Oh, I agree that it would be irritating as hell. But what I was trying to talk about was the security aspect of it; by pinging, they aren't getting any information that isn't publicly available somewhere else. I have no doubt that people are being bothered by it; I don't like it when people call my house (not just sales calls; anyone ; ), but I don't unplug my phone either. The issue (or at least the one I was directing my comment at) was the security and "fair use", as the person I origonally replied to put it. I agree that their methods are irritating, but getting pinged or tracerouted is something that happens daily to a lot of systems; I know I've been known to throw a few packets at a host that catches my attention. I don't see a reason why this is more of a cause for concern than those regular Internet events.
I'm not sure it even gives you that information. Well, if you get a ping back, you know they're "not blocking ping packets" ; ) But your point is definately valid; from the standpoint of ping (or traceroute), there's no difference between a system that is blocking certain packets and one that has bought the farm. You're probably right that that information can be extracted somehow, but it would take more work. And it reinforces the idea that the threat posed by these guys pinging and tracerouting random systems poses roughly as much danger as a wrong number on the telephone ("Some stranger knows my phone number works! Run!").
The author seems to be assuming that every OS is targeted to the same market segment. With that line of rational, if Linux is trying to hit the same people as Mac, then yeah, it's doing pretty poor. But Mac is a near-total flop for a person who wants to tinker, build, destroy, and improve without shelling out for proprietary courses. I think that is the big issue right now with Linux, and its one that gets dodged in this article. Where is the platform headed? Is is to remain in the domain of servers and cool projects for tech hobbyists? Is there even that much interest in the community in targeting slapping a Linux box on every grandma's desktop on the planet? Mac does great at the market it has already picked out for itself. MS does the same, by and large (yeah, the irritate the hell out of me sometimes, and fall on their face, but so does everything else, once in a while). Linux is unique among these in that it has not clearly defined where it is going to sit in the OS world. A lot of people want to keep it as a hobbyists machine; lots of power, lots of experimentation, and more work for the end user. Some elements (especially the commercial distibutors) would like to see it become more of a business player, or a Joe & Jane home-user desktop product. No one knows right now. The criticisms in this article definately have some substance to them. I just wonder if some of them are based on the wrong criteria- like saying that a 12-gauge shot gun is a poor tool for making caserole.
But, as BDR mentioned, the big labels control the infrastructure for widely distributing CD's. That means some small acts have to rely on MP3 only (or primary) distribution. In that case, it is very unlikely that MP3 distribution is going to boost CD sales; they simply don't have the capacity to get disks out to everywhere they need to go. As a result, all they can do is watch their MP3s get Dloaded for free, and hope a few people are kind enough to send cash. Shareware, basically. As for the multi-millionare vs. working stiff thing. . . never seen it. Most people I know who have no reservations about downloading Brittany Spears also have no reservations about downloading the Baptist Death Ray, or the Velcro Pigmys, or any other small name band. A lot of ethics discussion goes on about it on/., but my feeling is that most people just click.
I consider pinging my system to be the electronic equivalent of jiggling my front doorknob to see if the door will open:
I don't really think that those two are comperable. Ping tells you almost nothing. It gives no information about level of security (except "not blocking ping packets"), and there is no implication that someone would "come in" if the door was unlocked. Ping checks if something exists or is alive; it's information that anyone could get by a lot of methods, and this is probably the most "polite" one. It isn't someone jiggling a door, by telnetting into another port and playing patty-cake with your daemons; it's someone looking at the sign on the door that says "The doctor is not dead".
That was one of the issues that I was thinking about as I wrote- there isn't a real fantastic 3d controll system at the moment (except for that old Sega game at the arcade where you rode a motorcycle and leaned to turn. That ruled.). That is one problem that would need to be figured out. But still, if you allow people to use their favorite keybind script for movement, you're reducing the complexity of the interface- you're defining "this key makes me go forward" instead of "this abstract string of text defines where my address book is". You're still tapping into spacial memory for the actual task of locating resources, and you're greatly simplifying the number of operations and locations that have to be commited to memory.
