As soon as China opens up the Great Firewall of China and adopts a free and open access to information and communications policy, with no "jail-time" benefits for curiosity or initiative.
I don't think the computing world is ready for this yet, and it may never be a good idea.
Internationalization in software and operating systems is in a horrible state of excess complexity right now. When everything top to bottom runs unicode UTF8 as its default mode, then MAYBE.
But even then, there is a single language for Aviation communications (happens to be English) but that is done so that there is some hope that everyone will know what everyone is talking about, because everyone can learn the aviation subset of a single natural language.
Also, most programming languages retain a small set of keywords in a single natural language, so that most people will have a chance of learning that small set.
Simplicity-and-universality-first arguments maybe should win the day for domain names too.
"Nationalized" domain names are one more step in the very unfortunate trend toward balkanization of the Internet. The Internet is to some extent and should continue to be one place where all people around the world start working and communicating and trading and problem solving together. A Lingua Franca is clearly needed if this is to remain true.
I would like to see an OS that maintains several rings (concentric circles) into which programs can qualify through increasingly rigourous standards and testing as they get closer to the central core ring of software.
So essentially this OS would have a core ring of whitelisted and essential programs. Just outside this would be a 2nd ring of whitelisted but optional programs.
Then a ring of "grey listed" (reputationally vouched for, for both security and usefulness and quality)
Followed by a "wild west" outer ring.
The OS would be designed so that programs in a more outer (less trusted, and less essential) ring, could not have any access to the memory or disk areas of more inner programs, and could only ever use the services of inner programs through narrow public interfaces supervised by the OS.
I would say you need a short-text-message introduction protocol backed by a reputation network as the only way of starting a new communication between unintroduced parties.
Introductions should have to include a category for the nature of the communication, chosen from a small standard ontology. This could serve to tag or bucket the intro short-messages for systematic review separate from looking at my established correspondents messages.
You need digital signature based sender identity confirmation. Made as easy to use as current email for the sender and recipient.
One core idea that it espouses is: Encourage the initial symptoms rather than suppress them. For some infections and injuries, this makes eminent sense.
Let me give two examples:
Example 1. Getting a cold or other respiratory virus. Basic homeopathic advice: In the very initial stages, encourage coughing,sneezing, nose blowing, and drink lots of fluids so you can have a productive cough and nose-blowing.
Doesn't it make sense to facilitate the body's own defense mechanisms that are attempting to rid the body of virus particles?
Sure, after a few days, further coughing is likely starting to get destructive of lung tissue, but for the first day, cough and nose-blow as much as your body wants to and even a little more. Seems to work for me, but I know the plural of anecdote is not data.
Example 2: You injure a joint. It swells up. Ok, maybe it makes sense to reduce the swelling with ice, but the swelling, and the pain, is there to tell you something, and that is: Don't move me more and cause further injury. Taking pain medication and ice then "soldiering on" in whatever physical activity you are doing is going to exacerbate the injury. So feel the pain, and respect what the damaged part is telling you.
For either case, there is no reason the efficacy of the strategy I mentioned could not be scientifically tested.
The fact that a lot of medical research is funded by pharmaceutical companies means that homeopathic or alternative remedies are unlikely to receive scientific examination even if their practitioners wanted it done.
Put these things to a proper test, I say. Fund it through public health funding. I am almost certain that some homeopathic techniques will pass muster.
Hey does anyone have some bomb making instructions so we can go after the server farms where they operate this system from?
Me and my friends who stand in front of logging trucks trying to save the last vestiges of natural eco-systems are already labelled certified eco-terrorists, so what is there to lose?
Me and my friends who oppose global free trade organizations before global high environmental and labour standards are in place are already labeled dangerous anarchists.
Noam Chomsky is now a known associate of Osama Dustbin Laden, so I guess he's toast.
George Bush is a competent barbecue-steak-flipper from Texas who through the magic of owned media, owned judges, transnational corporate power, and cultural self-hypnosis has become the ultimate example of the Peter Principle.
