Start with burying, preferably outgrowing some of the pointless sexism. Then learn to expect that female hackers might know just as much or more than you regardless of whether they are as vociferious in their communication style. Then perhaps learn to ask females for what they think as you have internalized the notion that we do indeeed think and often what we think is actually useful. Women, as a rule, do communicate with a bit different style than that a lot of guy geeks may be used to and may assume is the only way "real hackers" communicate.
I am a geek. I am female. I am decidely not a "chick" and this woman's "woman's touch" may consist of batting you upside the head until you stop trivializing an entire gender.
I agree strongly. While it is obvious to me that software needs to be open source to reach anywhere near its potential and to avoid a slew of evils, there must still be a way to pay the folks who make the software possible. The software itself is infinitely copyable and divisible. True enough. But the pool of talented designers, developers, qa, documentation folk and so on is not in the least infinitely divisible. It is in fact a scarce commodity. Which means that some means of allocating these scarce resources effectively is necessary. One means used in market economies is money. This works on the theory that the most efficient use of resources will generate the most profit and thus keep and attract more resources. OSS also needs some solution to the problemn of allocation. And it majorly needs a solution to paying those who lay the golden eggs well for their trouble.
Doing it for the love of it is wonderful but I would like to support myself and my dependents off of what I love rather than having some day joy I don't love (at least in the form of the products) in order to afford to still a few hours from friends and family to create software that I do love.
It took me 10 minutes of waiting to post two comments successfully on/. tonight. The site has gradually been deteriorating in performance. This needs to be fixed and right now. It doesn't make the community or linux look good when a major site like this ($900M major) has really sucky performance. If y'all don't know how to make this better then put out a call for those who do.
I don't claim to understand business all that well, much less the modern e-biz/.com blitz of huge piles of money to companies that can't turn a profit. But it sure as hell doesn't make any sense to me for VA Linux to spend 900 million (!) to essentially pick up more web and web-zine stuff. That is an outrageous price for what I think they might maybe get out of this. Or is it all just monopoly money and basically meaningless these days?
Exactly what does VA Linux get that is worth such a sum that they couldn't have without the acquisition and/or at lower cost? I just don't get it. Exactly what are Andover.net folks holding that is worth that kind of money? A base (a lot of eyeballs to be disgustingly in the vernacular) for ads? I don't think so. So what is it?
What makes more sense is for humanity to finally go to a common spoken and written language that is taught universally. It is a sign of just how primitive this species is that we can't seem to make any headway on such an obviously beneficial project. Of course, if we get automagical translators for speech and text anytime soon that actually work well (no Babel-fish) the point could become moot.
I thought part of the great goodness of open source is not needing to reinvent the wheel. We can see/use the code and get a tremendous leg up. Personally I don't care if the leg up is for a competitor that is closed source or not. I still don't want to see a thousand stupid rewrites of some piece of code.
I agree that a serious question about open source is what it will do for and against innovation and the impetus to innovate.
If something is meant to be used as a component or library then it should probably be under LGPL rather than GPL. Particularly if that component or library is designed and intended for wide spread use and replacement of proprietary code doing a similar job.
Has primarily a systems/infrastructure hacker, I want my code to be used maximally, to be build upon, and improvements to its based to be shared. But it is not my mention to try to tell people how to license their own software that might call mine as a component.
The Java IMAP example is sort of strange. Who would use a component that they cannot use freely as a component?
But he blew it dismissing lisp and its derivatives early in the conversation. Most of the features that he wants have been explored in such languages to a much greater degree than anywhere else. The lisp languages lost the race a while back but I think we are in for a bit of a resurgence from scheme. Most folks don't even realize that compiled lisp out of the better envirionments is faster than java, nearly as fast as C.
The basic notion that language determines or limits thought in programming is crystal clear to anyone who has stretched the boundary of a few languages very often. The limitations of existhing languages are also obvious to those who push the boundaries looking for more expressive power and elegance.
The real question is not whether we need better languages and tools. The real question is what sort of process will really give them to us and make their use ubiquitous. The language/tools market is typically a hard place to build a successful business, especially to connect with early funding. This is one place where I believe Open Source is probably the only way the tools will be ubiquitous enough and evolve fast enough. Proprietary attempts have largely failed in this area. Anyone ever notice that many of our everyday programming tools haven't really changed or improved very much in nearly two decades? And no, it is not because they are so wonderful as they are.
