That argument is made all the time, but these people do not know WHO you are. And let me assure you that law enforcement does. You need coupling of act and identity to break privacy of course. What you also will need to reconstruct actions taken by individuals is continuity, a continuous and more or less overlapping set of observations. The public you meet in the street won't have that. Therefore, they will not be able to figure out what YOU were doing, other than that they saw some guy/girl wearing a tin foil hat walk down the street after which they lost sight. A surveillance system such as the one proposed in Baltimore doesn't lose sight.
If they did this in my home town. Sure, criminal activities will no longer take place under the watchful eye of the camera. They will just take place elsewhere. But these cameras interfere with my right to go wherever I goddamn please without someone knowing where I went, and where I went from there, and what I did while there, etc etc. Now it's criminal activities, next time the tapes will be used to monitor people who are suspected of other unpleasant activities, after which someone will manage to get the tapes to prove a case of adultery. Privacy IS important, because it means having the right to live life like you want it to (I know- criminals want privacy too, I don't pretend to have the ideal solution here), even though we do not always realize the countless ways in which we are giving it up. Hell, we shouldn't even be posting here, Google has our number:)
What Turing thought of the Z3. I though - and please correct me if I'm wrong here - that a computer in the Turing sense required a kind of memory in which to store the instructions that are to be used on the arbitrary dataset. The point being that the instructions in the program determine the actions of the machine so it is not limited to a single trick, such as an abacus. So, if a calculating machine is instructed through punch cards and is restricted to the operations that are made possible by its hardware and indicated by the punch cards, is it really a computer in that sense? It is programmable in a way, so in that sense it is, I guess. It's arguing fine points, but I am really curious as to what better informed/. members think about this.
So, what's new? The community I live in is famous for losing hard copies of just about anything you can imagine. I'm not sure whether it has really been lost or whether it was decided that it was better to be without certain possibly troublesome papers. So now they're intentionally losing stuff in order to avoid being drowned in cruft. It just goes to remind that whenever you deal with authority, you should keep hard copies of your correspondence:)
A is for aqua (water) and S is for Sea:). Just kidding. I'm not sure whether there is such a great difference between sea and space exploration. Both envirnoments are not meant for humans and will kill you if you're stupid. Of course, deep sea vehicles will have to withstand immense pressures, but so will for instance any vehicle that is ever to explore Jupiter. There's a great story about this by Arthur C. Clarke (I forget the title - someone?) where this parallel is drawn and a case is made for deep sea exploration as a kind of prelude to planetary exploration.
There's not that much deep sea exploration being done that results in observations that the general public can have a look at. I doubt whether military observations made by subs will be made public.
The advances resulting from space exploration are a continuing point of discussion so I won't go into that. Re the vast resources - you're right, but we have no idea whatsoever of the resources hidden in our seas.
It's really exciting science. I am still marveling at the fact that we can see actual pictures of the surface of Mars, from millions of kilometers away, as if we are looking at someone's holiday snapshots... I do wish, however, that NASA (or ESA) would turn all this ingenuity someday to an area that is even less explored than the surface of Mars or the Moon - our deep sea. Every time a mission goes out there, new species are discovered. The pay-off that may be generated by having a good look at our seas may be much greater than that of space exploration. Some of the reagents we use in the lab are derived from sea animals and have enabled us to gain deep insight into molecular biology. And I should think that the technical challenges of deep sea exploration should be worthy of the best NASA engineers' skills. Come on, guys, down is the way to go, not up:)
to design ways of jamming camcorders. As correctly pointed out by others here, most of us will want to view a decent DVD and not settle for crummy Digicam vids. Second, the jamming technique that is supposed to block all digital camcorders from recording relies, if I read between the lines correctly, on modulating brightness and perhaps color in a way that the human visual system will not grok but that will definitely show up on CCD. Now, how long would it take to either
-color/brightness correct in software, or
- modify the camcorder in such a way that its image acquisition becomes as slow as a human's (not sure if that can be done, anyone here with an understanding of camcorders?)
It's the usual senseless paranoia of the greedy big media trying to rake in every last penny that can possible be wrung from a movie release, causing us consumers more headaches than anything else. And it STILL won't prevent people from ripping DVD's and spreading the copies. So they will be losing money (but not much methinks) anyway.
