Nowadays, when we have all removed the onions from our belts, hypothetical kiddo is enormously better tools and documentation at his/her fingertips; but is also comparing the rudimentary results of a beginner against products of 2-3 years of effort by a professional design team, backed by artists and sound guys, available for 20-50 bucks off the shelf. Even the sort of flash games that will load about as quickly as the Python 3.2 reference manual will are comparatively polished and intimidating.
When I was a kid, we were playing pretty intimidating games by Konami. And even the earliest DOS games, like Digger, Tetris, Sopwith, were nothing to sneeze at. That didn't prevent me from having oodles of fun while programming my own rogue-like game, or just drawing line art with MSX Basic. Having a game behave the way I designed it felt very empowering, even though it didn't look like much to others.
You probably will think I am crazy, but IMHO, some kids may find it fun to learn PostScript. It certainly is not a language for creating interactive applications, but it makes it super-easy to draw stuff. It has probably the cleanest syntax I've ever seen, only a handful of commands, and it teaches the user about plane geometry (coordinates and transformations) and stack.
A new small molecule drug costs about $500 million to $600 million to develop these days.
Right. This is exactly why we need to pay for it directly from taxes. Because if we don't pay researchers directly, then we get our present fucked up system where a new small molecule drug costs additional $500 million to $600 million to market, and another $200 million in executive bonuses. Who do you think pays for that today?
This is utter BS. I bet it was the execs themselves who stole the money, probably long before they were "contacted by hackers". If it looks and smells like The Big Lebowski...
Re:Q: Why hasn't Mozilla considered a Firefox OS?
on
Where Is Firefox OS?
·
· Score: 1
Actually, because it's an AWESOME idea, already implemented and known as GNU/Linux.
Technical books are where things get difficult, and require a perspective shift. For example, if you were writing a technical book for print on paper, you'd probably have a lot of tables, sidebars, indexes, etc. When you go to convert that to an ebook, you quickly find that EPUB is somewhat limited on first glance. You're dead set on replicating the tables and sidebars and such from your printed book, so you just say, "Screw it, ship the PDF." But that's paper-centric thinking. In the digital world, that sidebar would become a link off to other data. The tables could still be there, of course, but you'll have to rethink where they fit in the flow of the text so that they render well on smaller devices. Indexes are trivial, of course. And there's a ton of other stuff you can do, as newer readers (iBooks, Nook Color) on more capable devices have the ability to embed other media and provide more interactive experiences than what you'd get from a piece of paper or a PDF. It turns out that if you approach the problem from a digital perspective rather than a paper perspective, you end up with something that looks different but still conveys all of the information you intended, and in a better way for digital devices.
IMHO, it doesn't require any perspective shift. Just a full-blown XHTML+CSS+MATHML+SVG reader and a large color screen. So I won't be able to bring it with me to a beach, whooptee-do. (And really, I can do it already. The relevant technology is called "full-size laptop", and the prices keep dropping.) Do I expect being able to bring an architect's desk to a beach? Take undergrad Calculus textbooks, for example: they are about letter-sized. This is because they really need a lot of space to present a bunch of triple integrals and 3D plots. People who are trying to fit scientific texts onto portable screens are insane.
So, what are you saying? I really don't understand what in my post is controversial. Did they evacuate too much area? Or should they have just let the general population (300000 people) stay where they were? (Note that the incident did kill thousands of people directly through radiation exposure.) Did Belorussians make a mistake when they hired a few thousand people to clean up the mess, even though this job still carries a significant risk? Is it possible that making the land into the nature preserve is the principal reason for animals flourishing? Did the radiation levels within 30 km of the ground zero return to safe levels by 2005? (I'll help you with this one: not according to the Chernobyl Forum, which includes IAEA, WHO, UN bodies, and is authored by about 100 recognized experts from many countries, and is criticized for being too conservative.) Should France not evacuate at least 30 km around a hypothetical disaster site, and whatever else gets contaminated? Would it be more manageable if the meltdown happened in the middle of freaking Europe, instead of Belorussian planes?