I do like the virtual class concept and I've run into plenty of cases where it would have been real handy.
Relatively transparent persistence can be added to any language for which sufficient metadata is either directly present in the runtime environment, is derivable from the compile time environment or is programmatically created by defining a routine per class that one wishes to have persistent instances of. I've have built many such things and am working on a refinement that will soon be open-sourced. More to come. Building persistence into the language only solves part of the problem and only for users of that language and a particular form of data storage (generally). Actually there are a set of common problems that are data source type, vendor and language independent that should be and can be addressed. Specific language and database plugins can then be added to this central core as needed. An in-language "persistence solution" typically does not touch complex object graph persistence where objects must be reachable along multiple paths and not just relative to a single root. Nor do such approaches deal with object and object/relational concerns such as transactions, concurrency, queries, distributed data sources, schema evolution and so on. But as I said, more on this subject later.
No it is pretty much everyone since almost no one anymore has an inkling of what individual rights are about much less believes that the government and instituitions should be held accountable for supporting them.
So, if I build a computer that can directly execute a purely mathematical representation of the algorithm, is this implementation patentable as a concrete form of the algorithm? I don't see that it would be as this machine can execute any old algorithm expressible mathematically directly. It is not an implementation of any of them but a device capable of executing them. Or does what I can patent depend on which mathematical algorithms this device is executing at the moment?
Why should what is basically a refinement of a mathematical algorithm be patentable? Most mathematical algorithms are not. An algorithm is not a physical machine, it is an idea or discovery.
THis piece seemd to be about hate speech but actually discusses a lot of different things in a bit of a ramble.
Online communities tend to become what they are fairly organically. When they do not meet some heartfelt needs of some of the participants those participants often start other forums and communities more oriented around the things perceived as missing. This is as it should be.
The WEB does not have any special failure to produce discussion groups that work well. I can points you to a dozen or two communities specializing in particular areas where discussions that are farily deep, involved and involving happen regularly. Is the technology for supporting discusion as good as it could be? No, of course not. But I don't think the medium itself is antithetical to meaningful interaction.
Misinformation is not exactly the special creation or result of the WEB. The WEB simply enables faster and broader creation and dissemination of information. This has both good and bad consequences. Personally I think it should be felonious for a professional to willingly float disinformation that s/he knows is incorrect in public forums. In an information culture this is fraud.
If an environment on the WEB becomes hostile exactly how can I be actively hurt? I have the ability to stay as anonymous and relatively safe as my persecuter. I have the ability to leave the environment. I can thumb my nose at his antics with impunity or simply consign him to the oblivion he deserves.
I've joined, spoke my mind and walked away from many e-groups that had nasty internal environments. I've also walked away from some that were so over-conscious of never offending anyone at all that no one could oppose any idea or speak freely without being seen as "attacking" some person. Many seem to have great trouble separating ideas and an attack on or attempted repudiation or disvaluing of an idea from people and an actual attack on a person.
I repudiate the notion that I have a responsibility to appoint myself the creator of environments for discussing and debating the urgent issues of our time on each and every list I am on. Many of these lists were simply not designed or chartered for any such agenda and their owners and clients would rightly highly resent any such effort on my part. It is difficult to set up a space to talk about some of the things I think are vitally important. Certainly I would like to see such spaces and wouldn't mind setting some up if I had the time energy and creative ability to do so effectively.
I believe people are accountable online the same way as offline to some extent. Which is that I will not deal with people who show themselves to be jerks. But I question whether the virtual world should have all or close to exactly the same rules, ethics and standards as the real-time world. The environments are too dissimilar to assume without some thought that they should bave the same governing principles across the board.
Personally I would much rather see some bigot blowing off steam online where s/he might get useful enough feedback to reconsider than having no outlet until they create real mayhem and harm in the RT world.
The assumptions about adolescent males are probably considerably over-generalized. Flamers and apparent bigots and hate mongers come in all ages and genders.
The US is the birthplace of liberty as far as instituting a political and legal system originally based on individual rights. I disagree strongly with a clain that the US censors open discussion of political and religious issues. The US as a government entity does no such thing. I can discuss any religion or atheism or make up a religions, satirize any religion and so on to my heart's content without the government once stopping me. The late censor-ware stuff is a failure of the govenrment - a failure to live up to its own governing principles. But I know of no censorware that will censor a religious or anti-religious work or discussion. Perhaps I am behind the times on this. I have no problem if individuals want blinders on their minds or even the minds of their children. I have a huge problem when the government attempts to make the blinders uniform and mandatory.
