Moore's law is that computing power doubles every eighteen months. At the same time, parallel processing and distributed computation ( Cosm & Distributed.net) are becoming increasingly common. This leads to an abundance of cheap computing power, enabling brute force attacks on secure systems. In light of these developments, do you see username/password pairs being replaced by anything more resistant to such brute computing force?
life's beginning is confused with human life's
on
Planet Gattaca
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· Score: 3
People tend to get bent out of shape not because this proposes to synthesize bacterial life, but because they fear that this will eventually lead to being able to synthesize human life from raw chemicals. People further vaguely worry that synthesizing human life would remove the distinction between animal and human, life and non-life, and rationalize all sorts of non-ethical things. However, they're wrong, and organized religion already has agreed with me. First, the worry, then the reassurance.
The uninformed worry goes something like this: if you believe there is no clear demarcation between an adult and an infant, infant and a fetus, a fetus and an embryo, embryo and a zygote, and scientists are able to synthesize a zygote from pure chemicals, it's only a few more assumptions to get to the conclusion that humans are just complex probablistic automata, not worthy of special value or consideration above insects.
However, the problem with this unfocused anxiety which Katz shows signs of, but fails to properly examine, is that it makes fundamental assumptions which are not proven, or even likely. The flaw is that if the components of life are deterministically constructed, it is still possible to believe in a human soul, in a self with free will, and all the special value and ethical considerations that human life is due. All you have to do is read GEB (Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid) by Douglas R Hofstadter.
Religion long ago agreed with the GEB premise (or a parallel one) when it accepted evolution (even guided by God, which also doesn't imply a lack of free will). Evolution is exactly the same type of (probablistic) process that chemically constructing a human is, so it doesn't follow that synthetic people don't have souls in just the same way that evolution does not imply that all humans are mere selfless animals. The religious advisors know that, but the common lay people like Katz never got wise to the deeper meaning of the earlier debate on evolution.
You raise another interesting point. All the genes won't be changed all at once. Kids won't go from regular to perfect in one straight shot. Each gene modified will effectively repeat the procedure, and add to the cost and difficulty accordingly. So few people will bother unless it is for individual genes causing birth defects and genetic diseases. A procedure to turn a gargoyle into a supermodel would require a slew of genes, and a truckload of cash. So a society of Morlocks and Eloi can't immediately emerge, for instance.
Actually, Huxley's world maximized contentment, not happiness. There's a difference. And he made an assumption which may render his prediction invalid.
What does our society tends to maximize? I think our free-wheeling capitalism espouses to maximize production and profit. In such an environment, what are the ramifications of the introduction of genetic engineering? In the short term, production and profit would definitely be maximized by a populace of content workers, as in Brave New World. However, in the long run production and profit are maximized by scientific innovation, which comes out of discontent, creativity, and freedom.
The question we have to ask ourselves about whether to fear genetic engineering or not is whether or not our society is short-sighted.
Actually, rather than criticizing the genetic engineering of infants, which is bound to happen, he should focus on the ramifications.
If the next generation is engineered to be nearer to perfection, what will happen to those now living? Gene-therapy on adults will only have limited ability to reorder cells, so adults can't modify themselves much. Those children of the next generation and present generations who are not engineered will get all kinds of discrimination, by insurance companies unwilling to pay for their greater health care costs, by schools and corporations who are unwilling to accept lesser candidates when newer, more perfect ones are available.
Personally, I'm brushing up on my janitorial skills for when the next generation of software engineers are gene engineered from Linux Kernel hackers and the inventor of LISP, with the looks of supermodels.
In order to seamlessly integrate Gnome and KDE apps, the KDE and Gnome themes of the apps have to match. His telling remark that the themes would probably never be compatible is annoying. It would be a pain to write a theme editor which saved everything as both formats, and a unified theme installer/selector. Especially if the each format is a moving target.
Linux developers constantly site the cross-pollination between BSD and Linux as an asset. The fact that the KDE-Gnome camps do not share this cooperative spirit of innovation is beyond annoying to users. Standard theme formats is just the tip of the iceberg.
I don't want geek merchandise for Christmas, because I could never wait to recieve what I want when it's already out. (it'd be obsolete)
However, a bottle of Syrah (Shiraz) wine and someone to share it with, now that's a far different story. Ah, a woman who can explain the finer points of UML diagram to XMI to stub code translation after a few glasses of wine is *the* geek gift for me.
I know you guys have been working with Gnome to standardize a lot of things, but do you ever forsee a time when there will be either a standard API or abstraction layer that will allow application developers to write one app that will be either KDE or Gnome depending on the user's setup?