Case in point: If I'm teaching someone Linux, I have to teach them cd, and ls and what they do, and then get them to associate in memory that the utilities that reside on their machine are in/bin, and so on for every other command and important location. With a windowed interface, operations are a little simpler, but you still have to recall directory and folder locations, and how to drill down from one to another. If I teach a 3d interface, all I have to say is "these three keys make you walk; this button opens/uses something". I don't have to tell them that you get from one room to another by walking through a door, or that tools are in the garage and food is in the kitchen. As soon as they see with the room with the drill press that represents LaTeX and the chainsaw that is gcc hanging from the wall, they know where similar things are going to be stored. It lets people use their "real-world" reason on what is normally a very abstract system of representation.
And besides. . . for anyone who grew up in the last 20 years, nothing is more intuitive than a video game controller!
I don't think that benchmarking is about deciding what is the 'better' operating system (you know, the one with the big 'S' on its chest). Benchmarking for something like this is about testing several products at the same task, and finding which one is better for that task. In that way, benchmarking is a good step in accepting that different OS's are good at different things. Saying that Red Hat 6.1 does worse on an application serving test doesn't mean that it's time for Bill the Gates to dance in his underware shouting "Victory!"; if RH61 had won, it wouldn't mean that it was time to throw the first (or last) shovel full of dirt on top of Windows. All it means is: Windows might be better at the particular task of serving applications. It's about finding those individual strengths, not culling the herd. Or at least, it ought to be.
The wacky world of depth. I still think a concept that is going to see its time come eventually is the 3d interface. Someone has already mentioned psDoom and the Doom System Administration Tool. At the time when the Doom SysAdmin program was on./ for the first time, someone mentioned that humans have a much better spacial memory than they do for abstract data like text or numbers. I don't remember the number for the pizza guy, but I never forget that the phone book sits next to the phone. We're used to reasoning with relation to spacial objects, knowing what sort of things should be where. A 3d interface doesn't require the sort of complex "jack in your nervous system" schlock that always emerges from Cyberpunk novels; for a lot of people, something like Doom would be good enough. Just post some signs on a wall or something. Moving from room to room in a building is intuitive; it's something we do every day of our lives, from a very young age. A 3d interface takes advantage of our natural inclination to use sight as our primary sense. Figuring out the 'theme' of a room or a location is much easier for most people than figuring out and recalling something abstract, like what files end up in what directory. It's worth some research, I think, and I hope people continue to look into it.
Gotcha. You (and anyone else reading this thread) might find interesting an essay contained in Thomas Merton's Zen and the Birds of Appettite that consists of a dialogue between Thomas Merton (A Catholic monk who lived in a monostary about an hour from my house and extensively studied the spiritual traditions of other faiths) and D.T Suzuki (possibly the biggest figure in Zen Buddhist scholarship in Japan and the West in the 20th century) concerning origins for a moral system in a religious tradition that lacks the idea of a creator or final judge. It stemmed from Merton's concerns about the moral implications of Zen claiming to go beyond the duality of good and evil, but Suzuki presents one of the best explanations of Buddhist morality that I have heard, relating morality not to the will of any being but to fundamental human nature. Merton also raises some great questions that challange the conventional understanding of non-theistic based moral systems. Haven't read Art of War myself, but Suzuki's arguments touch on themes very present in the Tao Te Ching (not to mention the Pali and Sanskrit Cannon). It might be worth a read.
I think your equation depends a lot on your view of what constitutes religion, and what constitutes spirituality. I would say that they are not necisarly the same thing, but I think that they are by no means mutually exclusive. And as for religion being a poor way to experience what you are describing as a spiritual experience, that may well be true- for you. The variety of experience and subjective nature implied by spirituality (which I guess I am by implication defining as being a more generalized feeling of wonder and reverence, sort of as you implied) demands that there be multiple ways of accessing it. For you it may well be that religion is a poor path to spirituality copmared to logical enquiry. A Sufi or a Zen monk might not agree with that. And they would be perfectly in the right too, from their experience of what constitutes spirituality.
As for the morals and religion linked comment, yeah, they are linked. There are a great many moral systems that are informed at some level by religious thought. There are general schemes of morality that are not explicitly based on a specific religious ethic, but in the fundamental assumptions that guide them, many of them are shaped by their religious environment. Is religion the sole arbiter of morality, and the sole source of moral wisdom and thought? Hell no. But morality is intimately linked to the ideals of almost every religious system, and there are a number of moral systems based almost exclusively on religion.