What I cannot expect is for anyone to be forced to provide me a podium or air space for disseminating my views. The WEB is open enough that I and everyone else can build their own podium. This is actually a good thing.
It is not possible to keep freedom but to remove it from all whom you find offensive. This is a contradiction.
what do you think law is about without legal philosophy? In the absence of reasonable law the ciitzenry will select what they can live with and ignore the rest. That is a lesson of history. It is pointless to beat people up verbally for doing this. There is a large difference between fighting tyranny and ripping off other developers.
But if the blinking data was all well-encrpyted to start with the hackers wouldn't have jack to threaten anyone with. So the government pushes more holes in encryption coverage to "protect" us from what we could only be protected from with really strong encryption? This is really twisted.
I am 45 years old and have skills and experience a lot of companies are willing to pay and pay well to access. On the order of 25% of the engineers I work with are 40+. A 22 yr old who works 16 hours a day will burnout in a year or two. And most such don't have the breadth of experience, information, political savvy, and so on to balance raw energy and talent. The myth of age discrimination is imho largely driven by people over 35 or so loosing their idealism (if they had any) or otherwise loosing their interest, motivation and zest for computer work. There are a lot of causes of this but it is not incurable. Another driver is the notion that programming is about being a macho coding jock and a failure to grasp that to be a good programmer requires a lot more than that. It requires a sense of design and synergy, an ability to synthesize information that most often comes only with long experience. There are exceptions of course.
I think it is foolish to believe that most companies only want development staff with tons of energy, no life, familarity with current favorite tools and nothing else to recommend them. But only such a basic priority widely present could lead to the claimed age discrimination.
A small problem with what you wrote. The US government does not own encryption or the minds of its citizens. The US government has no rights of control over things which are not its property or part of its legitimate functions. It is a legit function to provide for the common defense, but this is arguably not served by "controlling" encryption which really amounts to forbidding its citizens to use and/or sell encrpytion and encrypted communication and products worldwide. This does nothing to help defense. It only weakens American citizens and business in the international market.
Frankly, I am cynical for a different reason. I think this is all a big smoke screen because the government snoops have the bucks and equipment to break any encryption scheme on the market with far less trouble than they wish to advertise. But then I am a bit paranoid.
You misquote me. I said that I don't believe Open Source will go far without also including open source design documentation. I brought up a point worth considering about how far the source code alone can take us. Instead of responding to the point you chose to take it out of context.
I said nothing about formal proofs of correctness. I merely point out that it is difficult to impossible to program and debug well without good specifications of what the program should do. This is surely a perfectly straight-forward point. Well not so surely since in my 20 years of software engineering (although I think we often should not call it that) I've certainly run into a lot of folks (including myself at sometimes) who don't get that at all.
Can I ask when Mozilla will be done? And exactly why do we make browsers so complex that they may be arguably more complicated than the Linux kernel as was claimed? Is this a sign of something being more than slightly out of kilter?
If OSS is so much better at finding and eliminating bugs then why is Mozilla still a buggy mess that doesn't stay up more than 15 minutes in my normal usage? There is something wrong here. I do not see that 10,000 eyes are better than a dozen unless the 10,000 eyes are we versed in the design and function of the program being examined. I also think that OSS will not go very far without good Open Source Design documentation and practice. Some reverse engineering tools to extract at least some design elements would be a good start. But the source hides too much of the fundamental decisions and considerations governing a project as these have often been factored in in relatively invisible ways by the time implementation is reasonably far along. It is often not easy for even highly skilled programmer/designers to extract design criteria and decisions from raw source. Without a good understanding of the requirements there is no way to certify that a program behaves as it should. Not blowing up is a nice start but only the most coarse measure of correctness.
Actually, I'm way ahead of you. I want to start a new California spiritual movement called the Church of the Holy Nannite. The money collected from the congregation will go into funding hi-tech projects and particularly nano-tech with the profits plowed back into the congregation and the church. The message is that the world can be transformed to heaven on earth if we do both the technological and personal/interpersonal work necessary to make it so. With the proper amount of inspiration, showpersonship, hype and promotion I think it has a great chance of success.