I am just arguing that the death toll is not what freaking matters here. As an extreme analogy, if an activity carries a risk of sinking your country under the ocean over over a period of 10 years, once in 100 years on average, and we can make sure that no one dies directly from drowning, is it automatically worth doing it? I am pro-nuclear, if anything, by the way. I am just convinced that it is a whole lot more expensive than most people think, and should still be experimented with, not deployed worldwide.
Is David Keith seriously comparing risks by counting individual deaths? Besides the inherent vagueness in how we attribute deaths of, say, people with asthma, to coal-related pollutants, there is another elephant in the room: nuclear power plant disasters have other costs besides human deaths due to radiation.
Consider this map. No one lives within 30 km of the site, and only loons or paid professionals live in the pink areas, and they pay for it with their health. And now look at this plant, 30 km upstream from Orleans. If a disaster strikes and that thing goes... no problem, right? Just a few dozen deaths, a total evacuation of the whole Orleans metropolitan area for decades, and radiation extending as far as Paris, with unpredictable hotspots far away from the ground zero, as determined by chaotic weather patters. David Keith got one thing right: we are very bad at evaluating risks.
I would not go over the Net with Wikileaks or anyone else, unless I could find a trustworthy proxy. Wikileaks may be 100% true, but they wouldn't know if the police was sitting on their wire, decrypting their shit with a key gleaned through a hidden camera. But what is a trustworthy proxy? It looks like only criminals have the anonymity on the Net these days.
But it's not really an issue, since anyone (and I mean any idiot) can put on a new long sleeve shirt, new gloves, wrap their face in a new scarf, buy a used USB stick with cash, and mail it. Knowing that mail came from Boston or Paris or Athens ain't gonna help.
If I was a whistle-blower, I would worry first of all about my data. How many people had access to it, is indeed the question. Best case scenario is what Bradley Manning had: some old cruft accessible by millions of people. Worst case scenario, dozens of people, and everyone gets a slightly different file, steganographically marked with the receiver's identity. So there is risk of exposure, of course, but the transmission itself is trivially anonymous.
Not necessarily decentralized. But thinking that one domain name system would be enough for everyone was clearly a pipe dream. Just one problem from the top of my head is what to do with generic words like "apple", "ford", and "good", or common proper names. What is a fair way to assign "john.net"? FIFO? Surely, you are joking. We were doing great with one authoritative DNS, and we will do even better with several. We actually already have them, but we are slow to realize their name-resolving nature. Wikipedia, Google, Torrentz, or even browser plugins which uncensor domains: they all take short phrases and turn them into links to other pages. DNS was implemented (socially) as a wild wild west land grab (this analogy became complete after rich corporations started hijacking names through courts), and it pretty much reached its full potential by now. Other, more structured name resolvers are coming into spotlight now. A decentralized name system with FIFO registration would be completely useless: it would always remain DNS's uglier sister.
Internet cannot be locked down. It can, of course, be destroyed by taking out the infrastructure, but that won't happen. It can be fragmented and made somewhat more expensive through legislation, but it won't change the simple fact that, given desire and some minimal know-how, anyone can transfer GiBs of arbitrary data from anywhere to anywhere, do it secretly, and do it cheaply. And this is the bright side of Internet. There is also the dark side, where spammers and criminals control millions (soon, billions) of computers worldwide, as long as there are stupid people in the world. Criminals enjoy strong anonymity on the Net, and nothing will change that. Internet, and with it the freedom of expression, are limited only by the width of the pipe. China has wide shiny pipes, so when they try to control Internet, people have a good laugh (I know it, I ran a proxy for a while). Syria has crap for pipes, so their Internet would be deficient even if they didn't censor it.
It may be a shock to you, but under the current copyright system you end up paying many times over: when you buy an eBook, for example, some 5-15 cents on a dollar go to the writers of your choice, to pay their bills, which includes production. Ever wondered where the rest goes? (1) Monopoly tax, a.k.a. hookers and blow tax. (2) Development of all the flops: works that never see the light of day (that's what you are ranting against, right? Well, you are happy to subsidize them today). (3) Copyright litigation. (4) DRM development. (5) Digital distribution.