I am also curious why you find the association of religion with morality insulting. Can you elaborate on that?
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Re:That's only one definition
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Calculating God
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I think all of these posts would be referring to the Abrahamic tradition of God (Islam, Judaism, and Christianity). Greek, Hindu, and Buddhist concepts of gods in the plural have very little to do with that idea; they were imperfect, subject to the same foibles as humans, and in the case of Buddhist and Hindu gods, mortal (albeit with wicked long lifespans). Western philosophy tends to deal with the issue of divinity as it relates to the monotheistic "perfect God" idea of the Abrahamic traditions because, well, it's Western. Not true for Plato, of course, who was in the Greek polytheistic environment, but for all the more modern Western thinkers, polytheism and fallible divinity are at right angles to their reason, and tend to throw the whole thing into disaray.
Please don't take this as 'The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth', but the cycle of life is a complex system, it would be arrogant and I believe ultimatly stupid for us to tamper too much with it at our present level of technology. Perhaps a better way to say it is that the diverse and robust shall inherit the earth. Intense specialization and uniformity allows an organizsm to take advantage of a certain niche with great success. But when that niche is endangered or eliminated, the organism goes with it. Witness that organizms with the ability to both sexually and asexually reproduce usually reproduce asexually in times of abundant resources, and reproduce sexually when the situation becomes less certain. What things like the sickle cell/malaria link show vividly is that a diverse population that includes unplanned 'defects' in their genetic code has a much higher survivability than a genetically uniform population. When conditions change, a diverse population has higher odds of being able to withstand the change, because odds are somebody is going to have that one gene that lets them get by and carry on the line. Spending too much time guiding humans towards a specific ideal is nearsited, because it is based on the assumption that our needs and situation will not appreciably change in the conceavable future.
>Have they fought an all-out war, or has it been >that kind of push-pull border conflict? I was under the impression that at least some of the conflicts with Pakistan were at the level of full wars. I don't remember any exact dates, durations and numbers (which would be interesting to know), but I am fairly sure that there have been some straight on toe-to-toe battles fought over control of the border and Kashmir. As for the Vietnam reference, the politcol will would definately be different. There are years of enimity built up between the two, dating from the partition- much different than the US (I had a history teacher that claims that the US faired the way it did in the war was because the army couldn't get hyped up about trying to kill Ho Chi Min, who looked "like an Asian Santa Claus"). However, my main point was that despite the inequity of numbers, the ability to slip guerilla forces into the other teams camp and launch attacks from within can be devastating. Combine that with the fact that the odds are good that Pakistan could count on the support of certain radical Islamic groups inside India (which isn't to say that there aren't plenty of radical Hindus and Sikhs to go around too), India could have a real mess on its hands.
Well, I agree with the arogance part, but I seriously doubt that India will see the same return on their investment that the space program gave the US. I believe the six-to-one ratio was achieved primarily during the early missions, when the US had to invent a lot of totally novel technologies just to get the damn things off the ground and keep people alive and healthy for the flight. Return in new technology and techniques is bound to be high when you're attacking such totally new and foreign problems as the US was in the 60's. India, meanwhile, would be throwing itself at a problem that has already been solved. We got a lot of return on investment from building the first computers, like ENIAC. If you set out to build ENIAC today, you just get a piece of obsolete technology and a huge bill at Radio Shack. I have no doubts about the ability of the Indian technical community to build innovative technology, but I doubt that that much benefit would come from this project.
China is very concerned about a rise in Islamic nationalism within its borders. The history of the treatment of the Hui and Uighers by the PRC is rife with examples of moves made soley for the purpose of keeping Islamically-inspired uprisings or protest movements from gaining ground. The recent policy in China has actually been one of appeasement towards the Muslim minorities in a lot of areas. Chinese Muslims are offered special consideration educationally (lower admissions scores for Hui and other ethnic Muslims to top universities), and in some cases special funds so that they can eat a halal diet (pork is the cheapest and most readily available meat in China). Right now, they're worried not so much about Pakistan, but about the Taliban and other ultra-conservative, ultra-nationalistic strains of Islam. In previous years, it was Iran that had them scared, but that has eased as Iran has moderated its stance a little (witness Pres. Khattami's recent visit to China, where he was invited to visit mosques in Beijing). Pakistan itself is being increasingly influenced by Taliban-like groups (interesting article here), which makes it an indirect threat, but less of a direct problem for China.