I'm working on a theory that ridicule is the most effective weapon against the current United States regime. I spit in your general direction, U.S. pig dogs. (with no disrespect meant to pigs or dogs.)
My GPS coordinates: 38 degrees 53' 50.76"" N 77 degrees 02' 11.79"" W
Your content file would only be measured if you explicitly opted it in to the technical system for measuring, say by providing a copy of it with a claim to copyright attached to a central web service for receiving those claims. There would have to be a good way of verifying the copyright claims, and a dispute resolution mechanism built in.
If you did not opt your content in, nothing would track its travels in some kind of disturbing orwellian fashion.
Users of such content would also be made aware of the general tracking of "commercial" content going on, but in any case the tracking would be at central net nodes, and wouldn't provide insights into what individual people/households were watching. At most, we might learn of a strange Bjork-fan cluster in Cleveland, or something equally disturbing, but that's about it.
Actually, an overarching broadband fee which would be shared out among copyright holders might be the most sensible way to deal with this whole mess. And not just in sweden.
Why not put in systems that measure, based on statistical sampling at some representative routers, a rough idea of the number of copies of content item x,y, or z that are making their way across the net at any given moment, then average that out over a week, say, and use that figure to determine the weekly share of the copyright tax.
This is essentially a financial reward for providing popular content to the masses.
We may have to get over our high-minded view of our cultural tastes, when we see how much of the take is going to the pr0nographers, but if that's the way it is, then that's the way it is. Let's just hope the artists are being compensated fairly, and middle-persons aren't taking the lion's share of the loot.
I think a system like this could support artists of all kinds quite well, without the need for a corporate distribution channel, and it could also end the police takedowns of 12 year old copy-criminal-masterminds.
On reviewing the demo, it would seem that the untrusted i.e. frequently changed sections are essentially the sections that people care about or (in our present society) have more knowledge about or insight into, so people want to tweak those sections.
So ironically, the algorithm will flag as untrustworthy the most relevant sections of articles. The "don't know - don't care" parts will be virgin white and pure.
They might be somewhat correlated, on a statistical basis, over many cases, but there are many individual cases and times when the currently popular view is wrong and the lone wolf opinions are later proven to have been correct.
This algorithm would seem to be more of a popularity contest than a truth finder. I think we have to be very wary of the truth by mass agreement theory.
Hint: Remember the "weapons of mass delusion" ? I bet someone commenting that the US government is lying through their teeth about it would have been re-edited pretty quick.
Also, knowing those ENTJ, INTP etc personality types and how to work with different personalities and workstyles (including your own), is useful.
Basic leadership principles like consistency, taking responsibility, listening to concerns, and giving people real reasons to be motivated and happy to come to work. Learning to let go and trusting that your team really does amplify your own work output if you let them do the things they know how to do, and support them.
Be firm and focussed, and demand that, when required, but lighten up and keep it a fun place to work cooperatively. Don't micromanage everyone, and don't set artificial and ridiculous targets just for the sake of appearing organized or in control.
Aren't George and Dick the ones turning you (at least some of your compatriots) into paranoid, belligerent, might I say racist, morons.
Just know that if the U.S. declares unilateral war on Iran, the US will have officially jumped the shark, and deserves whatever it gets, whether merely merciless mockery, or more.
And no, I have no affiliation with Iranians except that they are people, like I am, and you are. Shake yourselves out of your propaganda sleepwalk, American zombies.
I know when I'm faced with a bewildering array of different licenses that I can't keep track of, I just download the software, use it, and get on with the rest of my day.
At a certain level of complexity, all you can do is zone out. I don't have time to become an intellectual property lawyer at night school.
So yeah, radical simplification of the situation would be a good thing for all concerned.
Re:Why doesn't linux come "closed" out of the box
on
Hardening Linux
·
· Score: 1
The point is, if most distros really did come really closed by default, there wouldn't be much need for expert articles telling us how to harden them, would there.
Why doesn't linux come "closed" out of the box
on
Hardening Linux
·
· Score: 1
i.e. with all ports closed and all services off, then take the installing user through some wizards with a few different, and mostly conservative, minimalist options for opening things up, explaining the cost-benefit of the options.