You know what a publisher deserves? Exactly (2) and (5). Think of (2) as an insurance: not every writer plays by the rules, and there is risk inherent in publishing. And you, after being so thoroughly cleaned, you don't even own the freaking book. Does a tax really sound that bad now?
Assuming that this is even a right guy (that is, someone directly responsible for one of the high-profile Sony hacks, and not some schmo who thought that Windows 7 and WEP is all security he needed), there are, probably, only two or three human proxies between him and FBI. The law enforcement may be 10 years behind in technology, but when it comes to time-tested methods involving confidential informants, they must be fucking scary.
I am so sick of you antiantimatter conservatives! I, for one, believe that matter and antimatter can co-exist peacefully. I refuse to discriminate based on a trivial single-bit difference, and will continue working together with our antimatter brethren on building a brighter futuNO CARRIER
Looks like planets form out of the collapsing molecular clouds. What if there is more dark matter in galaxies which experienced more star formation? Would that nudge us toward accepting that the invisible mass is carried by planetesimals? Anyway, we can almost see protostars already, so I'll give 100-300 years tops for us to have a really good model for star system formation.
And can you please tell us more about not having enough baryons?
If the response was anonymous, how do we know that the people who responded were the same as those who DDOSed? This, in a nutshell, is the idiocy of treating Anonymous as a group of people, however loosely organized. It would be better to call them what they are in this particular instance: Sony customers who are really pissed off.
"check it out, so sexy!!! - natalie-portmans-hot-grits.jpg.exe"
So you are saying, the risk of being penetrated by a trojan is positively correlated with the desire to penetrate Natalie Portman? Only too true. An unfortunate corollary is that the malware can never be defeated by technological means alone.
The funny thing about signing binaries, it only helps to authenticate the author and to defend against the random memory corruption. It does nothing at all for defending from things like local and remote exploits, which corrupt the memory intentionally by using bugs already present in the signed binaries.
I bet Voyagers won't fly forever. When space travel become cheap and safe enough, they will be seen as collectible items, and will be recovered. The two golden records will probably become the most expensive records money can buy.
I fail to see why IE 10 would not run on vista which is like 98% the same as Windows 7. What could there possibly be in Windows 7 that Vista lacks?
It's a mystery to me too why Microsoft is so adamant in its conviction that a Web browser should be an integrated OS component. For a general-purpose OS this makes no sense at all. May be they no longer want to be a general purpose OS? It definitely looks like Apple and Google are mostly interested in "toy" OSes. That is, OSes designed from the ground up primarily for entertainment. I hope this is the future of all proprietary software.
Anyone who lacks $1,000,000 in their bank account will fall behind their more moneyed peers. Is being rich now a right?
No, but having private property is. Owning $1,000,000 is like having 10 TiB/month bandwidth: no one is advocating this as a human right. Having a right to access Internet in a private and secure way is like having a right to express yourself, to teach yourself, and to associate with others.
I mean seriously, students need to learn what addition really is -- make them put 1111111111111111 1111111111111111 1111111111111111 1111111111111111 1111111111111111 1111111111111111 1111111111111111 1111111111111111 1111111111111111 1111111111111111 1111111111111111 1111111111111111 111111 beans into a pot, then put another 1111111111111111 1111111111111111 1111111111111111 1111111111111 beans in the pot, then count the beans to get the answer.
Jamming is dickish, too. But caging should be OK. I mean, in case of an emergency, a phone call can be made right outside of the classroom door, only a few feet away. Walls and ceiling can be lined with foil for cheap, but the floor needs something durable, and windows need fine microwave-oven-like mesh that doesn't make one feel imprisoned, so I don't expect this to catch on any time soon:(
I teach math at a university. I totally buy your way of doing it. My dream is to have courses and tests designed so that people can use any portable computer. I just need to figure out a (cheap) way to turn testing rooms into Faraday cages.