Organic food in the US (at least in south eastern Michigan) is available, but it's not really common. Some big grocery stores (VG's, of Spartan stores chain) have organic sections, but they're rather small, and you can't buy all your staples there. The best bet is Food Co-ops, such as my local People's Food Co-op which a lot of college towns have. Mainstream america, removed from places like that, generally don't have access or information on organic foods.
One of the advantages to a national repository is that researchers or programs can flag correlations that might otherwise get unnoticed. For instance, if people on a certain drug all develop arthritis, perhaps a clinical trial is called for. If a certain city has a much higher incidence of cancer, perhaps there's a contaminant in the water. This is especially useful for bizzarre combinations which aren't tested in drug trials. For instance, everyone who's on 5 unrelated drugs, might get symptoms that normal test subjects won't.
> The human race becomes homogeneous, boring and > culturally unified. Genetic engineering has > eliminated disease, prolonged life and destroyed > biological individuality. I disagree completely. Look at the individuality people express in clothes and cosmetic appearances. I think genetic engineering will lead to a wealth of individual expression.
For instance, what if you could have purple eyes? Naturally purple hair? Feline eyes? Elf-like ears? Gills? Optimize your body for a particular sport? Few would pick to conform to one homogeneous physical standard, when it is commonplace and easily attainable.
Want information on a particular topic on the web? Use a search engine or webbot. Monitor changes to the search results, and bring new matches (with high confidences) to your attention as they're found. Or better yet, use a weblog such as Slashdot or Memepool, devoted to your specific interests and quirky character. As Slashdot style weblogs become more prolific, you'll be able to find a niche one for you.
Ok, that's Clotho for the web. But his first part was all about the increasing complexity of devices and technology in general. Clotho, even as he's proposed it, doesn't do squat to make the controls on your car simpler as new features such as GPS, route finding systems, and night-vision enhanced windshields cause your car's dash to resemble an F-16's cockpit.
He's set up a scary demonized general problem, come up with a glorified vision of a solution to a very specific aspect of the problem, which already exists but is not in common use, then he proceeds to make wild predictions. He should run for office. Standard political tactic.
Havoc sounds kinda hostile towards Enlightenment, and the library it's based on, Imlib. I wonder why.
His comment about needing to pick a default window manager which they have more control over is disturbing. And why replace Imlib? It seems great to me.
Anyone familiar with the merits of gtk-pixbuf know why?
I interned for the evil empire last summer and I've got a semi-funny story. Everyone has two machines (slow one for e-mail, fast one for work) there so I installed Linux as my e-mail machine (because Outlook was too slow on my bottom-of-the-pecking-order e-mail machine). All kinds of geeks came out of the woodwork and wanted to play with Enlightenment and my other stuff. A couple guys got accounts to run scripts on it. One clueless manager guy said, "Are you *allowed* to use Linux?", I told him yes, definitely (i had no idea). His next question was, "Do you think I should?" I again told him yes. After I left, I heard he tried to do so, and managed to munge his system. The tech support guys who had to fix it reported it, and got him in trouble for 'undermining the corporate confidence and solidarity'. They came out with an anti-Linux internal use policy as a result, at least for that department.
Now that I think about it, the hardware for digital cellular reciever towers to get your signal from phone to internet might not be standard modem pool types. It could be built into the digital cellular reciever towers themselves. Does anyone have information on that?
Infeasible due to technical and financial reality
on
SprintPCS privacy
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· Score: 1
I think your fears are unfounded. It'd be a technical miracle to pull this off, and it'd hardly be worth the effort.
First, the modem pool you dial into needs to have hardware extensions (i.e. few modems have this) that support caller ID (I believe it is not possible to software emulate this, though the specs are beyond me).
Second, the modem pool needs to have some software like cid which will read the phone number. Not very common stuff.
Third, the most feasible way to use this information, would be for the ISP to log your phone number associated with what websites you hit, and with what frequency. Telemarketing is only profitable if they're making local (free) calls, so a local ISP (or a geographic regional subset of a larger ISP's log) would only be able to sell the phone numbers to geo-centric commercial sites, like local area stores. What kind of local area stores do you know with web sites, let alone the resources to buy these hypothetical logs and the tendency to use telemarketing? That's pretty bizarre set of coincidences necessary for your privacy to be violated. -Steve
I hope Corel throws some coders Debian's way. They're package management system has lagged behind Red Hat's due to lack of developers for a while.