I suppose it's just inertia combined with Unix/Linux's pre-internet-malevolence origins. The whole idea originally was for a number of socially responsible researchers to have their computers maximally cooperating with each other (go figure). It wasn't designed with human viruses (malicious crackers) in mind at the get-go.
But we've had net morons long enough now that you'd think a closed and incrementally open up policy would be a no-brainer for the default installations of net-facing OSes like Linux.
The reasons for supporting xhtml (more uniformity of expression, simpler parsers etc) are still as valid as ever.
Why not drive people to an xhtml 2 or 3 or whatever by including the advanced content type tags in a new xhtml standard.
When it comes to syntax standards, less often really is more. Simpler grammar, more expressive vocabulary is the way to go. Complex grammar + large vocabulary just means hard to parse and to understand.
Doh! Writing comments that aren't designed to be read. Yes, that makes a great deal of sense.
According to psychology studies: - Shorter line lengths result in increased comprehension. - The optimal number of characters per line is between 45 and 65.
I would say that comprehensibility is important in code comments, and code comments are just as important as the code.
The multiverse substrate of the universe is like a whole bunch of registers holding entangled qubits. The universe is a subset of the states of those things that exhibits some kind of consistency that allows one subregion of it to observe and affect another subregion of that statespace. Spacetime is the bounds of the phenomenologically self-consistent subspace of the statespace. Quantum observations are observations of the interface between the self-consistent subspace and surrouunding not-necessarily-consistent states. The present moment is by analogy the massively parallel "program counter" that is somehow, from the point of view of denizens of the subspace, the boundary of self-consistent states and states whose consistency with the subspace has not been evaluated yet. Energy is the key mystery. It is how "adjacent" states observe and influence each other, and its flow is what is constrained by the phenomenological consistency.
Ok, so what do we know? Lifeforms reproduce themselves, patterning surrounding matter and energy into more of their own form.
Over several billions of years, natural ecosystems have evolved checks and balances on overabundance of any particular lifeform. Other lifeforms co-evolved and the lifeforms limit each other (by eating each other, by competing for the same resources, etc.)
The ecosystems change, but rather gradually, as many stalemates (equilibria) in the energy and strategy balance of the competitive patterning game evolve.
So now we have Joe or Jane Scientist, or gene-engineer, thinking "I'm pretty damn smart. I know my sh*t. Got it 'Piled higher & Deeper' in fact.
Why don't I just unleash my patented self-replicating, resource-patterning machine, and let's see what happens.
On the bright side, most things they could come up with will be no match for the 3 billion year evolved competition.
On the other side, they could be unlucky, and make something that no other lifeform recognized, or could eat, or could compete with for resources.
Some (if not all) of the concept relation semantics needed for doing "semantic search" or "machine comprehension" of text on the web can be gleaned by doing statistical analysis of the relationships between words and phrases across the entire web. Aggregating across a large corpus eliminates "noise" in usage and draws out the semantic "signal" about how people relate the concepts to each other.
Someone should come right out and call a shovel a shovel.
The U.S.A. is essentially an international criminal state on this issue, and it's time that the rest of the world agreed to take some serious punitive measures.
I think sanctions would be a good first step.
"No oil for you!"
('til you learn how to use it like a responsible adult.)
Slashdot Mirror
As soon as China opens up the Great Firewall of China and adopts a free and
open access to information and communications policy, with no "jail-time" benefits
for curiosity or initiative.
I don't think the computing world is ready for this yet, and it may never be a good idea.
Internationalization in software and operating systems is in a horrible state of excess
complexity right now. When everything top to bottom runs unicode UTF8 as its default
mode, then MAYBE.
But even then, there is a single language for Aviation communications (happens
to be English) but that is done so that there is some hope that everyone will know what
everyone is talking about, because everyone can learn the aviation subset of a single
natural language.
Also, most programming languages retain a small set of keywords in a single natural
language, so that most people will have a chance of learning that small set.