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Nowadays, when we have all removed the onions from our belts, hypothetical kiddo is enormously better tools and documentation at his/her fingertips; but is also comparing the rudimentary results of a beginner against products of 2-3 years of effort by a professional design team, backed by artists and sound guys, available for 20-50 bucks off the shelf. Even the sort of flash games that will load about as quickly as the Python 3.2 reference manual will are comparatively polished and intimidating.
When I was a kid, we were playing pretty intimidating games by Konami. And even the earliest DOS games, like Digger, Tetris, Sopwith, were nothing to sneeze at. That didn't prevent me from having oodles of fun while programming my own rogue-like game, or just drawing line art with MSX Basic. Having a game behave the way I designed it felt very empowering, even though it didn't look like much to others.
You probably will think I am crazy, but IMHO, some kids may find it fun to learn PostScript. It certainly is not a language for creating interactive applications, but it makes it super-easy to draw stuff. It has probably the cleanest syntax I've ever seen, only a handful of commands, and it teaches the user about plane geometry (coordinates and transformations) and stack.
A new small molecule drug costs about $500 million to $600 million to develop these days.
Right. This is exactly why we need to pay for it directly from taxes. Because if we don't pay researchers directly, then we get our present fucked up system where a new small molecule drug costs additional $500 million to $600 million to market, and another $200 million in executive bonuses. Who do you think pays for that today?
This is utter BS. I bet it was the execs themselves who stole the money, probably long before they were "contacted by hackers". If it looks and smells like The Big Lebowski...
Actually, because it's an AWESOME idea, already implemented and known as GNU/Linux.
Technical books are where things get difficult, and require a perspective shift. For example, if you were writing a technical book for print on paper, you'd probably have a lot of tables, sidebars, indexes, etc. When you go to convert that to an ebook, you quickly find that EPUB is somewhat limited on first glance. You're dead set on replicating the tables and sidebars and such from your printed book, so you just say, "Screw it, ship the PDF." But that's paper-centric thinking. In the digital world, that sidebar would become a link off to other data. The tables could still be there, of course, but you'll have to rethink where they fit in the flow of the text so that they render well on smaller devices. Indexes are trivial, of course. And there's a ton of other stuff you can do, as newer readers (iBooks, Nook Color) on more capable devices have the ability to embed other media and provide more interactive experiences than what you'd get from a piece of paper or a PDF. It turns out that if you approach the problem from a digital perspective rather than a paper perspective, you end up with something that looks different but still conveys all of the information you intended, and in a better way for digital devices.
IMHO, it doesn't require any perspective shift. Just a full-blown XHTML+CSS+MATHML+SVG reader and a large color screen. So I won't be able to bring it with me to a beach, whooptee-do. (And really, I can do it already. The relevant technology is called "full-size laptop", and the prices keep dropping.) Do I expect being able to bring an architect's desk to a beach? Take undergrad Calculus textbooks, for example: they are about letter-sized. This is because they really need a lot of space to present a bunch of triple integrals and 3D plots. People who are trying to fit scientific texts onto portable screens are insane.
So, what are you saying? I really don't understand what in my post is controversial. Did they evacuate too much area? Or should they have just let the general population (300000 people) stay where they were? (Note that the incident did kill thousands of people directly through radiation exposure.) Did Belorussians make a mistake when they hired a few thousand people to clean up the mess, even though this job still carries a significant risk? Is it possible that making the land into the nature preserve is the principal reason for animals flourishing? Did the radiation levels within 30 km of the ground zero return to safe levels by 2005? (I'll help you with this one: not according to the Chernobyl Forum, which includes IAEA, WHO, UN bodies, and is authored by about 100 recognized experts from many countries, and is criticized for being too conservative.) Should France not evacuate at least 30 km around a hypothetical disaster site, and whatever else gets contaminated? Would it be more manageable if the meltdown happened in the middle of freaking Europe, instead of Belorussian planes?