Pakistan and India have fought eachother to a standstill before over borders and the like; the population difference hasn't really played in. Militarily, I'm not convinced that Pakistan is that much worse off than India. And India has do deal with much larger infrastructure and support issues than Pakistan, if only because of the geographical concerns. Pakistan has also been very effective at getting guerilla fighters across the border and behind the Indian lines. I seem to recall a certain small Southeast Asian nation throwing the US for a loop with similar capabilities. So the Pakistani threat doesn't start with nukes for India. Pakistan has also received a lot of military aid (including a lot from the United States during the cold war).
The phrase that was coined (I think in one of the old West End Star Wars RPG's) was that Star Wars described "A univese that's been lived in". It is without a doubt one of the things that set Star Wars apart, and one of the things sorely missing from Episode I. It's like the joke about artificial intelligence not being real until you can make a computer that acts neuroticlly and irrationally; digital special effects for sets and props won't cut it for atmosphere and realism until they can simulate not perfectly rendered fractal geometry plants and leaves, but the half-brown, mildly worm eaten and irregular plants that real people have in their front yards. A New Hope looked like people hanging out in the grimy bars and run-down frontier towns of the future; Episode I looked like a cartoon show.
I would imagine that the kid doesn't have a single major work to his name. Lucas stated publicly that he wanted a total unknown for the project, someone from outside the business.
I had some serious reliability problems with my Gateway laptop last year, and learned all about that bumpy reinstall process 5,6 or 7 times. If Gateway starts shipping Crusoe-based laptops, I'll worry less about the hit in processing power, and more about my hard drive bursting into flames every 4 months. It's great that they're willing to try and get out from under Intel by shipping AMD and Transmeta systems, but after the burn I took from them last time Dell is looking a lot better for a Windows machine.
For one thing, the increase in desktop and laptop performance across the board has increased the expectations for what a laptop can do. Consumers are no longer content to use ill-designed, unsupported, and generally flakey laptops just because they don't sit on a desk. The majority of senior management in my office doesn't have desktops- they have a laptop, and a docking station in the office. Laptops are increasingly fulfilling traditional desktop roles, and are a big deal with business users that travel and make off-site presentations. If Crusoe is a real drop in performance compared to a non-Crusoe laptop of comperable cost, the business world ain't gonna bite, and that's where a lot of the new money is.
Hmm, that wasn't what the Wired story seemed to be implying to me:
There is no evidence that IGI is working for a government client against Microsoft or its allies, however. Groups such as the United Way, GTE, the State Department and the state of Alaska have retained IGI in the past.
All that they were saying is that this PI agency has a lot of ties to the White House- which it does. The Clinton Administration has made use of them on numerous occasions, investigating whoever comes out of the woodwork this week to accuse Bill Clinton of being fellated by them. So it looks like Wired really did get the story ahead of the grey lady- they just didn't know it was Oracle.
BXXP is no more a replacement for TCP/IP than an API is a replacement for the underlying system. As the article said, the purpose of BXXP is to serve as a toolkit for the development of higher level protocals that can piggyback on the existing TCP/IP infrastructure. What it is there to do is to give developers a way to create new protocals for complex applications, without having to reinvent the wheel everytime they want to build a network aware app. It's a tool, so that every time you write network software you don't have to fiddle with low-level details of bitfields and error checking when you want to create a way to let multiple applications talk. I think the "replace HTTP" angle is being overemphasized. That doesn't seem to be the primary purpose of this tool- it has some uses that might be related to giving some new functionality over and above http, but it has a lot more flexible uses. Existing protocals are not appropriate for every application; if there is a good framework for building custom communications methods, why try and shoehorn a square into a circle.
