I'm not going to bother reading the court opinion this time, but I can pretty much guess the four judges come from this group:
Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas, O'Connor, Kennedy.
I would have thought so also, but I was surprised in reading the article that Thomas voted with the majority and it was Stephen Breyer who voted with the minority in this case. Interesting.
This is better than science fiction - and makes the previous holy grail - the space elevator - seem klunky and expensive in comparison.
That may be. I do have question -- perhaps some of you have the knowledge to speculate -- could one of these LEO objects be an anchor for a space elevator, to get one going sooner rather than later in this century?
This 'PM' thing has all of the hazards of a motorcycle (no surrounding protection, low visibility from other vehicles), with none of the manuverability and power that can allow you to avoid an accident. There's already a name for drivers of this thing -- roadkill.
Exactly what I though when I looked at this sight! The gif of the guy with a wrench coming out of his skull was the most informative element on the page. It depicts what the fate of the drivers of this death machine.
Re:Economics motivation for conservation
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
...unless everyone in China & India start to drive.
No major disagreements here, but... I believe (and hope) that economic growth in Asia over the next 50 years wiil be such that everyone in China & India will start to drive.
I like your argument and would like to believe it. But.. I believe that as stated, there is an error in #2. It should say that a normal person is only conscious once.
There is also an unstated assumption, that consciousness only resides in "normal" persons with normal left undefined.
Now, here is a possibility, perhaps. Suppose a person's brain is cut in half and put into separate bodies. Granting (1), then it seems possible that we could have two similar, but different fully conscious people, with some "consciousness" being present in both of the new persons. The "persons" in this hypothetical case are not "normal" persons, but I don't think your proof disallows this.
Interesting argument, but if you are using it to disprove Penrose, then it fails because it is circular. When you say, "there is no reason to think that a simulation of every particle that makes up a human . . . successfully simulate consciousness," you are assuming what you have set out to prove.
much of the crew was meeting for the first time in Encounter at Farpoint, so it would be tough to do anything with all the familiar characters together that was set earlier than that.
You mean you expect the various story lines to be consistent! That has never stopped Berman and company before. Why would they care now?
"As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. Godwin's Law thus practically guarantees the existence of an upper bound on thread length in those groups. However there is also a widely- recognized codicil that any intentional triggering of Godwin's Law in order to invoke its thread-ending effects will be unsuccessful.
I partly with you about the earlier post. Software will have bugs, and the dominant OS will always be a target. The First internet worm was unleashed in 1988 and attacked UNIX systems. The earlier poster has not explained why he blames "windows users" and may just be trying to troll. I wouldn't have modded it up certainly.
But -- the earlier poster could have made this point -- that Microsoft OS's are insecure by design. They create systems full of unneeded security issues for nothing more than commercial advantage. This subject was covered here
a few months back.
They could not have avoided the problems we have today, but they did make them much worse. And, yes, it was foreseeable -- witness the security measures in UNIX, present long before Win 95. So, they are morally culpable.
Internet usage is not a RIGHT. It's a PRIVILEDGE. And it's one you should have to be responsible to keep.
I appreciate your perspective, but I disagree. Intenet usage ought to be a RIGHT. Why? Because the guarantee of free speech in our constitution is meaningless if it does not entail an access to the communications media. Free speech was coupled in its time with freedom of assembly, freedom of association and freedom of the press. The freedom of the press is essentially a freedom to access and use the predominant media of the time. In the future (its already happening), the internet will be the dominant communications media.
The problem is not your ignorant user. Your ignorant user is a victim of abuse and theft. Viruses, adware and spyware are all theft of computer resources by the perpetuators. Even SPAM is theft and an abuse of free speech rights -- the level of spam is destroying email and literally drowning out speech. Your ignorant use ought to be able to get on the internet, communicate with others, and put up websites, etc. without being subject to all this illegal activity.
The ultimate fix will involve both technological solutions and law enforcement, both of which are woefully deficient. It is the duty of government to fix these problems. If done right, it does not require any curtailment of freedoms we have under the constitution. In fact, if the goverment makes the defense of liberty and rule of law as its guiding principle (as opposed to another principle like maximizing corporate shareholder value), it will more likely than not do the right thing. But, whether or not it will is a real concern. Real freedoms may be curtailed if we do not all work to defend out rights and to help society come up with good solutions to these problems.
That is an interesting and excellent article you linked. It may show how to provides a solution to permitting a user to take home a verifiable ballot receipt.
However... the other part of my objection is how to keep your vote secret from the government. The article said, "Either one you take has the vote information you saw coded in it, but it cannot be read (except with numeric keys divided among computers run by election officials)." If the government has a ballot anywhere that can be traced back to you with a record of how you voted -- one that they can decrypt -- then the concept of the secret ballot is violated.
Also, an encrypted reciept also destroys confidence in the integrity of the voting procedure because we end up just trusting that the government's tech is all honest and correct. Shakrai's post nailed it quite well when he said, "I don't trust any balloting scheme that can't be recounted by my 85 year old Grandmother who volunteers for election day -- and neither should you."