I use a lab full of XGrid-ed macs to run Nethack! I think my gaming rig is the most expensive in terms of $ spent per processor cycle required for the game:)
Apart from showing nicely how the "hive" model of software development can and *will* work (although I am not sure whether patch first, ask later is always a good idea), this development has me hoping that people who, like our group, use Illustrator and Photoshop for scientific illustrations, can finally escape vendor lock-in. For relatively simple illustrations (we always keep illustrations as simple as possible for reasons of clarity), Adobe's solutions are really overpriced. Licensing issues have us worried anyway since it is almost impossible to keep track of all the licenses we're supposed to have... Anyways: we're on a budget and are always looking to open source alternatives. We have our students on OpenOffice and lots of touching up is already done with the Gimp. If we can now do other illustrations with an open source tool that is equivalent to Illustrator, well... And we would be happy to contribute to the effort financially as long as it is cheaper than buying Adobe:)
Excuse me? It is flat, rectangular and whitish by the look of the./-ed site. Apart from that it doesn't look like an iPod at all. Since when is everything that is rectangular and flat styled like an iPod? Is a paperweight styled like an iPod? Or an iced cake?
Please, think before you post.
This is the era following "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", guys. Remember "release early and release often"? Of course they are soliciting users as beta testers. Microsoft does that all the time. And of course it is a marketing ploy. May I suggest a third option: compare this to the way that Doom was first released. This way of releasing is not only meant to make people feel exclusive or valued, it is also a way of gaining mind share (==market share) before the actual product is even released. Wake up, this is the 21st century Internet:)
I do have an iPod. Thing is, I use it with my macs. No crashes ever. Your problem must be windows . I meant the device itself, not any other device it is being attached to.
That this thing will be:
1. Ugly;
2. Have a clunky interface with lots of glitz and glitter;
3. Play WMA only;
4. Require XP;
5. Have limited hard drive capacity;
6. Run Pocketwindows and crash regularly;
7. Have its own host of viruses within half a year;
8. Still sell like crazy because for some reason people seem to prefer mediocre crap as long as it is cheap and runs windows
Let's hope I'm wrong, I have an iPod and rather enjoy having something made by Apple be mainstream for a change:)
I can now program my vacuum cleaner to follow my cats and kids around and vac up everything that they drop in their wake. Considering the sheer amount of flotsam they leave, 1800 $US is money well spent. Trilobite here I come!
to business cards! So, if I am at a conference and I talk to someone doing interesting stuff, we can just have the business cards touch and exchange all necessary contact information. Now that would be really easy. If there were a way to wire this thing to your fingertips, you could exchange the information by shaking hands:)
This guy is really talented - the box looks fantastic. I'd hire him to do my car if I were up to it. It'd be interesting to have my family car modded like this, it might end up looking like a high-tech urban assault vehicle:)
Having the professors scan their own shit? Where I work, there's no way a professor would ever consider asking such an impossible thing. They would either scan it themselves or have their secretaries do it (FYI, every department in our hospital has one or more flatbed scanners including some automated ones). I mean, this is real donkey work for which you are likely to be too highly trained and too expensive. Again - no way.
But then I am using one OS I do not like to run another one that I do not like at all:) Seriously, I would have more use for a nice X windows client so I could remotely connect to my OSX and Solaris boxes at work. That would be really useful.
.. and that's DNA extracted from blood cells (the white ones). Run it through a lab-on-a-chip which will take all of, oh , 5 minutes these days and run a minimum of six microsatellite repeats on it. Guaranteed ID, although you might consider running eight satellites for added safety. One problem: the identification procedure is invasive (it has to be, to be sure that the DNA really comes from the person that is being ID'ed) and takes too long. But those are mere technical problems.
All other forms of biometry can be circumvented (crying, enucleation of eyes, cutting of hands). You can even check the blood for freshness (eg by measuring calcium in platelets, takes a couple microseconds) to prevent people from carrying little bags of blood to have tested.