I sure hope they help the whole community *and* themselves with developers, rather than trying to make only proprietary add-ons that duplicate competing (free or commercial) versions. Muscle like Corel's got could easily fractionalize demand/enthusiasm.
Would people who submit good articles...
on
Moderation Ideas
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· Score: 1
Would people who submit good articles be worthy of increased Karma? This is similar to people who meta-moderation has flagged as discerning judges of comment worth being given better karma. If a person is a good judge of an article's interest level, they're likely to be good at judging comments.
The temptation is to make Karma the "reward" for being a good community member, and not just a measure of how good your comments usually are. Or are they the same thing?
Re:Karma Feedback leads to Nirvana
on
Moderation Ideas
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· Score: 1
Whups. How do you navigate to stuff like that? Or is that a document that you get the URL when you're picked to be a moderator? I'd been looking for that very thing.
Karma Feedback leads to Nirvana
on
Moderation Ideas
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· Score: 2
How's this for an idea, if a user's comments are consistantly moderated as good, then new ones default to being rated good, until moderated elsewise. Same idea for a bad user's comments, as long as there is still some hope of an anomolous good comment by a bad user getting to the masses. It could be as simple as the default value for your comment being the arithmetic average of past comments (within limits), or it could be more complex.
I'm leery of internet appliances, just like I'm leery of game consoles. I'm leery of all specialized home-use computers. If you have an internet appliance, a game console, a desktop publishing machine, etc. they add up to greater cost then just buying one real computer, and you have the ability to use it for new things later. Plus, most of those systems are closed. I can't hack my game N64 to use cheat codes, I have to buy some goofy gadget to do it for me. I can't freely upgrade my web box to the newest Netscape, I have to buy a goofy card. I don't have good reasons for my fears, just vague worries. Opinions?
Also, Every time I post an article, when I reload, it's been posted by someone else. I think they're going to start filtering me out soon.:) Happened with this one.
X is great and everything, but it's pretty old. If you had an infinite number of monkeys, and they were going to start over on X, what would you want them to do differently? Or, put another way, what is on the top of your wish list of things to change in X?
Check out http://www.kt.opensrc.org/ Issue #21 and later. Journalled File systems are probably going to make it into Linux 2.4, but it may not necessarily be XFS. Stephen C. Tweedie's been whipping up something (ext3?) that is arguably better, as it's likely going to end up lighter weight. On a related note, reiserfs will definitely be in 2.4, as it works fine with 2.3.
Slashdot Mirror
Moore's law is that computing power doubles every eighteen months. At the same time, parallel processing and distributed computation ( Cosm & Distributed.net) are becoming increasingly common. This leads to an abundance of cheap computing power, enabling brute force attacks on secure systems. In light of these developments, do you see username/password pairs being replaced by anything more resistant to such brute computing force?
People tend to get bent out of shape not because this proposes to synthesize bacterial life, but because they fear that this will eventually lead to being able to synthesize human life from raw chemicals. People further vaguely worry that synthesizing human life would remove the distinction between animal and human, life and non-life, and rationalize all sorts of non-ethical things. However, they're wrong, and organized religion already has agreed with me. First, the worry, then the reassurance.
The uninformed worry goes something like this: if you believe there is no clear demarcation between an adult and an infant, infant and a fetus, a fetus and an embryo, embryo and a zygote, and scientists are able to synthesize a zygote from pure chemicals, it's only a few more assumptions to get to the conclusion that humans are just complex probablistic automata, not worthy of special value or consideration above insects.
However, the problem with this unfocused anxiety which Katz shows signs of, but fails to properly examine, is that it makes fundamental assumptions which are not proven, or even likely. The flaw is that if the components of life are deterministically constructed, it is still possible to believe in a human soul, in a self with free will, and all the special value and ethical considerations that human life is due. All you have to do is read GEB (Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid) by Douglas R Hofstadter.
Religion long ago agreed with the GEB premise (or a parallel one) when it accepted evolution (even guided by God, which also doesn't imply a lack of free will). Evolution is exactly the same type of (probablistic) process that chemically constructing a human is, so it doesn't follow that synthetic people don't have souls in just the same way that evolution does not imply that all humans are mere selfless animals. The religious advisors know that, but the common lay people like Katz never got wise to the deeper meaning of the earlier debate on evolution.
You raise another interesting point. All the genes won't be changed all at once. Kids won't go from regular to perfect in one straight shot. Each gene modified will effectively repeat the procedure, and add to the cost and difficulty accordingly. So few people will bother unless it is for individual genes causing birth defects and genetic diseases. A procedure to turn a gargoyle into a supermodel would require a slew of genes, and a truckload of cash. So a society of Morlocks and Eloi can't immediately emerge, for instance.