Yes, I'm kidding - at the moment. Sometimes it feels like a real good idea. After all humans seem to have these spiritual propensities that need to be channeled in a way that is actually good for us instead of fighting against all reason and real world advancement.
Long before we develop the technology that far out a lot of us will most likely decide bodies are only useful some of the time and will configure a body to our needs of the moment when we actually need one (or several for that matter). There is no reason all or even most of those bodies should look like the ones we evolved with. That model of body is only useful in a range of conditions and for a range of tasks not far removed from our evolutionary environment.
It is actually vitally important to think about where the technology can take us before it is already here. What nanotech can do has heavy duty implications for our entire socio-economic structure and our psychology, even for our very identity as a species. I think we would be extremely wise to think of how we will evolve to use the technology with what wisdom we are capable of. The world that is coming will require new habitual ways of looking at things, new ways of interacting, new systems of ethics across all aspects of interaction. It is not too early to start thinking about this stuff and working toward some of the likely necessary changes.
Who the heck cares if it leads to a short-term gap if it improves the long term health and well-being of all human beings? The new is almost always of necessity the scarce and the expensive as long as it is new. So only those with more resources and wealth in the beginning can access it. So what? There is nothing inherently wrong with this. No one owes anyone equal results and goodies across the board.
Open public discousrce among non-scientists and engineers who don't even understand the technology they would dare to dominate? No thank you.
I hope the hell that technology is moving at a faster pace than our politics and societies at this point. Because it is only technology that will allow us to think and understand enough and more quickly in order to deal more wisely with our world. Or have you not noticed that the standard human brain/mind is woefully poor at many desperately needed aspects of reasoning much less wisdom?
To have the nearly illiterate masses control our future at the hands of professional manipulators of mass opinion is a nightmare I will fight with everything I have. That will kill our future and all of us.
As I read quite a bit of nanotech literature academic and in industrial research labs, I find your assertions that experts think macroassembly is impossible quite incredible. If you believe it is impossible then give an argument showing that it is. Drexler and crew have answered several possible arguments quite handily. If you have or no of others not answered then please bring them forward.
Slashdot Mirror
Start with burying, preferably outgrowing some of the pointless sexism. Then learn to expect that female hackers might know just as much or more than you regardless of whether they are as vociferious in their communication style. Then perhaps learn to ask females for what they think as you have internalized the notion that we do indeeed think and often what we think is actually useful. Women, as a rule, do communicate with a bit different style than that a lot of guy geeks may be used to and may assume is the only way "real hackers" communicate.
I am a geek. I am female. I am decidely not a "chick" and this woman's "woman's touch" may consist of batting you upside the head until you stop trivializing an entire gender.
I agree strongly. While it is obvious to me that software needs to be open source to reach anywhere near its potential and to avoid a slew of evils, there must still be a way to pay the folks who make the software possible. The software itself is infinitely copyable and divisible. True enough. But the pool of talented designers, developers, qa, documentation folk and so on is not in the least infinitely divisible. It is in fact a scarce commodity. Which means that some means of allocating these scarce resources effectively is necessary. One means used in market economies is money. This works on the theory that the most efficient use of resources will generate the most profit and thus keep and attract more resources. OSS also needs some solution to the problemn of allocation. And it majorly needs a solution to paying those who lay the golden eggs well for their trouble.
Doing it for the love of it is wonderful but I would like to support myself and my dependents off of what I love rather than having some day joy I don't love (at least in the form of the products) in order to afford to still a few hours from friends and family to create software that I do love.
It took me 10 minutes of waiting to post two comments successfully on /. tonight. The site has gradually been deteriorating in performance. This needs to be fixed and right now. It doesn't make the community or linux look good when a major site like this ($900M major) has really sucky performance. If y'all don't know how to make this better then put out a call for those who do.
It is IMPORTANT.
I don't claim to understand business all that well, much less the modern e-biz/.com blitz of huge piles of money to companies that can't turn a profit. But it sure as hell doesn't make any sense to me for VA Linux to spend 900 million (!) to essentially pick up more web and web-zine stuff. That is an outrageous price for what I think they might maybe get out of this. Or is it all just monopoly money and basically meaningless these days?
Exactly what does VA Linux get that is worth such a sum that they couldn't have without the acquisition and/or at lower cost? I just don't get it. Exactly what are Andover.net folks holding that is worth that kind of money? A base (a lot of eyeballs to be disgustingly in the vernacular) for ads? I don't think so. So what is it?