Dude, you're not getting my point. An oligarchy, as you rightly point out, is a rule of the few. While not meant literally, I did mean relatively few as you can hardly consider the eligible citizens of 500 BC Athens a majority of the population. There were at least 4-5 times as many slaves. Also, I am fully aware that a democracy did not follow the French revolution. It's the thoughts that count. If anything, the French revolution was about ideas even though the implementation was flawed (to say the very least:)). Without the French revolution there wouldn't have been an American democracy.
Yeah, right. It may be worth mentioning that the Greek version of democracy differs somewhat from ours. In Athens, only free men were allowed to vote. Women and slaves were not. Hence, democracy in the Greek sense is more of an oligocracy. However, their system of adult full citizens voting on decisions did pave the way for the Western type of democracy that came out of the French revolution. One may wonder to what extent our modern democracies really are democracies.
Oh, and part of the homosexual thing was due to the fact that most women (except for prostitutes, or haetares as they were known) were not considered fit and proper intellectual partners for a nice night out for a man. I'm not sure where the other part came from but it was first and foremost an "intellectual" thing.
While wide-ranging, this guy's answers are really vague. I am none the wiser for it. What the hell does he mean by "We're taking the concept of transferring information across the life cycle of the business application and ingraining it in as part of the process. DSI is all about information transfer between a developer, the operations center and the end user. There are ways to do that on a surface level, and there are ways to build that deeper into the OS, and that's what we are doing."?? Like, are they going to provide a pack of Sticky Notes (TM, did they buy 3M?) with every copy of Longhorn or Blackcomb that they sell so that the developer may leave a note for the user? That's one way of "ingraining" info. And while I'm at it, why is he touting complexity as a good thing? AFAIK the more parts there are, the bigger the chance of something breaking down. New security holes, here we come.
I work in a large university hospital (more than 5000 employees) where the entire information structure is based on NT4. The only recent innovation was that desktop PC's running (you're not going to believe this considering the critical data some people are working with) win 98 were phased out and replaced by WinTerms. Desktop applications are now delivered by server. The groupware is Novell's, running on NT4. There is no way that the IT department is going to consider running W2K or up, especially not now that we have major budget cuts. Hell, we may actually see a move to Linux before too long:)
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That argument is made all the time, but these people do not know WHO you are. And let me assure you that law enforcement does. You need coupling of act and identity to break privacy of course. What you also will need to reconstruct actions taken by individuals is continuity, a continuous and more or less overlapping set of observations. The public you meet in the street won't have that. Therefore, they will not be able to figure out what YOU were doing, other than that they saw some guy/girl wearing a tin foil hat walk down the street after which they lost sight. A surveillance system such as the one proposed in Baltimore doesn't lose sight.
If they did this in my home town. Sure, criminal activities will no longer take place under the watchful eye of the camera. They will just take place elsewhere. But these cameras interfere with my right to go wherever I goddamn please without someone knowing where I went, and where I went from there, and what I did while there, etc etc. Now it's criminal activities, next time the tapes will be used to monitor people who are suspected of other unpleasant activities, after which someone will manage to get the tapes to prove a case of adultery. Privacy IS important, because it means having the right to live life like you want it to (I know- criminals want privacy too, I don't pretend to have the ideal solution here), even though we do not always realize the countless ways in which we are giving it up. Hell, we shouldn't even be posting here, Google has our number :)
What Turing thought of the Z3. I though - and please correct me if I'm wrong here - that a computer in the Turing sense required a kind of memory in which to store the instructions that are to be used on the arbitrary dataset. The point being that the instructions in the program determine the actions of the machine so it is not limited to a single trick, such as an abacus. So, if a calculating machine is instructed through punch cards and is restricted to the operations that are made possible by its hardware and indicated by the punch cards, is it really a computer in that sense? It is programmable in a way, so in that sense it is, I guess. It's arguing fine points, but I am really curious as to what better informed /. members think about this.
So, what's new? The community I live in is famous for losing hard copies of just about anything you can imagine. I'm not sure whether it has really been lost or whether it was decided that it was better to be without certain possibly troublesome papers. So now they're intentionally losing stuff in order to avoid being drowned in cruft. It just goes to remind that whenever you deal with authority, you should keep hard copies of your correspondence :)
A is for aqua (water) and S is for Sea :). Just kidding. I'm not sure whether there is such a great difference between sea and space exploration. Both envirnoments are not meant for humans and will kill you if you're stupid. Of course, deep sea vehicles will have to withstand immense pressures, but so will for instance any vehicle that is ever to explore Jupiter. There's a great story about this by Arthur C. Clarke (I forget the title - someone?) where this parallel is drawn and a case is made for deep sea exploration as a kind of prelude to planetary exploration.
