DHCP, etc.)
MAC addresses were INTENDED to be globally unique - and properly assigned MAC addresses are.
They don't NEED to be more than "lan segment unique" because collisions can only occur on a LAN segment. This is inherent in the architecture of LAN segments. But the WHOLE POINT of assigning Mac addresses in a globally-unique manner is to allow any device to be plugged into any LAN seguent without having to change its MAC address to avoid a collision with some other device on that LAN segment.
Of course for WiFi a "LAN segment" is everybody within range of each other - which in principle is everybody, since there are no inherent boundaries (unless you count countries with incompatible channel allocations).
Every access point has a hardware address that never changes (unless the owner is a firmware-flashing geek) and is always broadcast, even if you turn off SSID broadcasts. If you have a powered-on wireless access point and they've scanned your area, your AP is in the database.
Sounds like a great way to find stolen Access Points, WiFi cards, laptops with built-in WiFi, and other such gear. B-)
How many petty thieves are going to re-flash the gear to change the MAC address? (And if they do it will still show up as MAC addresses appearing multiply in the maps and/or addresses outside the allocated ranges.)
(Our company had some APs stolen a while back. The IT guys did a little wardriving but didn't find them. We've upgraded since so it probably won't matter to us. But it could be really useful for people who had stuff stolen more recently.)
Then, introduce a retrovirus which the mosquitos can carry that will modify the whole of our population to protect us.
Causing autoimmune diseases among most of those bitten and not actually conferring the immunity to them.
The immune system generally avoids autoimmune disease by killing off self-reacting white cells shortly after birth. Changing a surface antigen of the post-infancy body or an internal protein (fragments of which are displayed on MHC proteins - which is what they're for), means the cell would be susceptible to attack by the immune system.
Meanwhile only the cells actually infected by the virus would be altered, leaving plenty of the old versions around to be infected by Malaria.
Finally: It's easy to use a virus to ADD something to SOME of the cells. It's really difficult to use one to REMOVE something or REPLACE IT COMPLETELY with a modified version.
If you make a better Malaria resistent bug, then only be the strongest strains of Malaria will survive.
It's not a matter of "stronger".
They changed the receptor that Malaria attacks. The parasite will have to change its corresponding attack mechanism to attack the modified receptor. This will make it less effective at attacking the original receptor.
If this is the same receptor that Malaria uses to infect humans, the allegedly "stronger" Malaria will be less effective at infecting humans and other animals, possibly unable to do so at all. Being able to infect mosquitoes OR mamals but NOT BOTH would break its life cycle.
If the parasite attacks receptors on its non-mosquito prey using a different mechanism you may still be ahead. Parasites capable of being spread by the GM mosquitoes would not be spread (or not be spread as effectively) by the unmodified ones, and vice-versa. (Even if the parasite produces both types of of the receptor-attacking mechanism it would likely produce less of each.)
Slashdot Mirror
We know the world can't sustain a population of seven billion people all living the all-electric 21st century Western lifestyle. The question is, do we aim to cut the population to about 2.5 - 3G and keep our gadgets -- or let it grow past 10G and become relegated to the level of subsistence farmers, scratching out a meagre living in the dirt?
I used to hear that sort of argument back in the '60s, when the world population had just hit 3 billion. We were supposed to be starving and choking to death on air pollution long before now.
Surprise: Air and water are far cleaner in the developed world now than then. Still plenty of food to go around, despite a 6B world population, etc.
It seems technology improves with time in other ways than just scale. Meanwhile, the populations of developed countries actually fall short of replacement - with the continued expansion only the result of immigration.
Now there will no doubt be a limit to how much the earth can support. (If nothing else, eventually there'd be no room to stand.) But the doomsayers' extrapolations have been laughably wrong, decade after decade, and the methodology of the current crop seems no better (in fact far worse) than those of previous decades.
So I think it's a bit premature to start talking about requiring 2/3 of the human race to be liquidated if the remainder are to have technology. (However, switching from technological farming to subsistence farming would be a very effective way to bring about such a die-back.)
... a landfill full of computers is very bad ...
Indeed. Even nuclear waste degrades with time. Heavy metals last forever.
(Or at least as long as the rest of the planet, or the continent the landfill is on. So don't give me the so-far unproven "proton decay" argument or talk about the landfill being recycled with the rest of the crust by geological plate subduction.)
= = = =
IMHO, though, a greater cost is the energy and waste from building the replacement computer. Do that half as often and you save a bunch of energy as well as cutting waste in half.
(It's a pity the people trying to kick carpools out of the diamond lane and reserve them for hybrids don't count the environmental and energy costs of building the hybrids and scrapping their corpses.)
1) You do not talk about computer security.
That's "security through obscurity" which has been shown to do more than buy you a (very) small amount of time, then fail catastriphically.
It appears you have a problem with LDS people based on your sig.