Actually, Huxley's world maximized contentment, not happiness. There's a difference. And he made an assumption which may render his prediction invalid.
What does our society tends to maximize? I think our free-wheeling capitalism espouses to maximize production and profit. In such an environment, what are the ramifications of the introduction of genetic engineering? In the short term, production and profit would definitely be maximized by a populace of content workers, as in Brave New World. However, in the long run production and profit are maximized by scientific innovation, which comes out of discontent, creativity, and freedom.
The question we have to ask ourselves about whether to fear genetic engineering or not is whether or not our society is short-sighted.
Actually, rather than criticizing the genetic engineering of infants, which is bound to happen, he should focus on the ramifications.
If the next generation is engineered to be nearer to perfection, what will happen to those now living? Gene-therapy on adults will only have limited ability to reorder cells, so adults can't modify themselves much. Those children of the next generation and present generations who are not engineered will get all kinds of discrimination, by insurance companies unwilling to pay for their greater health care costs, by schools and corporations who are unwilling to accept lesser candidates when newer, more perfect ones are available.
Personally, I'm brushing up on my janitorial skills for when the next generation of software engineers are gene engineered from Linux Kernel hackers and the inventor of LISP, with the looks of supermodels.
In order to seamlessly integrate Gnome and KDE apps, the KDE and Gnome themes of the apps have to match. His telling remark that the themes would probably never be compatible is annoying. It would be a pain to write a theme editor which saved everything as both formats, and a unified theme installer/selector. Especially if the each format is a moving target.
Linux developers constantly site the cross-pollination between BSD and Linux as an asset. The fact that the KDE-Gnome camps do not share this cooperative spirit of innovation is beyond annoying to users. Standard theme formats is just the tip of the iceberg.
I don't want geek merchandise for Christmas, because I could never wait to recieve what I want when it's already out. (it'd be obsolete)
However, a bottle of Syrah (Shiraz) wine and someone to share it with, now that's a far different story. Ah, a woman who can explain the finer points of UML diagram to XMI to stub code translation after a few glasses of wine is *the* geek gift for me.
I know you guys have been working with Gnome to standardize a lot of things, but do you ever forsee a time when there will be either a standard API or abstraction layer that will allow application developers to write one app that will be either KDE or Gnome depending on the user's setup?
For future reference JP, slashdot frowns on posting anonymously.
Organic food in the US (at least in south eastern Michigan) is available, but it's not really common.
Some big grocery stores (VG's, of Spartan stores chain) have organic sections, but they're rather small, and you can't buy all your staples there. The best bet is Food Co-ops, such as my local People's Food Co-op which a lot of college towns have. Mainstream america, removed from places like that, generally don't have access or information on organic foods.
One of the advantages to a national repository is that researchers or programs can flag correlations that might otherwise get unnoticed. For instance, if people on a certain drug all develop arthritis, perhaps a clinical trial is called for. If a certain city has a much higher incidence of cancer, perhaps there's a contaminant in the water. This is especially useful for bizzarre combinations which aren't tested in drug trials. For instance, everyone who's on 5 unrelated drugs, might get symptoms that normal test subjects won't.
> The human race becomes homogeneous, boring and > culturally unified. Genetic engineering has > eliminated disease, prolonged life and destroyed > biological individuality.
I disagree completely. Look at the individuality people express in clothes and cosmetic appearances. I think genetic engineering will lead to a wealth of individual expression.
For instance, what if you could have purple eyes? Naturally purple hair? Feline eyes? Elf-like ears? Gills? Optimize your body for a particular sport? Few would pick to conform to one homogeneous physical standard, when it is commonplace and easily attainable.
Want information on a particular topic on the web? Use a search engine or webbot. Monitor changes to the search results, and bring new matches (with high confidences) to your attention as they're found. Or better yet, use a weblog such as Slashdot or Memepool, devoted to your specific interests and quirky character. As Slashdot style weblogs become more prolific, you'll be able to find a niche one for you.
Ok, that's Clotho for the web. But his first part was all about the increasing complexity of devices and technology in general. Clotho, even as he's proposed it, doesn't do squat to make the controls on your car simpler as new features such as GPS, route finding systems, and night-vision enhanced windshields cause your car's dash to resemble an F-16's cockpit.
He's set up a scary demonized general problem, come up with a glorified vision of a solution to a very specific aspect of the problem, which already exists but is not in common use, then he proceeds to make wild predictions. He should run for office. Standard political tactic.