There's not that much deep sea exploration being done that results in observations that the general public can have a look at. I doubt whether military observations made by subs will be made public.
The advances resulting from space exploration are a continuing point of discussion so I won't go into that. Re the vast resources - you're right, but we have no idea whatsoever of the resources hidden in our seas.
It's really exciting science. I am still marveling at the fact that we can see actual pictures of the surface of Mars, from millions of kilometers away, as if we are looking at someone's holiday snapshots... I do wish, however, that NASA (or ESA) would turn all this ingenuity someday to an area that is even less explored than the surface of Mars or the Moon - our deep sea. Every time a mission goes out there, new species are discovered. The pay-off that may be generated by having a good look at our seas may be much greater than that of space exploration. Some of the reagents we use in the lab are derived from sea animals and have enabled us to gain deep insight into molecular biology. And I should think that the technical challenges of deep sea exploration should be worthy of the best NASA engineers' skills. Come on, guys, down is the way to go, not up :)
to design ways of jamming camcorders. As correctly pointed out by others here, most of us will want to view a decent DVD and not settle for crummy Digicam vids. Second, the jamming technique that is supposed to block all digital camcorders from recording relies, if I read between the lines correctly, on modulating brightness and perhaps color in a way that the human visual system will not grok but that will definitely show up on CCD. Now, how long would it take to either
-color/brightness correct in software, or
- modify the camcorder in such a way that its image acquisition becomes as slow as a human's (not sure if that can be done, anyone here with an understanding of camcorders?)
It's the usual senseless paranoia of the greedy big media trying to rake in every last penny that can possible be wrung from a movie release, causing us consumers more headaches than anything else. And it STILL won't prevent people from ripping DVD's and spreading the copies. So they will be losing money (but not much methinks) anyway.
Now you can tour Chicago while looking like an idiot.
I use a lab full of XGrid-ed macs to run Nethack! I think my gaming rig is the most expensive in terms of $ spent per processor cycle required for the game :)
Apart from showing nicely how the "hive" model of software development can and *will* work (although I am not sure whether patch first, ask later is always a good idea), this development has me hoping that people who, like our group, use Illustrator and Photoshop for scientific illustrations, can finally escape vendor lock-in. For relatively simple illustrations (we always keep illustrations as simple as possible for reasons of clarity), Adobe's solutions are really overpriced. Licensing issues have us worried anyway since it is almost impossible to keep track of all the licenses we're supposed to have... Anyways: we're on a budget and are always looking to open source alternatives. We have our students on OpenOffice and lots of touching up is already done with the Gimp. If we can now do other illustrations with an open source tool that is equivalent to Illustrator, well... And we would be happy to contribute to the effort financially as long as it is cheaper than buying Adobe :)
Exactly - I rest my case!
Excuse me? It is flat, rectangular and whitish by the look of the ./-ed site. Apart from that it doesn't look like an iPod at all. Since when is everything that is rectangular and flat styled like an iPod? Is a paperweight styled like an iPod? Or an iced cake?
Please, think before you post.
This is the era following "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", guys. Remember "release early and release often"? Of course they are soliciting users as beta testers. Microsoft does that all the time. And of course it is a marketing ploy. May I suggest a third option: compare this to the way that Doom was first released. This way of releasing is not only meant to make people feel exclusive or valued, it is also a way of gaining mind share (==market share) before the actual product is even released. Wake up, this is the 21st century Internet :)
I do have an iPod. Thing is, I use it with my macs. No crashes ever. Your problem must be windows . I meant the device itself, not any other device it is being attached to.