I am just arguing that the death toll is not what freaking matters here. As an extreme analogy, if an activity carries a risk of sinking your country under the ocean over over a period of 10 years, once in 100 years on average, and we can make sure that no one dies directly from drowning, is it automatically worth doing it? I am pro-nuclear, if anything, by the way. I am just convinced that it is a whole lot more expensive than most people think, and should still be experimented with, not deployed worldwide.
Is David Keith seriously comparing risks by counting individual deaths? Besides the inherent vagueness in how we attribute deaths of, say, people with asthma, to coal-related pollutants, there is another elephant in the room: nuclear power plant disasters have other costs besides human deaths due to radiation.
Consider this map. No one lives within 30 km of the site, and only loons or paid professionals live in the pink areas, and they pay for it with their health. And now look at this plant, 30 km upstream from Orleans. If a disaster strikes and that thing goes... no problem, right? Just a few dozen deaths, a total evacuation of the whole Orleans metropolitan area for decades, and radiation extending as far as Paris, with unpredictable hotspots far away from the ground zero, as determined by chaotic weather patters. David Keith got one thing right: we are very bad at evaluating risks.
I would not go over the Net with Wikileaks or anyone else, unless I could find a trustworthy proxy. Wikileaks may be 100% true, but they wouldn't know if the police was sitting on their wire, decrypting their shit with a key gleaned through a hidden camera. But what is a trustworthy proxy? It looks like only criminals have the anonymity on the Net these days.
But it's not really an issue, since anyone (and I mean any idiot) can put on a new long sleeve shirt, new gloves, wrap their face in a new scarf, buy a used USB stick with cash, and mail it. Knowing that mail came from Boston or Paris or Athens ain't gonna help.
If I was a whistle-blower, I would worry first of all about my data. How many people had access to it, is indeed the question. Best case scenario is what Bradley Manning had: some old cruft accessible by millions of people. Worst case scenario, dozens of people, and everyone gets a slightly different file, steganographically marked with the receiver's identity. So there is risk of exposure, of course, but the transmission itself is trivially anonymous.
Not necessarily decentralized. But thinking that one domain name system would be enough for everyone was clearly a pipe dream. Just one problem from the top of my head is what to do with generic words like "apple", "ford", and "good", or common proper names. What is a fair way to assign "john.net"? FIFO? Surely, you are joking. We were doing great with one authoritative DNS, and we will do even better with several. We actually already have them, but we are slow to realize their name-resolving nature. Wikipedia, Google, Torrentz, or even browser plugins which uncensor domains: they all take short phrases and turn them into links to other pages. DNS was implemented (socially) as a wild wild west land grab (this analogy became complete after rich corporations started hijacking names through courts), and it pretty much reached its full potential by now. Other, more structured name resolvers are coming into spotlight now. A decentralized name system with FIFO registration would be completely useless: it would always remain DNS's uglier sister.
Internet cannot be locked down. It can, of course, be destroyed by taking out the infrastructure, but that won't happen. It can be fragmented and made somewhat more expensive through legislation, but it won't change the simple fact that, given desire and some minimal know-how, anyone can transfer GiBs of arbitrary data from anywhere to anywhere, do it secretly, and do it cheaply. And this is the bright side of Internet. There is also the dark side, where spammers and criminals control millions (soon, billions) of computers worldwide, as long as there are stupid people in the world. Criminals enjoy strong anonymity on the Net, and nothing will change that. Internet, and with it the freedom of expression, are limited only by the width of the pipe. China has wide shiny pipes, so when they try to control Internet, people have a good laugh (I know it, I ran a proxy for a while). Syria has crap for pipes, so their Internet would be deficient even if they didn't censor it.
It may be a shock to you, but under the current copyright system you end up paying many times over: when you buy an eBook, for example, some 5-15 cents on a dollar go to the writers of your choice, to pay their bills, which includes production. Ever wondered where the rest goes? (1) Monopoly tax, a.k.a. hookers and blow tax. (2) Development of all the flops: works that never see the light of day (that's what you are ranting against, right? Well, you are happy to subsidize them today). (3) Copyright litigation. (4) DRM development. (5) Digital distribution.