Havoc sounds kinda hostile towards Enlightenment, and the library it's based on, Imlib. I wonder why.
His comment about needing to pick a default window manager which they have more control over is disturbing. And why replace Imlib? It seems great to me.
Anyone familiar with the merits of gtk-pixbuf know why?
I interned for the evil empire last summer and I've got a semi-funny story. Everyone has two machines (slow one for e-mail, fast one for work) there so I installed Linux as my e-mail machine (because Outlook was too slow on my bottom-of-the-pecking-order e-mail machine). All kinds of geeks came out of the woodwork and wanted to play with Enlightenment and my other stuff. A couple guys got accounts to run scripts on it. One clueless manager guy said, "Are you *allowed* to use Linux?", I told him yes, definitely (i had no idea). His next question was, "Do you think I should?" I again told him yes. After I left, I heard he tried to do so, and managed to munge his system. The tech support guys who had to fix it reported it, and got him in trouble for 'undermining the corporate confidence and solidarity'. They came out with an anti-Linux internal use policy as a result, at least for that department.
Now that I think about it, the hardware for digital cellular reciever towers to get your signal from phone to internet might not be standard modem pool types. It could be built into the digital cellular reciever towers themselves. Does anyone have information on that?
I think your fears are unfounded. It'd be a technical miracle to pull this off, and it'd hardly be worth the effort.
First, the modem pool you dial into needs to have hardware extensions (i.e. few modems have this) that support caller ID (I believe it is not possible to software emulate this, though the specs are beyond me).
Second, the modem pool needs to have some software like cid which will read the phone number. Not very common stuff.
Third, the most feasible way to use this information, would be for the ISP to log your phone number associated with what websites you hit, and with what frequency. Telemarketing is only profitable if they're making local (free) calls, so a local ISP (or a geographic regional subset of a larger ISP's log) would only be able to sell the phone numbers to geo-centric commercial sites, like local area stores. What kind of local area stores do you know with web sites, let alone the resources to buy these hypothetical logs and the tendency to use telemarketing? That's pretty bizarre set of coincidences necessary for your privacy to be violated.
-Steve
I hope Corel throws some coders Debian's way. They're package management system has lagged behind Red Hat's due to lack of developers for a while.
I sure hope they help the whole community *and* themselves with developers, rather than trying to make only proprietary add-ons that duplicate competing (free or commercial) versions. Muscle like Corel's got could easily fractionalize demand/enthusiasm.
Would people who submit good articles be worthy of increased Karma? This is similar to people who meta-moderation has flagged as discerning judges of comment worth being given better karma. If a person is a good judge of an article's interest level, they're likely to be good at judging comments.
The temptation is to make Karma the "reward" for being a good community member, and not just a measure of how good your comments usually are. Or are they the same thing?
Whups. How do you navigate to stuff like that? Or is that a document that you get the URL when you're picked to be a moderator? I'd been looking for that very thing.
How's this for an idea, if a user's comments are consistantly moderated as good, then new ones default to being rated good, until moderated elsewise. Same idea for a bad user's comments, as long as there is still some hope of an anomolous good comment by a bad user getting to the masses.
It could be as simple as the default value for your comment being the arithmetic average of past comments (within limits), or it could be more complex.
Luck it's Linux, so it can be administered remotely. If slashdot effect crashes something, it's nice to be able to remotely get it to reboot.
I'm leery of internet appliances, just like I'm leery of game consoles. I'm leery of all specialized home-use computers. If you have an internet appliance, a game console, a desktop publishing machine, etc. they add up to greater cost then just buying one real computer, and you have the ability to use it for new things later. Plus, most of those systems are closed. I can't hack my game N64 to use cheat codes, I have to buy some goofy gadget to do it for me. I can't freely upgrade my web box to the newest Netscape, I have to buy a goofy card. I don't have good reasons for my fears, just vague worries. Opinions?
:) Happened with this one.
Also, Every time I post an article, when I reload, it's been posted by someone else. I think they're going to start filtering me out soon.
X is great and everything, but it's pretty old. If you had an infinite number of monkeys, and they were going to start over on X, what would you want them to do differently? Or, put another way, what is on the top of your wish list of things to change in X?
Check out http://www.kt.opensrc.org/
Issue #21 and later.
Journalled File systems are probably going to make it into Linux 2.4, but it may not necessarily be XFS. Stephen C. Tweedie's been whipping up something (ext3?) that is arguably better, as it's likely going to end up lighter weight. On a related note, reiserfs will definitely be in 2.4, as it works fine with 2.3.