Simplicity-and-universality-first arguments maybe should win the day
for domain names too.
"Nationalized" domain names are one more step in the very unfortunate
trend toward balkanization of the Internet. The Internet is to some extent and
should continue to be one place where all people around the world start working
and communicating and trading and problem solving together. A Lingua Franca
is clearly needed if this is to remain true.
I would like to see an OS that maintains
several rings (concentric circles) into which programs can qualify
through increasingly rigourous standards and testing as they
get closer to the central core ring of software.
So essentially this OS would have a core ring of whitelisted and essential
programs. Just outside this would be a 2nd ring of whitelisted but
optional programs.
Then a ring of "grey listed" (reputationally vouched for, for both security
and usefulness and quality)
Followed by a "wild west" outer ring.
The OS would be designed so that programs in a more outer (less trusted,
and less essential) ring, could not have any access to the memory or disk
areas of more inner programs, and could only ever use the services of inner
programs through narrow public interfaces supervised by the OS.
This should be a top priority.
I would say you need a short-text-message introduction protocol
backed by a reputation network as the only way of starting a new
communication between unintroduced parties.
Introductions should have to include a category for the nature of
the communication, chosen from a small standard ontology.
This could serve to tag or bucket the intro short-messages for
systematic review separate from looking at my established
correspondents messages.
You need digital signature based sender identity confirmation.
Made as easy to use as current email for the sender and recipient.
That's about it.
One core idea that it espouses is:
Encourage the initial symptoms rather than suppress them.
For some infections and injuries, this makes eminent sense.
Let me give two examples:
Example 1. Getting a cold or other respiratory virus.
Basic homeopathic advice: In the very initial stages,
encourage coughing,sneezing, nose blowing, and drink lots of fluids
so you can have a productive cough and nose-blowing.
Doesn't it make sense to facilitate the body's own
defense mechanisms that are attempting to rid the body
of virus particles?
Sure, after a few days, further coughing is likely starting
to get destructive of lung tissue, but for the first day,
cough and nose-blow as much as your body wants to and
even a little more. Seems to work for me, but I know
the plural of anecdote is not data.
Example 2: You injure a joint. It swells up. Ok, maybe
it makes sense to reduce the swelling with ice, but the
swelling, and the pain, is there to tell you something,
and that is: Don't move me more and cause further injury.
Taking pain medication and ice then "soldiering on" in whatever
physical activity you are doing is going to exacerbate the
injury. So feel the pain, and respect what the damaged part
is telling you.
For either case, there is no reason the efficacy of the
strategy I mentioned could not be scientifically tested.
The fact that a lot of medical research is funded by
pharmaceutical companies means that homeopathic
or alternative remedies are unlikely to receive scientific
examination even if their practitioners wanted it done.
Put these things to a proper test, I say. Fund it through
public health funding. I am almost certain that some
homeopathic techniques will pass muster.
Hey does anyone have some bomb making instructions so we can go after the server farms where they
operate this system from?
Me and my friends who stand in front of logging trucks trying to save the last vestiges of
natural eco-systems are already labelled certified eco-terrorists, so what is there to lose?
Me and my friends who oppose global free trade organizations before global high environmental and
labour standards are in place are already labeled dangerous anarchists.
Noam Chomsky is now a known associate of Osama Dustbin Laden, so I guess he's toast.
George Bush is a competent barbecue-steak-flipper from Texas who through the magic of
owned media, owned judges, transnational corporate power, and cultural self-hypnosis
has become the ultimate example of the Peter Principle.
I'm working on a theory that ridicule is the most effective weapon against the current
United States regime. I spit in your general direction, U.S. pig dogs. (with
no disrespect meant to pigs or dogs.)
My GPS coordinates: 38 degrees 53' 50.76"" N 77 degrees 02' 11.79"" W
Then go directly to jail when they claimed responsibility for the spam
in order to get paid.
Your content file would only be measured if you explicitly opted it in to the technical system for measuring,
say by providing a copy of it with a claim to copyright attached to a central web service for receiving
those claims. There would have to be a good way of verifying the copyright claims, and a dispute
resolution mechanism built in.