I'm not sure that http is inadequite for what it was designed for; what I do know, as someone else mentioned (and right on, if I might add), is that http is one of the few protocals that has been greatly expanded and stretched out in the pursuit of new web apps. When you think about the fact that this protocal was designed to pump simpe, marked up text documents over the Internet, and that it now handles dynamically generated content, binaries, Java applets, and a whole passle of other technologies, it is a miracle that it has aged as well as it has. I would say that http does a good job of the basic work that it was designed for, and I doubt that it will dissapear from that too soon. But as networked applications grow more and more complex, http is going to be harder and harder pressed to adapt. Hopefully, simple apps will keep using the simple http protocal, and newer, more complex technologies will have access to a protocal framework with the power and flexability they need.
If you read down through the rest of the article, it mentioned that work was already underway to produce Apache support for BXXP. They estimated that there would be the version of Apache due out this fall would include support for BXXP.
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Oh, I agree that it would be irritating as hell. But what I was trying to talk about was the security aspect of it; by pinging, they aren't getting any information that isn't publicly available somewhere else. I have no doubt that people are being bothered by it; I don't like it when people call my house (not just sales calls; anyone ; ), but I don't unplug my phone either. The issue (or at least the one I was directing my comment at) was the security and "fair use", as the person I origonally replied to put it. I agree that their methods are irritating, but getting pinged or tracerouted is something that happens daily to a lot of systems; I know I've been known to throw a few packets at a host that catches my attention. I don't see a reason why this is more of a cause for concern than those regular Internet events.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
I'm not sure it even gives you that information.
Well, if you get a ping back, you know they're "not blocking ping packets" ; )
But your point is definately valid; from the standpoint of ping (or traceroute), there's no difference between a system that is blocking certain packets and one that has bought the farm. You're probably right that that information can be extracted somehow, but it would take more work. And it reinforces the idea that the threat posed by these guys pinging and tracerouting random systems poses roughly as much danger as a wrong number on the telephone ("Some stranger knows my phone number works! Run!").
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
The author seems to be assuming that every OS is targeted to the same market segment. With that line of rational, if Linux is trying to hit the same people as Mac, then yeah, it's doing pretty poor. But Mac is a near-total flop for a person who wants to tinker, build, destroy, and improve without shelling out for proprietary courses. I think that is the big issue right now with Linux, and its one that gets dodged in this article. Where is the platform headed? Is is to remain in the domain of servers and cool projects for tech hobbyists? Is there even that much interest in the community in targeting slapping a Linux box on every grandma's desktop on the planet? Mac does great at the market it has already picked out for itself. MS does the same, by and large (yeah, the irritate the hell out of me sometimes, and fall on their face, but so does everything else, once in a while). Linux is unique among these in that it has not clearly defined where it is going to sit in the OS world. A lot of people want to keep it as a hobbyists machine; lots of power, lots of experimentation, and more work for the end user. Some elements (especially the commercial distibutors) would like to see it become more of a business player, or a Joe & Jane home-user desktop product. No one knows right now. The criticisms in this article definately have some substance to them. I just wonder if some of them are based on the wrong criteria- like saying that a 12-gauge shot gun is a poor tool for making caserole.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
But, as BDR mentioned, the big labels control the infrastructure for widely distributing CD's. That means some small acts have to rely on MP3 only (or primary) distribution. In that case, it is very unlikely that MP3 distribution is going to boost CD sales; they simply don't have the capacity to get disks out to everywhere they need to go. As a result, all they can do is watch their MP3s get Dloaded for free, and hope a few people are kind enough to send cash. Shareware, basically. /., but my feeling is that most people just click.
As for the multi-millionare vs. working stiff thing. . . never seen it. Most people I know who have no reservations about downloading Brittany Spears also have no reservations about downloading the Baptist Death Ray, or the Velcro Pigmys, or any other small name band. A lot of ethics discussion goes on about it on
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
I don't really think that those two are comperable. Ping tells you almost nothing. It gives no information about level of security (except "not blocking ping packets"), and there is no implication that someone would "come in" if the door was unlocked. Ping checks if something exists or is alive; it's information that anyone could get by a lot of methods, and this is probably the most "polite" one. It isn't someone jiggling a door, by telnetting into another port and playing patty-cake with your daemons; it's someone looking at the sign on the door that says "The doctor is not dead".