I don't read his sig that way. I read it as calling one or more presidents a moron.
In the US it's possible (for at least the major utilities and other large businesses) to tap your checking account with just your account number, bank routing number, and name.
While the article is indeed lacking technical details, the vague refrences to infringing on usage of voicemail and call-waiting really shows how desperate they are to crush vonage and anyone else in the VoIP services market. Features such as this are in use by every other telco, both small and large, on the planet.
This is why, IMHO, "emulating, on a computer and/or a computer network, a well-known process or business method" should not, in itself be patentable.
If there is something innovative about the WAY it is done there MIGHT be an invention. But just doing on a computer and/or a computer network what is done without one is "obvious to one versed in the art".
Move headquarters and all operations to Oregon (and/or any other states with no sales tax.)
B-)
They have. It's published here They also have guides for OSX and Solaris.
I said "So let's see if even the NSA can come up with a secure configuration for windows."
Those are the ALLEGEDLY secure configurations they came up with. Only time will tell if they are ACTUALLY secure. B-)
What if Office or IE or Lookout won't run under Secure Vista but Open Office and Firefox etc. will ?
We can all dream of that.
But I sincerely doubt that the government-mandated configurations will disable the basic Microsoft applications - at least until they decide, deliberately, to move to some other (and designated) toolset.
Within a week of the Mint putting a plastic stripe in money, there were guys in bars demonstrating how to take said stripe back out.
Which makes the money worthless - and refused the first time somebody looks for the stripe.
The trick is to figure out how to put the stripe INTO a counterfeit bill.
Now that Slashdot pointed it out, they will probably decide to "standardize" on Lunix.
The TFA says the "same idea may be applied to Unix and Windows Servers over time".
At the resolution of such press releases "Unix" would include Linux and OSX.
The AC speculates: ... they a) won't tell you what the settings are, ...
But the TFA says that one of the major points of the exercise is to give developers a common configuration to develop for and test against.
So they'll be telling all the developers - which means all the potential developers - which means everybody.
Cute idea. But the tinfoil brim got between the AC's eyes and the screen. B-)
So let's see if even the NSA can come up with a secure configuration for windows.
(Or at least one that's secure against everybody but the NSA. B-) )
And my bet is their solution will be DRM enhanced. Another little bit of lame.
More like a big hulking boulder of lame.
The text starts out making it sound like it's got a cluster of FPGAs, reconfigurable on the fly, for the bulk of its structure (or at least the data path).
But by the time they're done they could even be talking about the Siemens/Infineon TriCore (an embedded processor core with an feature-rich instruction set suitable for process control, serious crunch, or DSP).
For the vast majority of that fifteen thousand years you speak of, music wasn't a service that people (regular folk, that is) provided each other at all. For the lion's share of the first 14/15ths, nearly all music was for religious purposes, so at best it was a service by people for their gods, not for each other.
We have no clue of that whatsoever.
What we DO have for most of that time is the some buried artifacts and the speculations of anthropologists as to how they were used. Anthropologists tend to assign a religious meaning to anything they can't explain otherwise.
For much of the fraction where we DO have a historic record that record was written primarily by members of the ruling classes and/or the clergy.
And for the recent few centuries, where we have a more complete historical record, what do we see?
- Work songs.
- Sea Chanteys.
- Love songs.
- Drinking songs.
- Marching songs.
- Battle songs.
- Pro-establishment propaganda songs.
- Political protest and satire songs.
- Oral history (such as epic poetry and nursery rhymes) set to music.
- Teaching songs (lessons and mnemonics set to music).
- Herder and hunter self-entertainment songs.
- Lullabies.
I could go on for a while.
Even from the leading edge of recorded history we have minstrel figures like Orpheus and the "panpipes" of the fauns (indicating that herders were playing them even back then). And what religious-celebratory significance can you assign to Pythagoras' mathematical studies of stringed-instrument resonance and musical structure?
Meanwhile we have a sampling of religions and find that they run a gamut from using music in their celebrations to attempting to ban it altogether.
My take:
I'd bet that music is as old as language and may predate it. And that it's the "love song" that made it a pervasive characteristic of humans: Those who could make music had an easier time mating and raising children.
Sorry about the "adjective" part. (I started responding to one of the followup comments and pulled the "verbing an adjective" from there.)
"Open Source" is a noun phrase so verbing it is a proper construction of hacker slang. This seems appropriate, given that the whole open source movement was started by one or more of the original MIT Hackers. Since one of them coined it, and they habitually also used nouns as verbs (and vice-versa), they automatically coined the verb form simultaneously. This makes it proper even in Standard English.
Open source is not a verb, dammit. Try "Microsoft to make FoxFro open source" or something like that. Arrgh!
I was under the impression that verbing adjectives was a construction in mainstream American English that is recognized as legitimate even by academics. (Verbing nouns is a legitimate construction in hacker slang, but that's a separate issue.)