What makes more sense is for humanity to finally go to a common spoken and written language that is taught universally. It is a sign of just how primitive this species is that we can't seem to make any headway on such an obviously beneficial project. Of course, if we get automagical translators for speech and text anytime soon that actually work well (no Babel-fish) the point could become moot.
I thought part of the great goodness of open source is not needing to reinvent the wheel. We can see/use the code and get a tremendous leg up. Personally I don't care if the leg up is for a competitor that is closed source or not. I still don't want to see a thousand stupid rewrites of some piece of code.
I agree that a serious question about open source is what it will do for and against innovation and the impetus to innovate.
If something is meant to be used as a component or library then it should probably be under LGPL rather than GPL. Particularly if that component or library is designed and intended for wide spread use and replacement of proprietary code doing a similar job.
Has primarily a systems/infrastructure hacker, I want my code to be used maximally, to be build upon, and improvements to its based to be shared. But it is not my mention to try to tell people how to license their own software that might call mine as a component.
The Java IMAP example is sort of strange. Who would use a component that they cannot use freely as a component?
But he blew it dismissing lisp and its derivatives early in the conversation. Most of the features that he wants have been explored in such languages to a much greater degree than anywhere else. The lisp languages lost the race a while back but I think we are in for a bit of a resurgence from scheme. Most folks don't even realize that compiled lisp out of the better envirionments is faster than java, nearly as fast as C.
The basic notion that language determines or limits thought in programming is crystal clear to anyone who has stretched the boundary of a few languages very often. The limitations of existhing languages are also obvious to those who push the boundaries looking for more expressive power and elegance.
The real question is not whether we need better languages and tools. The real question is what sort of process will really give them to us and make their use ubiquitous. The language/tools market is typically a hard place to build a successful business, especially to connect with early funding. This is one place where I believe Open Source is probably the only way the tools will be ubiquitous enough and evolve fast enough. Proprietary attempts have largely failed in this area. Anyone ever notice that many of our everyday programming tools haven't really changed or improved very much in nearly two decades? And no, it is not because they are so wonderful as they are.
I do like the virtual class concept and I've run into plenty of cases where it would have been real handy.
Relatively transparent persistence can be added to any language for which sufficient metadata is either directly present in the runtime environment, is derivable from the compile time environment or is programmatically created by defining a routine per class that one wishes to have persistent instances of. I've have built many such things and am working on a refinement that will soon be open-sourced. More to come. Building persistence into the language only solves part of the problem and only for users of that language and a particular form of data storage (generally). Actually there are a set of common problems that are data source type, vendor and language independent that should be and can be addressed. Specific language and database plugins can then be added to this central core as needed. An in-language "persistence solution" typically does not touch complex object graph persistence where objects must be reachable along multiple paths and not just relative to a single root. Nor do such approaches deal with object and object/relational concerns such as transactions, concurrency, queries, distributed data sources, schema evolution and so on. But as I said, more on this subject later.
No it is pretty much everyone since almost no one anymore has an inkling of what individual rights are about much less believes that the government and instituitions should be held accountable for supporting them.
What the heck does all of this have to do with the subject? Sheesh. Is there intelligent life on earth?
So, if I build a computer that can directly execute a purely mathematical representation of the algorithm, is this implementation patentable as a concrete form of the algorithm? I don't see that it would be as this machine can execute any old algorithm expressible mathematically directly. It is not an implementation of any of them but a device capable of executing them. Or does what I can patent depend on which mathematical algorithms this device is executing at the moment?
Why should what is basically a refinement of a mathematical algorithm be patentable? Most mathematical algorithms are not. An algorithm is not a physical machine, it is an idea or discovery.
THis piece seemd to be about hate speech but actually discusses a lot of different things in a bit of a ramble.
Online communities tend to become what they are fairly organically. When they do not meet some heartfelt needs of some of the participants those participants often start other forums and communities more oriented around the things perceived as missing. This is as it should be.
The WEB does not have any special failure to produce discussion groups that work well. I can points you to a dozen or two communities specializing in particular areas where discussions that are farily deep, involved and involving happen regularly. Is the technology for supporting discusion as good as it could be? No, of course not. But I don't think the medium itself is antithetical to meaningful interaction.
Misinformation is not exactly the special creation or result of the WEB. The WEB simply enables faster and broader creation and dissemination of information. This has both good and bad consequences. Personally I think it should be felonious for a professional to willingly float disinformation that s/he knows is incorrect in public forums. In an information culture this is fraud.
