I'm sorry, but I think your parent is exactly correct. You try to argue from a theoretical point of view where computer scientists are equal to mathematicians. Maybe proving an algorithm is the right thing to do for small isolated cases of important code.
But computer scientists are NOT mathematicians. There is a reason that they're called _computer_ scientists.
CS today also contains elements of art and architecture. Sure, there is still mathematics and, sure it's still the most important part of it.
You can say similar things about experimental physics, for example. An experimental physicist is as much mathematician as he is computer scientist as he is electrical engineer as he is technician!
Do you really think an EE proves every circuit he/she designs correct?! Often enough, he'll design a circuit a certain way because -*gasp*- it looks nicer to him! That's the art part of EE:-)
Yes, some companies are evil, but put yourself in their shoes sometimes. That sounds like you want to see a company as a person, what it isn't.
Although I also personally don't like people who always complain about this and that (which IMHO isn't the case here), I think I can't in any case have sympathy with an entity that is only there to produces things in the most efficient way.
So redistribution for no profit, no matter at what scale it occurs, should be legal? What if this means that a large studio (that can afford the bandwidth) could just host a copy of any indie film so that the makers see no profit? I doubt that the large studio with that much bandwidth to spare would still exist in such a situation! And that, IMHO, would even be a good thing.
The more I think about this hypothetical case, the more ridiculous it seems. NO, I don't think such a situation would hurt independent artists.
One the stupidest arguments I've heard against creationism is that "Hitler used natural selection and darwinism to justify the holocaust, therefore anyone who believes in Evolution is a Nazi" or something stupid to that effect. Evolution is not a moral doctrine and doesn't profess to be so. Anyone who tries to make it so, is boneheaded. People have done some awful things in the name of Christianity. So is it ok to go ahead and label all Christians as Bad People?
VERY true. But also consider that many scientists form their opinion by taking their data and theories as literally 'the truth' - ignoring the fact that science is part of philosophy and not the other way around. By adding some human feelings (e.g. fear), you can easily get to these weird opinions.
A scientist who says that evolution is a well-checked theory is doing the right thing.
A scientist who says that a well-checked theory should be translated to other areas just because (social darwinism vs. the finding that there exists this concept of darwinism in nature), can be dangerous!
However, there's another unspoken law of science that's emerged: "All things have natural explanations." Whenever scientists encounter a new phenomenon, they assume that it has a natural explanation (i.e. one susceptible to analysis) and then go about finding it. I'm just thinking about this one. You could see it as a "meta-theory" about scientific findings and not an additional axiom of science. I.e. all findings so far have been natural -> to falsify, find the ghost:-)
Files aren't water marked for my protection, DRM isn't about my "security", and "Trusted Computing" is about the opposite of trust. Everybody knows it, why can't they just say it? To point out the obvious: not everybody knows it, too much people are manipulable i.e. stupid and/or uncritical.
You should be able to see it as a object not to fly into at daylight, and at night you could switch on some of those simple red slowly-blinking lights. Wouldn't that be sufficient? Both sides would be pleased.
Not that I'm against radio towers, I have a ham radio license...:)
This may be true - but you have to admit that there are probably people in your statistic who still have objections against the sign and are glad about it being removed. So, don't oversimplify things:-)
Still, I would differentiate between microwave photons and optical photons here. You can have similar effects with microwaves, you can even have 'optical' excitation by microwaves, for example rotational modes in the micro-evolt range. Two or more GHZ photons can surely have a combined effect. And, at the same power levels, microwave photon density is vastly bigger than optical photon density, of course (although if you look at biological effects, you have to take into account surface absorption etc.) - so this would also make these transitions more probable. Heck, you can even generate hard X-rays by microwave radiation, the simplest example is putting a vacuum tube into your microwave oven, or generating very nasty flying things from optical photons with those new tabletop laser particle accelerators:-)
But IMHO, that's not the point nor the question.
The question is whether the excitation of modes which can easily be excited thermally can have any effect on humans at all. There are some statistics which suggest eye damage by overheating. This has to be closely monitored, of course.
But I still doubt that there is signficant non-thermal influence on chemical reactions by certain 'matching' microwave photons, the only other reasonable cause of adverse effects. AFAIK all the studies in this area are at least highly disputed.