No harm, no foul.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Case in point: If I'm teaching someone Linux, I have to teach them cd, and ls and what they do, and then get them to associate in memory that the utilities that reside on their machine are in /bin, and so on for every other command and important location. With a windowed interface, operations are a little simpler, but you still have to recall directory and folder locations, and how to drill down from one to another. If I teach a 3d interface, all I have to say is "these three keys make you walk; this button opens/uses something". I don't have to tell them that you get from one room to another by walking through a door, or that tools are in the garage and food is in the kitchen. As soon as they see with the room with the drill press that represents LaTeX and the chainsaw that is gcc hanging from the wall, they know where similar things are going to be stored. It lets people use their "real-world" reason on what is normally a very abstract system of representation.
And besides. . . for anyone who grew up in the last 20 years, nothing is more intuitive than a video game controller!
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Bringing humanity one step closer to achieving its ideal: Inspector Gadget.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
I don't think that benchmarking is about deciding what is the 'better' operating system (you know, the one with the big 'S' on its chest). Benchmarking for something like this is about testing several products at the same task, and finding which one is better for that task. In that way, benchmarking is a good step in accepting that different OS's are good at different things. Saying that Red Hat 6.1 does worse on an application serving test doesn't mean that it's time for Bill the Gates to dance in his underware shouting "Victory!"; if RH61 had won, it wouldn't mean that it was time to throw the first (or last) shovel full of dirt on top of Windows. All it means is: Windows might be better at the particular task of serving applications. It's about finding those individual strengths, not culling the herd.
Or at least, it ought to be.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
The wacky world of depth. I still think a concept that is going to see its time come eventually is the 3d interface. Someone has already mentioned psDoom and the Doom System Administration Tool. At the time when the Doom SysAdmin program was on ./ for the first time, someone mentioned that humans have a much better spacial memory than they do for abstract data like text or numbers. I don't remember the number for the pizza guy, but I never forget that the phone book sits next to the phone. We're used to reasoning with relation to spacial objects, knowing what sort of things should be where. A 3d interface doesn't require the sort of complex "jack in your nervous system" schlock that always emerges from Cyberpunk novels; for a lot of people, something like Doom would be good enough. Just post some signs on a wall or something. Moving from room to room in a building is intuitive; it's something we do every day of our lives, from a very young age. A 3d interface takes advantage of our natural inclination to use sight as our primary sense. Figuring out the 'theme' of a room or a location is much easier for most people than figuring out and recalling something abstract, like what files end up in what directory. It's worth some research, I think, and I hope people continue to look into it.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Gotcha. You (and anyone else reading this thread) might find interesting an essay contained in Thomas Merton's Zen and the Birds of Appettite that consists of a dialogue between Thomas Merton (A Catholic monk who lived in a monostary about an hour from my house and extensively studied the spiritual traditions of other faiths) and D.T Suzuki (possibly the biggest figure in Zen Buddhist scholarship in Japan and the West in the 20th century) concerning origins for a moral system in a religious tradition that lacks the idea of a creator or final judge. It stemmed from Merton's concerns about the moral implications of Zen claiming to go beyond the duality of good and evil, but Suzuki presents one of the best explanations of Buddhist morality that I have heard, relating morality not to the will of any being but to fundamental human nature. Merton also raises some great questions that challange the conventional understanding of non-theistic based moral systems. Haven't read Art of War myself, but Suzuki's arguments touch on themes very present in the Tao Te Ching (not to mention the Pali and Sanskrit Cannon). It might be worth a read.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
As for the morals and religion linked comment, yeah, they are linked. There are a great many moral systems that are informed at some level by religious thought. There are general schemes of morality that are not explicitly based on a specific religious ethic, but in the fundamental assumptions that guide them, many of them are shaped by their religious environment. Is religion the sole arbiter of morality, and the sole source of moral wisdom and thought? Hell no. But morality is intimately linked to the ideals of almost every religious system, and there are a number of moral systems based almost exclusively on religion.
I am also curious why you find the association of religion with morality insulting. Can you elaborate on that?