If an environment on the WEB becomes hostile exactly how can I be actively hurt? I have the ability to stay as anonymous and relatively safe as my persecuter. I have the ability to leave the environment. I can thumb my nose at his antics with impunity or simply consign him to the oblivion he deserves.
I've joined, spoke my mind and walked away from many e-groups that had nasty internal environments. I've also walked away from some that were so over-conscious of never offending anyone at all that no one could oppose any idea or speak freely without being seen as "attacking" some person. Many seem to have great trouble separating ideas and an attack on or attempted repudiation or disvaluing of an idea from people and an actual attack on a person.
I repudiate the notion that I have a responsibility to appoint myself the creator of environments for discussing and debating the urgent issues of our time on each and every list I am on. Many of these lists were simply not designed or chartered for any such agenda and their owners and clients would rightly highly resent any such effort on my part. It is difficult to set up a space to talk about some of the things I think are vitally important. Certainly I would like to see such spaces and wouldn't mind setting some up if I had the time energy and creative ability to do so effectively.
I believe people are accountable online the same way as offline to some extent. Which is that I will not deal with people who show themselves to be jerks. But I question whether the virtual world should have all or close to exactly the same rules, ethics and standards as the real-time world. The environments are too dissimilar to assume without some thought that they should bave the same governing principles across the board.
Personally I would much rather see some bigot blowing off steam online where s/he might get useful enough feedback to reconsider than having no outlet until they create real mayhem and harm in the RT world.
The assumptions about adolescent males are probably considerably over-generalized. Flamers and apparent bigots and hate mongers come in all ages and genders.
The US is the birthplace of liberty as far as instituting a political and legal system originally based on individual rights. I disagree strongly with a clain that the US censors open discussion of political and religious issues. The US as a government entity does no such thing. I can discuss any religion or atheism or make up a religions, satirize any religion and so on to my heart's content without the government once stopping me. The late censor-ware stuff is a failure of the govenrment - a failure to live up to its own governing principles. But I know of no censorware that will censor a religious or anti-religious work or discussion. Perhaps I am behind the times on this. I have no problem if individuals want blinders on their minds or even the minds of their children. I have a huge problem when the government attempts to make the blinders uniform and mandatory.
What I cannot expect is for anyone to be forced to provide me a podium or air space for disseminating my views. The WEB is open enough that I and everyone else can build their own podium. This is actually a good thing.
It is not possible to keep freedom but to remove it from all whom you find offensive. This is a contradiction.
what do you think law is about without legal philosophy? In the absence of reasonable law the ciitzenry will select what they can live with and ignore the rest. That is a lesson of history. It is pointless to beat people up verbally for doing this. There is a large difference between fighting tyranny and ripping off other developers.
But if the blinking data was all well-encrpyted to start with the hackers wouldn't have jack to threaten anyone with. So the government pushes more holes in encryption coverage to "protect" us from what we could only be protected from with really strong encryption? This is really twisted.
I am 45 years old and have skills and experience a lot of companies are willing to pay and pay well to access. On the order of 25% of the engineers I work with are 40+. A 22 yr old who works 16 hours a day will burnout in a year or two. And most such don't have the breadth of experience, information, political savvy, and so on to balance raw energy and talent. The myth of age discrimination is imho largely driven by people over 35 or so loosing their idealism (if they had any) or otherwise loosing their interest, motivation and zest for computer work. There are a lot of causes of this but it is not incurable. Another driver is the notion that programming is about being a macho coding jock and a failure to grasp that to be a good programmer requires a lot more than that. It requires a sense of design and synergy, an ability to synthesize information that most often comes only with long experience. There are exceptions of course.
I think it is foolish to believe that most companies only want development staff with tons of energy, no life, familarity with current favorite tools and nothing else to recommend them. But only such a basic priority widely present could lead to the claimed age discrimination.
A small problem with what you wrote. The US government does not own encryption or the minds of its citizens. The US government has no rights of control over things which are not its property or part of its legitimate functions. It is a legit function to provide for the common defense, but this is arguably not served by "controlling" encryption which really amounts to forbidding its citizens to use and/or sell encrpytion and encrypted communication and products worldwide. This does nothing to help defense. It only weakens American citizens and business in the international market.