You know what a publisher deserves? Exactly (2) and (5). Think of (2) as an insurance: not every writer plays by the rules, and there is risk inherent in publishing. And you, after being so thoroughly cleaned, you don't even own the freaking book. Does a tax really sound that bad now?
Assuming that this is even a right guy (that is, someone directly responsible for one of the high-profile Sony hacks, and not some schmo who thought that Windows 7 and WEP is all security he needed), there are, probably, only two or three human proxies between him and FBI. The law enforcement may be 10 years behind in technology, but when it comes to time-tested methods involving confidential informants, they must be fucking scary.
I am so sick of you antiantimatter conservatives! I, for one, believe that matter and antimatter can co-exist peacefully. I refuse to discriminate based on a trivial single-bit difference, and will continue working together with our antimatter brethren on building a brighter futuNO CARRIER
I thought you are just talking out of your ass, but then I read your nick... and dude, wow. How could we be so blind? Preach on, brother.
Looks like planets form out of the collapsing molecular clouds. What if there is more dark matter in galaxies which experienced more star formation? Would that nudge us toward accepting that the invisible mass is carried by planetesimals? Anyway, we can almost see protostars already, so I'll give 100-300 years tops for us to have a really good model for star system formation.
And can you please tell us more about not having enough baryons?
If the response was anonymous, how do we know that the people who responded were the same as those who DDOSed? This, in a nutshell, is the idiocy of treating Anonymous as a group of people, however loosely organized. It would be better to call them what they are in this particular instance: Sony customers who are really pissed off.
Dude, seriously.
"check it out, so sexy!!! - natalie-portmans-hot-grits.jpg.exe"
So you are saying, the risk of being penetrated by a trojan is positively correlated with the desire to penetrate Natalie Portman? Only too true. An unfortunate corollary is that the malware can never be defeated by technological means alone.
The funny thing about signing binaries, it only helps to authenticate the author and to defend against the random memory corruption. It does nothing at all for defending from things like local and remote exploits, which corrupt the memory intentionally by using bugs already present in the signed binaries.
I bet Voyagers won't fly forever. When space travel become cheap and safe enough, they will be seen as collectible items, and will be recovered. The two golden records will probably become the most expensive records money can buy.
I fail to see why IE 10 would not run on vista which is like 98% the same as Windows 7. What could there possibly be in Windows 7 that Vista lacks?
It's a mystery to me too why Microsoft is so adamant in its conviction that a Web browser should be an integrated OS component. For a general-purpose OS this makes no sense at all. May be they no longer want to be a general purpose OS? It definitely looks like Apple and Google are mostly interested in "toy" OSes. That is, OSes designed from the ground up primarily for entertainment. I hope this is the future of all proprietary software.
Anyone who lacks $1,000,000 in their bank account will fall behind their more moneyed peers. Is being rich now a right?
No, but having private property is. Owning $1,000,000 is like having 10 TiB/month bandwidth: no one is advocating this as a human right. Having a right to access Internet in a private and secure way is like having a right to express yourself, to teach yourself, and to associate with others.
I mean seriously, students need to learn what addition really is -- make them put 1111111111111111 1111111111111111 1111111111111111 1111111111111111 1111111111111111 1111111111111111 1111111111111111 1111111111111111 1111111111111111 1111111111111111 1111111111111111 1111111111111111 111111 beans into a pot, then put another 1111111111111111 1111111111111111 1111111111111111 1111111111111 beans in the pot, then count the beans to get the answer.
There, fixed it for you.
Jamming is dickish, too. But caging should be OK. I mean, in case of an emergency, a phone call can be made right outside of the classroom door, only a few feet away. Walls and ceiling can be lined with foil for cheap, but the floor needs something durable, and windows need fine microwave-oven-like mesh that doesn't make one feel imprisoned, so I don't expect this to catch on any time soon :(
I teach math at a university. I totally buy your way of doing it. My dream is to have courses and tests designed so that people can use any portable computer. I just need to figure out a (cheap) way to turn testing rooms into Faraday cages.