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
I think all of these posts would be referring to the Abrahamic tradition of God (Islam, Judaism, and Christianity). Greek, Hindu, and Buddhist concepts of gods in the plural have very little to do with that idea; they were imperfect, subject to the same foibles as humans, and in the case of Buddhist and Hindu gods, mortal (albeit with wicked long lifespans). Western philosophy tends to deal with the issue of divinity as it relates to the monotheistic "perfect God" idea of the Abrahamic traditions because, well, it's Western. Not true for Plato, of course, who was in the Greek polytheistic environment, but for all the more modern Western thinkers, polytheism and fallible divinity are at right angles to their reason, and tend to throw the whole thing into disaray.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Please don't take this as 'The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth', but the cycle of life is a complex system, it would be arrogant and I believe ultimatly stupid for us to tamper too much with it at our present level of technology.
Perhaps a better way to say it is that the diverse and robust shall inherit the earth. Intense specialization and uniformity allows an organizsm to take advantage of a certain niche with great success. But when that niche is endangered or eliminated, the organism goes with it. Witness that organizms with the ability to both sexually and asexually reproduce usually reproduce asexually in times of abundant resources, and reproduce sexually when the situation becomes less certain. What things like the sickle cell/malaria link show vividly is that a diverse population that includes unplanned 'defects' in their genetic code has a much higher survivability than a genetically uniform population. When conditions change, a diverse population has higher odds of being able to withstand the change, because odds are somebody is going to have that one gene that lets them get by and carry on the line. Spending too much time guiding humans towards a specific ideal is nearsited, because it is based on the assumption that our needs and situation will not appreciably change in the conceavable future.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
>Have they fought an all-out war, or has it been >that kind of push-pull border conflict?
I was under the impression that at least some of the conflicts with Pakistan were at the level of full wars. I don't remember any exact dates, durations and numbers (which would be interesting to know), but I am fairly sure that there have been some straight on toe-to-toe battles fought over control of the border and Kashmir.
As for the Vietnam reference, the politcol will would definately be different. There are years of enimity built up between the two, dating from the partition- much different than the US (I had a history teacher that claims that the US faired the way it did in the war was because the army couldn't get hyped up about trying to kill Ho Chi Min, who looked "like an Asian Santa Claus"). However, my main point was that despite the inequity of numbers, the ability to slip guerilla forces into the other teams camp and launch attacks from within can be devastating. Combine that with the fact that the odds are good that Pakistan could count on the support of certain radical Islamic groups inside India (which isn't to say that there aren't plenty of radical Hindus and Sikhs to go around too), India could have a real mess on its hands.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Well, I agree with the arogance part, but I seriously doubt that India will see the same return on their investment that the space program gave the US. I believe the six-to-one ratio was achieved primarily during the early missions, when the US had to invent a lot of totally novel technologies just to get the damn things off the ground and keep people alive and healthy for the flight. Return in new technology and techniques is bound to be high when you're attacking such totally new and foreign problems as the US was in the 60's. India, meanwhile, would be throwing itself at a problem that has already been solved. We got a lot of return on investment from building the first computers, like ENIAC. If you set out to build ENIAC today, you just get a piece of obsolete technology and a huge bill at Radio Shack. I have no doubts about the ability of the Indian technical community to build innovative technology, but I doubt that that much benefit would come from this project.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
China is very concerned about a rise in Islamic nationalism within its borders. The history of the treatment of the Hui and Uighers by the PRC is rife with examples of moves made soley for the purpose of keeping Islamically-inspired uprisings or protest movements from gaining ground. The recent policy in China has actually been one of appeasement towards the Muslim minorities in a lot of areas. Chinese Muslims are offered special consideration educationally (lower admissions scores for Hui and other ethnic Muslims to top universities), and in some cases special funds so that they can eat a halal diet (pork is the cheapest and most readily available meat in China). Right now, they're worried not so much about Pakistan, but about the Taliban and other ultra-conservative, ultra-nationalistic strains of Islam. In previous years, it was Iran that had them scared, but that has eased as Iran has moderated its stance a little (witness Pres. Khattami's recent visit to China, where he was invited to visit mosques in Beijing). Pakistan itself is being increasingly influenced by Taliban-like groups (interesting article here), which makes it an indirect threat, but less of a direct problem for China.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Pakistan and India have fought eachother to a standstill before over borders and the like; the population difference hasn't really played in. Militarily, I'm not convinced that Pakistan is that much worse off than India. And India has do deal with much larger infrastructure and support issues than Pakistan, if only because of the geographical concerns. Pakistan has also been very effective at getting guerilla fighters across the border and behind the Indian lines. I seem to recall a certain small Southeast Asian nation throwing the US for a loop with similar capabilities. So the Pakistani threat doesn't start with nukes for India. Pakistan has also received a lot of military aid (including a lot from the United States during the cold war).