... the interaction cross section gives the statistics to tell you how common that particular reaction is... Absolutely true, but if you consider for example a spectral line in the THz range (where physicist start to speak of ionization to occur) as a gaussian (it is a lorentzian in most cases, but this doesn't matter much here) with a sigma of at most a few GHz and now go to microwaves in the GHz range, a difference of thousands of sigmas. Now, look at your gauss and you'll see that you can really say that it is indeed, with the best floating point precision your computer or calculator supports, zero there! I bet that the probability a "microwave ionization" occured in any man or woman that has lived or lives on earth is smaller than 50%:-)
Although I can't say that I have taken classes in philosophy and although my knowledge in these matters is only marginal, I have to say that you're absolutely right!
Your post is really insightful, even funny:-) But instead of moderating, I have to point out one assumption you make: That there exists an entity called "universe" outside of yourself, independently of your existance.
For many, this philosophical premise is clear, although for me it is not. I generally tend to think like you, though.
But what exactly defines oneself is another question that leads to another heap of questions...:-)
Personally, I think the whole way init works needs to be revisted - it would be better if you could start all the init processes at once, with each having its standard input, output, and error going into init. If startup script FOO requires service BAR to be active before it proceeds, then BAR ought to provide a means for FOO to check if BAR is ready (and block if not). Good idea, but the only thing you'd get is close to 100% CPU usage upon startup and a startup that is at most that much faster (i.e. by the amount of CPU time wasted before). Processes which block because of I/O (disk usage, DNS queries etc.) don't block the queue of the init process.
I don't know the CPU utilization during startup though, and I think it has to be measured on all kinds of different systems to have some data - maybe it's not worth the effort:-)
As long as you have the kernel headers available (and the GPLed source of the driver, of course:), you can compile a loadable driver module without touching any other part of the kernel.
Debian with it's separate kernel-image/kernel-headers packages shows nicely how the problem can be solved. I run several systems with additional hardware and drivers but a stock debian kernel.
Heh, funny. The title pages features the ship cruising through the kiel canal near my home city, Kiel Germany. Apparently the ship was built here. In fact, the part of the canal shown here is next to an old bridge (Brücke Levensau) across the canal (the picture is taken from the bridge, I suppose). I very often drive the hill at the waterside behind the ship down with my bicycle. The location is only a few km (max. 2) from my home, so it was VERY funny and astonishing to see that on slashdot:-) OTOH, Mr. Allen seems to have WAY too much money...
These are the reasons that I doubt if it is neccessary to have patents *at all*. Of course, I would be very happy if swpats are abandoned!
But I'd like to have a clear and independent study that shows that patents as a whole have a positive effect on innovation. IMHO, somehow it got implanted into our minds that having bright ideas needs monetary incentive. I fail to see how one can prove *THAT*. Granted, the _implementation_ of bright ideas needs EUREUREUR. But the idea itself?
I now ran several times into the problem of sites which do not respond correctly (or at all) with fragmentation requests, see for example IP-Masq-HOWTO. Its a very similar problem and causes some websites/tcp connections to hang without any apparent reason. Why the hell can't they configure this properly? It is not like that an immediate DOS attack results from sending back fragmentation requests...
To start the typical/. rant::-) IMHO it is neccessary to have some kind of "RAW IP" consumer label which would guarantee that: 1. my or my peers packets are not blocked willingly (no port filtering etc.)
2. my packets are not traffic shaped, at least not in other ways than I specify by setting TOS fields. I'm not arguing about the possibility of different TOS due to different prices, but rather a telephone/ISP combination slowing down my VoIP traffic to the competition. General disparity in handling traffic should be marked as such, though!
3. DNS and all other provided 'additional' services (eMail accounts etc.) follow all RFCs and other standards (i.e. this TTL problem).
Of course, such a label could come in different forms (for example for people really wanting to have a firewall which blocks traffic for them).
But one needs to be informed to make the decision for the right ISP. The current situation is rather intransparent and it steadily gets worse. And websites deserve a similar label too. There are "HTML x/y compliant" stickers on some sites, but they are rare and this should be only the beginning. I'm still not really sure about who would own these labels (if at all), though.
Some probably say that black/white good/evil issues are discussed by slashbots here. But as a european, I am really interested in these posts.