That this thing will be: 1. Ugly; 2. Have a clunky interface with lots of glitz and glitter; 3. Play WMA only; 4. Require XP; 5. Have limited hard drive capacity; 6. Run Pocketwindows and crash regularly; 7. Have its own host of viruses within half a year; 8. Still sell like crazy because for some reason people seem to prefer mediocre crap as long as it is cheap and runs windows Let's hope I'm wrong, I have an iPod and rather enjoy having something made by Apple be mainstream for a change :)
I can now program my vacuum cleaner to follow my cats and kids around and vac up everything that they drop in their wake. Considering the sheer amount of flotsam they leave, 1800 $US is money well spent. Trilobite here I come!
to business cards! So, if I am at a conference and I talk to someone doing interesting stuff, we can just have the business cards touch and exchange all necessary contact information. Now that would be really easy. If there were a way to wire this thing to your fingertips, you could exchange the information by shaking hands :)
This guy is really talented - the box looks fantastic. I'd hire him to do my car if I were up to it. It'd be interesting to have my family car modded like this, it might end up looking like a high-tech urban assault vehicle :)
Having the professors scan their own shit? Where I work, there's no way a professor would ever consider asking such an impossible thing. They would either scan it themselves or have their secretaries do it (FYI, every department in our hospital has one or more flatbed scanners including some automated ones). I mean, this is real donkey work for which you are likely to be too highly trained and too expensive. Again - no way.
But then I am using one OS I do not like to run another one that I do not like at all :) Seriously, I would have more use for a nice X windows client so I could remotely connect to my OSX and Solaris boxes at work. That would be really useful.
.. and that's DNA extracted from blood cells (the white ones). Run it through a lab-on-a-chip which will take all of, oh , 5 minutes these days and run a minimum of six microsatellite repeats on it. Guaranteed ID, although you might consider running eight satellites for added safety. One problem: the identification procedure is invasive (it has to be, to be sure that the DNA really comes from the person that is being ID'ed) and takes too long. But those are mere technical problems. All other forms of biometry can be circumvented (crying, enucleation of eyes, cutting of hands). You can even check the blood for freshness (eg by measuring calcium in platelets, takes a couple microseconds) to prevent people from carrying little bags of blood to have tested.
Dude, you're not getting my point. An oligarchy, as you rightly point out, is a rule of the few. While not meant literally, I did mean relatively few as you can hardly consider the eligible citizens of 500 BC Athens a majority of the population. There were at least 4-5 times as many slaves. Also, I am fully aware that a democracy did not follow the French revolution. It's the thoughts that count. If anything, the French revolution was about ideas even though the implementation was flawed (to say the very least :)). Without the French revolution there wouldn't have been an American democracy.
Yeah, right. It may be worth mentioning that the Greek version of democracy differs somewhat from ours. In Athens, only free men were allowed to vote. Women and slaves were not. Hence, democracy in the Greek sense is more of an oligocracy. However, their system of adult full citizens voting on decisions did pave the way for the Western type of democracy that came out of the French revolution. One may wonder to what extent our modern democracies really are democracies. Oh, and part of the homosexual thing was due to the fact that most women (except for prostitutes, or haetares as they were known) were not considered fit and proper intellectual partners for a nice night out for a man. I'm not sure where the other part came from but it was first and foremost an "intellectual" thing.
While wide-ranging, this guy's answers are really vague. I am none the wiser for it. What the hell does he mean by "We're taking the concept of transferring information across the life cycle of the business application and ingraining it in as part of the process. DSI is all about information transfer between a developer, the operations center and the end user. There are ways to do that on a surface level, and there are ways to build that deeper into the OS, and that's what we are doing."?? Like, are they going to provide a pack of Sticky Notes (TM, did they buy 3M?) with every copy of Longhorn or Blackcomb that they sell so that the developer may leave a note for the user? That's one way of "ingraining" info. And while I'm at it, why is he touting complexity as a good thing? AFAIK the more parts there are, the bigger the chance of something breaking down. New security holes, here we come.
I work in a large university hospital (more than 5000 employees) where the entire information structure is based on NT4. The only recent innovation was that desktop PC's running (you're not going to believe this considering the critical data some people are working with) win 98 were phased out and replaced by WinTerms. Desktop applications are now delivered by server. The groupware is Novell's, running on NT4. There is no way that the IT department is going to consider running W2K or up, especially not now that we have major budget cuts. Hell, we may actually see a move to Linux before too long :)