If you did not opt your content in, nothing would track its travels in some kind of disturbing orwellian fashion.
Users of such content would also be made aware of the general tracking of "commercial" content going on, but
in any case the tracking would be at central net nodes, and wouldn't provide insights into what individual
people/households were watching. At most, we might learn of a strange Bjork-fan cluster in Cleveland, or
something equally disturbing, but that's about it.
Actually, an overarching broadband fee which would be shared out among copyright holders
might be the most sensible way to deal with this whole mess. And not just in sweden.
Why not put in systems that measure, based on statistical sampling at some representative
routers, a rough idea of the number of copies of content item x,y, or z that are making their
way across the net at any given moment, then average that out over a week, say, and use
that figure to determine the weekly share of the copyright tax.
This is essentially a financial reward for providing popular content to the masses.
We may have to get over our high-minded view of our cultural tastes, when we see how
much of the take is going to the pr0nographers, but if that's the way it is, then that's
the way it is. Let's just hope the artists are being compensated fairly, and middle-persons
aren't taking the lion's share of the loot.
I think a system like this could support artists of all kinds quite well, without the need for
a corporate distribution channel, and it could also end the
police takedowns of 12 year old copy-criminal-masterminds.
On reviewing the demo, it would seem that the untrusted i.e. frequently
changed sections are essentially the sections that people care about
or (in our present society) have more knowledge about or insight into,
so people want to tweak those sections.
So ironically, the algorithm will flag as untrustworthy the most relevant
sections of articles. The "don't know - don't care" parts will be virgin
white and pure.
They might be somewhat correlated, on a statistical basis, over
many cases, but there are many individual cases and times
when the currently popular view is wrong and the lone
wolf opinions are later proven to have been correct.
This algorithm would seem to be more of a popularity contest
than a truth finder. I think we have to be very wary of
the truth by mass agreement theory.
Hint: Remember the "weapons of mass delusion" ?
I bet someone commenting that the US government is lying
through their teeth about it would have been re-edited
pretty quick.
Took a training course in this quite a while back:
http://www.chimaeraconsulting.com/sitleader.htm
Also, knowing those ENTJ, INTP etc personality types
and how to work with different personalities and
workstyles (including your own), is useful.
Basic leadership principles like consistency,
taking responsibility, listening to concerns, and
giving people real reasons to be motivated and happy
to come to work.
Learning to let go and trusting that your team really
does amplify your own work output if you let them do
the things they know how to do, and support them.
Be firm and focussed, and demand that, when required,
but lighten up and keep it a fun place to work
cooperatively.
Don't micromanage everyone, and don't set artificial
and ridiculous targets just for the sake of appearing
organized or in control.
My app and data on my laptop:
Hey, why won't the hard drive spin? Damn.
Come back here thief, help!
Was my backup cd in the house too? Oh no,
there goes my Great American Novel.
What do you mean I need a new computer to run this next version?
I just bought this one last year.
But seriously, the problems of SAAS are teething troubles.
The following technologies will improve:
1. Local client-side caching for performance
2. Software that executes the appropriate parts in a
sandboxed client-side applet for performance (what a
novel idea!)
3. Server data migration for performance wherever you are
using it in the world.
4. Massively redundant widely distributed strong-encrypted data storage.
You just can't compete with all that.
George Bush and Dick Cheney are your enemies.
Not some 17 year old kid from Tehran.
Aren't George and Dick the ones turning you (at least some of your compatriots)
into paranoid, belligerent, might I say racist, morons.
Just know that if the U.S. declares unilateral war on Iran, the US will have
officially jumped the shark, and deserves whatever it gets, whether merely
merciless mockery, or more.
And no, I have no affiliation with Iranians except that they are people,
like I am, and you are. Shake yourselves out of your propaganda sleepwalk,
American zombies.
I know when I'm faced with a bewildering array of different licenses that I can't keep track of,
I just download the software, use it, and get on with the rest of my day.