I still haven't figured out what exactly makes up the typical 'US libertarian'. Sometimes, a/. libertarian sounds like being a rational, somewhat technocratic, sometimes even somewhat socialistic liberal. Sometimes the social darwinist hardliners, against any state-regulation of corporations but pro-death-penalty show up here (obviously I do not agree with them, but that's not the point:) Being 'libertarian' is much more about the personal opinion than belonging to the libertarian party, isn't it? Else, I would not understand how such diametrical political views match.
Firstly you need the 70m dishes of the DSN to communicate with the Voyagers at the current distances. Ok, but maybe this one can be solved? RX: I'm thinking of synchronizing several hundred amateur receivers and then combining all the data, getting a good-enough SnR. I haven't got a web link on hand, but there's the amateur SETI project which AFAIK had a waterfall plot with the pioneer 10 carrier signal visible. Maybe that was from a single receiver... TX: That one is hard. Somehow, a way must be found to coherently produce microwaves, i.e. sub-ns synchronisation, worldwide:) But maybe there are incoherent principles which work without that? Any ham here who wants to add some comments?
The way around "rm -rf" is to make the filesystem transaction-based and versioned. If you do the above, all you need to do to recover is to undo the last command. And then, you have the problem that your storage requirements grow and grow. There is a physical limitation to the HDD equivalent of Moore's Law.. You just _have_ to delete data someday. And if it's 'only' the merging of several version on your transaction filesystem. Bad things can happen there, too.
The same with archeology, at leat from a philosophical standpoint. You can't preserve everything, else the earth will be littered with AOL-CDs..;)
Ooops, sorry if this sounds a bit like nitpicking (although I still think these are valid points to consider), it probably is, but I just had a bad argument with my GF...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, but I think your parent is exactly correct. You try to argue from a theoretical point of view where computer scientists are equal to mathematicians. Maybe proving an algorithm is the right thing to do for small isolated cases of important code.
:-)
But computer scientists are NOT mathematicians. There is a reason that they're called _computer_ scientists.
CS today also contains elements of art and architecture. Sure, there is still mathematics and, sure it's still the most important part of it.
You can say similar things about experimental physics, for example. An experimental physicist is as much mathematician as he is computer scientist as he is electrical engineer as he is technician!
Do you really think an EE proves every circuit he/she designs correct?! Often enough, he'll design a circuit a certain way because -*gasp*- it looks nicer to him! That's the art part of EE
Yes, some companies are evil, but put yourself in their shoes sometimes.
That sounds like you want to see a company as a person, what it isn't.
Although I also personally don't like people who always complain about this and that (which IMHO isn't the case here), I think I can't in any case have sympathy with an entity that is only there to produces things in the most efficient way.
So redistribution for no profit, no matter at what scale it occurs, should be legal? What if this means that a large studio (that can afford the bandwidth) could just host a copy of any indie film so that the makers see no profit?
I doubt that the large studio with that much bandwidth to spare would still exist in such a situation!
And that, IMHO, would even be a good thing.
The more I think about this hypothetical case, the more ridiculous it seems. NO, I don't think such a situation would hurt independent artists.
In space, no one can hear you boom. :-)
You need a medium to transmit your sounds through
But on the spacecraft, you HAVE a medium: The spacecraft itself.
I bet that there are some kind of acceleration/attitude sensors which picked the 'sound' of the boom deployment up.
Funny, I just realized that firefox/mozilla created a rather messy layout of slashdot on my screen.
Maybe this shows that really only a site's content is important?
One the stupidest arguments I've heard against creationism is that "Hitler used natural selection and darwinism to justify the holocaust, therefore anyone who believes in Evolution is a Nazi" or something stupid to that effect. Evolution is not a moral doctrine and doesn't profess to be so. Anyone who tries to make it so, is boneheaded. People have done some awful things in the name of Christianity. So is it ok to go ahead and label all Christians as Bad People?
VERY true. But also consider that many scientists form their opinion by taking their data and theories as literally 'the truth' - ignoring the fact that science is part of philosophy and not the other way around. By adding some human feelings (e.g. fear), you can easily get to these weird opinions.
A scientist who says that evolution is a well-checked theory is doing the right thing.
A scientist who says that a well-checked theory should be translated to other areas just because
(social darwinism vs. the finding that there exists this concept of darwinism in nature), can be dangerous!