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
The phrase that was coined (I think in one of the old West End Star Wars RPG's) was that Star Wars described "A univese that's been lived in". It is without a doubt one of the things that set Star Wars apart, and one of the things sorely missing from Episode I. It's like the joke about artificial intelligence not being real until you can make a computer that acts neuroticlly and irrationally; digital special effects for sets and props won't cut it for atmosphere and realism until they can simulate not perfectly rendered fractal geometry plants and leaves, but the half-brown, mildly worm eaten and irregular plants that real people have in their front yards. A New Hope looked like people hanging out in the grimy bars and run-down frontier towns of the future; Episode I looked like a cartoon show.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
I would imagine that the kid doesn't have a single major work to his name. Lucas stated publicly that he wanted a total unknown for the project, someone from outside the business.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
I had some serious reliability problems with my Gateway laptop last year, and learned all about that bumpy reinstall process 5,6 or 7 times. If Gateway starts shipping Crusoe-based laptops, I'll worry less about the hit in processing power, and more about my hard drive bursting into flames every 4 months. It's great that they're willing to try and get out from under Intel by shipping AMD and Transmeta systems, but after the burn I took from them last time Dell is looking a lot better for a Windows machine.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
For one thing, the increase in desktop and laptop performance across the board has increased the expectations for what a laptop can do. Consumers are no longer content to use ill-designed, unsupported, and generally flakey laptops just because they don't sit on a desk. The majority of senior management in my office doesn't have desktops- they have a laptop, and a docking station in the office. Laptops are increasingly fulfilling traditional desktop roles, and are a big deal with business users that travel and make off-site presentations. If Crusoe is a real drop in performance compared to a non-Crusoe laptop of comperable cost, the business world ain't gonna bite, and that's where a lot of the new money is.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
BXXP is no more a replacement for TCP/IP than an API is a replacement for the underlying system. As the article said, the purpose of BXXP is to serve as a toolkit for the development of higher level protocals that can piggyback on the existing TCP/IP infrastructure. What it is there to do is to give developers a way to create new protocals for complex applications, without having to reinvent the wheel everytime they want to build a network aware app. It's a tool, so that every time you write network software you don't have to fiddle with low-level details of bitfields and error checking when you want to create a way to let multiple applications talk. I think the "replace HTTP" angle is being overemphasized. That doesn't seem to be the primary purpose of this tool- it has some uses that might be related to giving some new functionality over and above http, but it has a lot more flexible uses. Existing protocals are not appropriate for every application; if there is a good framework for building custom communications methods, why try and shoehorn a square into a circle.
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Man I love mixing metaphors. .
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
I'm not sure that http is inadequite for what it was designed for; what I do know, as someone else mentioned (and right on, if I might add), is that http is one of the few protocals that has been greatly expanded and stretched out in the pursuit of new web apps. When you think about the fact that this protocal was designed to pump simpe, marked up text documents over the Internet, and that it now handles dynamically generated content, binaries, Java applets, and a whole passle of other technologies, it is a miracle that it has aged as well as it has.
I would say that http does a good job of the basic work that it was designed for, and I doubt that it will dissapear from that too soon. But as networked applications grow more and more complex, http is going to be harder and harder pressed to adapt. Hopefully, simple apps will keep using the simple http protocal, and newer, more complex technologies will have access to a protocal framework with the power and flexability they need.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
If you read down through the rest of the article, it mentioned that work was already underway to produce Apache support for BXXP. They estimated that there would be the version of Apache due out this fall would include support for BXXP.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"