Frankly, I am cynical for a different reason. I think this is all a big smoke screen because the government snoops have the bucks and equipment to break any encryption scheme on the market with far less trouble than they wish to advertise. But then I am a bit paranoid.
and depends a whole lot on the woman...
You misquote me. I said that I don't believe Open Source will go far without also including open source design documentation. I brought up a point worth considering about how far the source code alone can take us. Instead of responding to the point you chose to take it out of context.
I said nothing about formal proofs of correctness. I merely point out that it is difficult to impossible to program and debug well without good specifications of what the program should do. This is surely a perfectly straight-forward point. Well not so surely since in my 20 years of software engineering (although I think we often should not call it that) I've certainly run into a lot of folks (including myself at sometimes) who don't get that at all.
Can I ask when Mozilla will be done? And exactly why do we make browsers so complex that they may be arguably more complicated than the Linux kernel as was claimed? Is this a sign of something being more than slightly out of kilter?
If OSS is so much better at finding and eliminating bugs then why is Mozilla still a buggy mess that doesn't stay up more than 15 minutes in my normal usage? There is something wrong here. I do not see that 10,000 eyes are better than a dozen unless the 10,000 eyes are we versed in the design and function of the program being examined. I also think that OSS will not go very far without good Open Source Design documentation and practice. Some reverse engineering tools to extract at least some design elements would be a good start. But the source hides too much of the fundamental decisions and considerations governing a project as these have often been factored in in relatively invisible ways by the time implementation is reasonably far along. It is often not easy for even highly skilled programmer/designers to extract design criteria and decisions from raw source. Without a good understanding of the requirements there is no way to certify that a program behaves as it should. Not blowing up is a nice start but only the most coarse measure of correctness.
Actually, I'm way ahead of you. I want to start a new California spiritual movement called the Church of the Holy Nannite. The money collected from the congregation will go into funding hi-tech projects and particularly nano-tech with the profits plowed back into the congregation and the church. The message is that the world can be transformed to heaven on earth if we do both the technological and personal/interpersonal work necessary to make it so. With the proper amount of inspiration, showpersonship, hype and promotion I think it has a great chance of success.
Yes, I'm kidding - at the moment. Sometimes it feels like a real good idea. After all humans seem to have these spiritual propensities that need to be channeled in a way that is actually good for us instead of fighting against all reason and real world advancement.
Long before we develop the technology that far out a lot of us will most likely decide bodies are only useful some of the time and will configure a body to our needs of the moment when we actually need one (or several for that matter). There is no reason all or even most of those bodies should look like the ones we evolved with. That model of body is only useful in a range of conditions and for a range of tasks not far removed from our evolutionary environment.
It is actually vitally important to think about where the technology can take us before it is already here. What nanotech can do has heavy duty implications for our entire socio-economic structure and our psychology, even for our very identity as a species. I think we would be extremely wise to think of how we will evolve to use the technology with what wisdom we are capable of. The world that is coming will require new habitual ways of looking at things, new ways of interacting, new systems of ethics across all aspects of interaction. It is not too early to start thinking about this stuff and working toward some of the likely necessary changes.
Uh. I saw the same flick (Outer Limits). The scientist did not give his friend the nannites. His friend swiped them and injected himself.
There are ways to follow every movement of anyone you like already. Can't raise a decent scare of nannites with that one.
Who the heck cares if it leads to a short-term gap if it improves the long term health and well-being of all human beings? The new is almost always of necessity the scarce and the expensive as long as it is new. So only those with more resources and wealth in the beginning can access it. So what? There is nothing inherently wrong with this. No one owes anyone equal results and goodies across the board.
Open public discousrce among non-scientists and engineers who don't even understand the technology they would dare to dominate? No thank you.
I hope the hell that technology is moving at a faster pace than our politics and societies at this point. Because it is only technology that will allow us to think and understand enough and more quickly in order to deal more wisely with our world. Or have you not noticed that the standard human brain/mind is woefully poor at many desperately needed aspects of reasoning much less wisdom?
To have the nearly illiterate masses control our future at the hands of professional manipulators of mass opinion is a nightmare I will fight with everything I have. That will kill our future and all of us.
As I read quite a bit of nanotech literature academic and in industrial research labs, I find your assertions that experts think macroassembly is impossible quite incredible. If you believe it is impossible then give an argument showing that it is. Drexler and crew have answered several possible arguments quite handily. If you have or no of others not answered then please bring them forward.