However, there's another unspoken law of science that's emerged: "All things have natural explanations." Whenever scientists encounter a new phenomenon, they assume that it has a natural explanation (i.e. one susceptible to analysis) and then go about finding it. :-)
I'm just thinking about this one. You could see it as a "meta-theory" about scientific findings and not an additional axiom of science.
I.e. all findings so far have been natural -> to falsify, find the ghost
Files aren't water marked for my protection, DRM isn't about my "security", and "Trusted Computing" is about the opposite of trust. Everybody knows it, why can't they just say it?
To point out the obvious: not everybody knows it, too much people are manipulable i.e. stupid and/or uncritical.
fusion energy will be ready when mankind needs it - Lev Artsimovich
---
[These are surely not the original words, but the message. I can't find a good online reference now.]
You should be able to see it as a object not to fly into at daylight, and at night you could switch on
:)
some of those simple red slowly-blinking lights.
Wouldn't that be sufficient? Both sides would be pleased.
Not that I'm against radio towers, I have a ham radio license...
This may be true - but you have to admit that there are probably people in your statistic who still have objections against the sign and are glad about it being removed. :-)
So, don't oversimplify things
Still, I would differentiate between microwave photons and optical photons here. :-)
You can have similar effects with microwaves, you can even have 'optical' excitation by microwaves, for example rotational modes in the micro-evolt range. Two or more GHZ photons can surely have a combined effect. And, at the same power levels, microwave photon density is vastly bigger than optical photon density, of course (although if you look at biological effects, you have to take into account surface absorption etc.) - so this would also make these transitions more probable.
Heck, you can even generate hard X-rays by microwave radiation, the simplest example is putting a vacuum tube into your microwave oven, or generating very nasty flying things from optical photons with those new tabletop laser particle accelerators
But IMHO, that's not the point nor the question.
The question is whether the excitation of modes which can easily be excited thermally can have any effect on humans at all. There are some statistics which suggest eye damage by overheating. This has to be closely monitored, of course.
But I still doubt that there is signficant non-thermal influence on chemical reactions by certain 'matching' microwave photons, the only other reasonable cause of adverse effects. AFAIK all the studies in this area are at least highly disputed.
... the interaction cross section gives the statistics to tell you how common that particular reaction is... :-)
Absolutely true, but if you consider for example a spectral line in the THz range (where physicist start to speak of ionization to occur) as a gaussian (it is a lorentzian in most cases, but this doesn't matter much here) with a sigma of at most a few GHz and now go to microwaves in the GHz range, a difference of thousands of sigmas.
Now, look at your gauss and you'll see that you can really say that it is indeed, with the best floating point precision your computer or calculator supports, zero there!
I bet that the probability a "microwave ionization" occured in any man or woman that has lived or lives on earth is smaller than 50%
Although I can't say that I have taken classes in philosophy and although my knowledge in these matters is only marginal, I have to say that you're absolutely right!
Your post is really insightful, even funny :-)
:-)
But instead of moderating, I have to point out one assumption you make:
That there exists an entity called "universe" outside of yourself, independently of your existance.
For many, this philosophical premise is clear, although for me it is not. I generally tend to think like you, though.
But what exactly defines oneself is another question that leads to another heap of questions...
Which small european country?
Personally, I think the whole way init works needs to be revisted - it would be better if you could start all the init processes at once, with each having its standard input, output, and error going into init. If startup script FOO requires service BAR to be active before it proceeds, then BAR ought to provide a means for FOO to check if BAR is ready (and block if not).
:-)
Good idea, but the only thing you'd get is close to 100% CPU usage upon startup and a startup that is at most that much faster (i.e. by the amount of CPU time wasted before). Processes which block because of I/O (disk usage, DNS queries etc.) don't block the queue of the init process.
I don't know the CPU utilization during startup though, and I think it has to be measured on all kinds of different systems to have some data - maybe it's not worth the effort
I think that there really isn't any problem.
:), you can compile a loadable driver module without touching any other part of the kernel.
As long as you have the kernel headers available (and the GPLed source of the driver, of course
Debian with it's separate kernel-image/kernel-headers packages shows nicely how the problem can be solved. I run several systems with additional hardware and drivers but a stock debian kernel.