At a certain level of complexity, all you can do is zone out. I don't have time to become an
intellectual property lawyer at night school.
So yeah, radical simplification of the situation would be a good thing for all concerned.
The point is, if most distros really did come really closed by default, there wouldn't be
much need for expert articles telling us how to harden them, would there.
i.e. with all ports closed and all services off, then take the installing user through
some wizards with a few different, and mostly conservative, minimalist options
for opening things up, explaining the cost-benefit of the options.
I suppose it's just inertia combined with Unix/Linux's pre-internet-malevolence
origins. The whole idea originally was for a number of socially responsible researchers
to have their computers maximally cooperating with each other (go figure). It wasn't designed
with human viruses (malicious crackers) in mind at the get-go.
But we've had net morons long enough now that you'd think a closed and incrementally
open up policy would be a no-brainer for the default installations of net-facing OSes like
Linux.
The reasons for supporting xhtml (more uniformity of expression, simpler parsers etc) are still as valid as ever.
Why not drive people to an xhtml 2 or 3 or whatever by including the advanced content type tags in a
new xhtml standard.
When it comes to syntax standards, less often really is more. Simpler grammar, more expressive vocabulary
is the way to go. Complex grammar + large vocabulary just means hard to parse and to understand.
Doh! Writing comments that aren't designed to be read. Yes, that
makes a great deal of sense.
According to psychology studies:
- Shorter line lengths result in increased comprehension.
- The optimal number of characters per line is between 45 and 65.
I would say that comprehensibility is important in code comments,
and code comments are just as important as the code.
The multiverse substrate of the universe is like a whole bunch of registers holding entangled qubits.
The universe is a subset of the states of those things that exhibits some kind of consistency that
allows one subregion of it to observe and affect another subregion of that statespace.
Spacetime is the bounds of the phenomenologically self-consistent subspace of the statespace.
Quantum observations are observations of the interface between the self-consistent subspace
and surrouunding not-necessarily-consistent states. The present moment is by analogy the
massively parallel "program counter" that is somehow, from the point of view of denizens
of the subspace, the boundary of self-consistent states and states whose consistency with
the subspace has not been evaluated yet. Energy is the key mystery. It is how "adjacent"
states observe and influence each other, and its flow is what is constrained by the phenomenological
consistency.
Pass me another mushroom.
Unfortunately for this analogy, there is something North of the North Pole, if you think "outside the sphere".
You and your infestation of stinking synthmicrobes
are not coming into my igloo!
Ok, so what do we know?
Lifeforms reproduce themselves, patterning surrounding matter and
energy into more of their own form.
Over several billions of years, natural ecosystems have evolved
checks and balances on overabundance of any particular lifeform.
Other lifeforms co-evolved and the lifeforms limit each other
(by eating each other, by competing for the same resources, etc.)
The ecosystems change, but rather gradually, as many stalemates
(equilibria) in the energy and strategy balance of the
competitive patterning game evolve.
So now we have Joe or Jane Scientist, or gene-engineer, thinking
"I'm pretty damn smart. I know my sh*t.
Got it 'Piled higher & Deeper' in fact.
Why don't I just unleash my patented self-replicating, resource-patterning
machine, and let's see what happens.
On the bright side, most things they could come up with will be no match
for the 3 billion year evolved competition.
On the other side, they could be unlucky, and make something that no other
lifeform recognized, or could eat, or could compete with for resources.
Oh, too bad. Start game over.
Some (if not all) of the concept relation semantics needed for doing "semantic search"
or "machine comprehension" of text on the web can be gleaned by
doing statistical analysis of the relationships between words and phrases
across the entire web. Aggregating across a large corpus eliminates "noise"
in usage and draws out the semantic "signal" about how people relate the
concepts to each other.
Someone should come right out and call a shovel a shovel.
The U.S.A. is essentially an international criminal state on this issue,
and it's time that the rest of the world agreed to take some serious
punitive measures.
I think sanctions would be a good first step.
"No oil for you!"
('til you learn how to use it like a responsible adult.)