However, even if it wasn't, American English does NOT have a regulatory body. It is, and always has been, what the users make of it. Academics must continuously research and document its changes - rather than prescribing it (and using legal power to enforce it) ala the French Academy.
("Standard English", on the other hand, is a construction that an east-coast self-proclaimed elite attempted {with much success} to foist on the rest of the country via the {largely governmentally-supported} school systems, in order to establish their version of the language as that of a ruling class and marginalize the speakers of the other local dialects and pronunciation variants. Fortunately for midwesterners, the advent of broadcast radio led to the standardization of THEIR pronunciation variant by the budding broadcast industry, due to its understandability by the largest population of listeners.)
"Records never came with any such restrictions," I said. She replied, "Well they were supposed to, but we weren't able to enforce those licenses back then, and now we can"
And here you all thought that you owned all those 8 track tapes, when in fact you're just storing them for the company that made them.
I've seen some of my grandparents' early 45s and they did indeed have a label with a license printed on them. It said things like RCA owned the record and the music on it and all you had was a license to listen to it under certain terms yadda yadda.
(I think one of the terms was that it had to be a genuine RCA branded player, too. Shades of the CSS licensing scheme! Also mattress tags and video tape "FBI warnings".)
... let me go ahead and burst your bubble... MAC addresses are not globally unique. They only have to be unique within a lan segment -- with a wrinkle or two from other uses (licenses keys attached to MACs, DHCP, etc.)
MAC addresses were INTENDED to be globally unique - and properly assigned MAC addresses are.
They don't NEED to be more than "lan segment unique" because collisions can only occur on a LAN segment. This is inherent in the architecture of LAN segments. But the WHOLE POINT of assigning Mac addresses in a globally-unique manner is to allow any device to be plugged into any LAN seguent without having to change its MAC address to avoid a collision with some other device on that LAN segment.
Of course for WiFi a "LAN segment" is everybody within range of each other - which in principle is everybody, since there are no inherent boundaries (unless you count countries with incompatible channel allocations).
WiFi is one big "global village LAN".
Every access point has a hardware address that never changes (unless the owner is a firmware-flashing geek) and is always broadcast, even if you turn off SSID broadcasts. If you have a powered-on wireless access point and they've scanned your area, your AP is in the database.
Sounds like a great way to find stolen Access Points, WiFi cards, laptops with built-in WiFi, and other such gear. B-)
How many petty thieves are going to re-flash the gear to change the MAC address? (And if they do it will still show up as MAC addresses appearing multiply in the maps and/or addresses outside the allocated ranges.)
(Our company had some APs stolen a while back. The IT guys did a little wardriving but didn't find them. We've upgraded since so it probably won't matter to us. But it could be really useful for people who had stuff stolen more recently.)
Then, introduce a retrovirus which the mosquitos can carry that will modify the whole of our population to protect us.
Causing autoimmune diseases among most of those bitten and not actually conferring the immunity to them.
The immune system generally avoids autoimmune disease by killing off self-reacting white cells shortly after birth. Changing a surface antigen of the post-infancy body or an internal protein (fragments of which are displayed on MHC proteins - which is what they're for), means the cell would be susceptible to attack by the immune system.
Meanwhile only the cells actually infected by the virus would be altered, leaving plenty of the old versions around to be infected by Malaria.
Finally: It's easy to use a virus to ADD something to SOME of the cells. It's really difficult to use one to REMOVE something or REPLACE IT COMPLETELY with a modified version.
If you make a better Malaria resistent bug, then only be the strongest strains of Malaria will survive.
It's not a matter of "stronger".
They changed the receptor that Malaria attacks. The parasite will have to change its corresponding attack mechanism to attack the modified receptor. This will make it less effective at attacking the original receptor.
If this is the same receptor that Malaria uses to infect humans, the allegedly "stronger" Malaria will be less effective at infecting humans and other animals, possibly unable to do so at all. Being able to infect mosquitoes OR mamals but NOT BOTH would break its life cycle.
If the parasite attacks receptors on its non-mosquito prey using a different mechanism you may still be ahead. Parasites capable of being spread by the GM mosquitoes would not be spread (or not be spread as effectively) by the unmodified ones, and vice-versa. (Even if the parasite produces both types of of the receptor-attacking mechanism it would likely produce less of each.)
The people developing these mosquitos need to prove that it will not have any negative side effects on the ecosystem.
A convenient assertion. Such a proof can't be done. Therefore, accepting it means believing no GM organisms should ever be released.
I have the feeling that we should not attempt this kind of solution.
See?
Doesn't this scare anyone else? The GM version...is outbreeding the non-GM version, why?
Because it's resistant to malaria, which weakens infected mosquitoes and reduces their number of eggs.
It doesn't outbreed unmodified mosquitoes except in the presence of the malaria parasite.