Heh, funny. The title pages features the ship cruising through the kiel canal near my home city, Kiel Germany. Apparently the ship was built here. :-)
In fact, the part of the canal shown here is next to an old bridge (Brücke Levensau) across the canal (the picture is taken from the bridge, I suppose). I very often drive the hill at the waterside behind the ship down with my bicycle.
The location is only a few km (max. 2) from my home, so it was VERY funny and astonishing to see that on slashdot
OTOH, Mr. Allen seems to have WAY too much money...
These are the reasons that I doubt if it is neccessary to have patents *at all*. Of course, I would be very happy if swpats are abandoned!
But I'd like to have a clear and independent study that shows that patents as a whole have a positive effect on innovation.
IMHO, somehow it got implanted into our minds that having bright ideas needs monetary incentive. I fail to see how one can prove *THAT*.
Granted, the _implementation_ of bright ideas needs EUREUREUR. But the idea itself?
I now ran several times into the problem of sites which do not respond correctly (or at all) with fragmentation requests, see for example IP-Masq-HOWTO.
/. rant: :-)
Its a very similar problem and causes some websites/tcp connections to hang without any apparent reason. Why the hell can't they configure this properly? It is not like that an immediate DOS attack results from sending back fragmentation requests...
To start the typical
IMHO it is neccessary to have some kind of "RAW IP" consumer label which would guarantee that:
1. my or my peers packets are not blocked willingly (no port filtering etc.)
2. my packets are not traffic shaped, at least not in other ways than I specify by setting TOS fields. I'm not arguing about the possibility of different TOS due to different prices, but rather a telephone/ISP combination slowing down my VoIP traffic to the competition. General disparity in handling traffic should be marked as such, though!
3. DNS and all other provided 'additional' services (eMail accounts etc.) follow all RFCs and other standards (i.e. this TTL problem).
Of course, such a label could come in different forms (for example for people really wanting to have a firewall which blocks traffic for them).
But one needs to be informed to make the decision for the right ISP. The current situation is rather
intransparent and it steadily gets worse.
And websites deserve a similar label too. There are "HTML x/y compliant" stickers on some sites, but they are rare and this should be only the beginning.
I'm still not really sure about who would own these labels (if at all), though.
Some probably say that black/white good/evil issues are discussed by slashbots here. But as a european, I am really interested in these posts.
/. libertarian sounds like being a rational, somewhat technocratic, sometimes even somewhat socialistic liberal. :)
I still haven't figured out what exactly makes up the typical 'US libertarian'. Sometimes, a
Sometimes the social darwinist hardliners, against any state-regulation of corporations but pro-death-penalty show up here (obviously I do not agree with them, but that's not the point
Being 'libertarian' is much more about the personal opinion than belonging to the libertarian party, isn't it? Else, I would not understand how such diametrical political views match.
Firstly you need the 70m dishes of the DSN to communicate with the Voyagers at the current distances. :) But maybe there are incoherent principles which work without that?
Ok, but maybe this one can be solved?
RX: I'm thinking of synchronizing several hundred amateur receivers and then combining all the data, getting a good-enough SnR. I haven't got a web link on hand, but there's the amateur SETI project which AFAIK had a waterfall plot with the pioneer 10 carrier signal visible. Maybe that was from a single receiver...
TX: That one is hard. Somehow, a way must be found to coherently produce microwaves, i.e. sub-ns synchronisation, worldwide
Any ham here who wants to add some comments?
Yes, I must also admit that the poster of the story sounds a bit like that.
But maybe he simply did mean respect for him as a person and not "respect" as the gangsta rappers define it?
The way around "rm -rf" is to make the filesystem transaction-based and versioned. If you do the above, all you need to do to recover is to undo the last command.
;)
And then, you have the problem that your storage requirements grow and grow. There is a physical limitation to the HDD equivalent of Moore's Law..
You just _have_ to delete data someday. And if it's 'only' the merging of several version on your transaction filesystem. Bad things can happen there, too.
The same with archeology, at leat from a philosophical standpoint. You can't preserve everything, else the earth will be littered with AOL-CDs..
Ooops, sorry if this sounds a bit like nitpicking (although I still think these are valid points to consider), it probably is, but I just had a bad argument with my GF...