I have no argument that absentee ballots can be and perhaps are being abused. We may need to fix that problem also.
But -- just to be clear. I don't think it is important, or even a good idea for me to have a paper copy of my vote. In fact, sending me out of the polling place with a copy of how I voted is a potential violation of the secret ballot.
One could imagine how this would work in some third world country. Perhaps the national police or an organized militia or gang could force people to vote a certain way -- and could check on them by asking to look at their ballot copy. This is not that far fetched of a scenario even in the USA. Here in Orange County, we have had instances of "volunteers" policing (and intimidating) Latino voters at polling places to prevent voting by "illegal aliens." The potential abuses are enough to require that no one leave a polling place with a paper ballot showing how they voted.
The point to having a paper ballot is so that I can stuff it into a box (after I have verified that it is correct) at the polling location where it gets mixed with all the other ballots and cannot be traced back to me. The paper ballots are then stored using an auditable, public and secure method. They are them made available for random audits and manual recounts to verify the integrity and correctness of the vote.
I made another post here about the problems with Orange Counties "access codes" and how they endanger the concept of the secret ballot.
I voted in Orange County using one of these machines. My name and precinct was given to a person who created an access code after entering in my personal information into a computer. I got the right ballot, but.... How can I know that my ballot is secret? Isn't the access code tied to me? And to my ballot? What the hell happened to the secret ballot?
Oh, yes, I am sure that OC bureaucrats will assure me that they do not keep those records and the ballot really is secret. Maybe so, but how do I know that? For that matter, how do they know if the machine source code is closed source? It is important that the voter can know with some certainty that thier ballot is truly secret for the voting process to have true integrity.
This whole system literally destroys some very fundamental principles.
Oh yes. There was no paper ballots, so third party audits of the election results are impossible. Now, California is now requiring papar ballots for all voting machines by 2006 -- a good step, but the not so secret ballot issue is also critical.
The only way for e-voting to be secure (open source or closed) is with a paper audit trail. Print me out a paper ballot based on my voting selections and let me drop it into a drop box. Until that happens I won't trust any e-voting system (closed or open source | copyleft or copyright).
I live in Orange County and voted here. There were no paper ballots. I am alarmed and unhappy about the whole situation. I agree with you completely about the papar ballots. On a more positive note, the California Secretary of State is now requiring paper ballots for all voting machines by 2006 -- too late for the presidential election.
The significance of publication in a peer reviewed journal should not be overestimated as the press seems to do so often.
I remember from about 10 years ago that an article on letter on equidistant letter spacing in the Bible (I.e. Bible Codes) was published in "Statistical Science" -- a recongized peer reviewed journal. I also recall that those who approved the article did not agree with it. The reason for publishing it was because they could not refute the mathematics in it. It was a sufficiently interesting finding and methods to merit publication. The work was later effectively refuted, as most knew it would be -- the hypothesis was nutty.
The point here is that Keller's work may have merited publication even if we regard it likely that he is wrong. I don't know one way or the other myself. I guess I am reacting a little bit to the idea that Smits is upset that Keller was even published. It smells of censorship. But maybe he is right.
I've read a fair amount of the Creationist stuff. Views in fact vary widely (young earth, old earth, etc., etc.), but I believe that the position that will be taken is that the life on Mars is Earth life populated via span-spermia.
That view may in fact be a correct one, but we could only know after analysis of Martian life forms bio-chemical strucure, i.e -- does it have earth like DNA? Assuming of course that such life forms are present.
So you watch nightline, or 20/20, or whatever show that "give me a break" shill is on.
I happened to see the "shill" show as you label it. John Stossel did not claim that DDT was completely harmless to humans or the enviroment. The show showed footage of DDT being used in excess 50 years ago. The implication was that any harm from DDT was due to excessive use.
His claim was that the complete banning of DDT has lead to the large death toll due to malaria in Africa today -- an unnecessary tragedy since it could have been prevented with a moderate use of DDT -- presumably at a level that would not cause environmental issues.
I don't know that he is correct. I agree with your skepticism of Stossel's skepticism. But I do think that we need to represent his claim accurately.
It is easy to be fearful due to the short term pain due to economic dislocations, but growth will continue. We haven't come close yet to exhausting all the new areas. Note two emerging revolutions: nano-tech and bio-tech. Also, we still have a long way to go in the whole knowledge revolution area. My own belief is that total programming jobs in the US will grow over time, not shrink. Expect a new expansion in a few years time. Look for jobs in small business and nich industries.
If Linux (or any OS) dominates to the extent Microsoft has we all lose.
Not so!
There are huge benefits (development savings, training costs, you name it) to having one common commoditized Operating System. In fact, I believe that the OS is a natural monopoly for those reasons. The UNIX wars of the '80s destroyed UNIX's opportunity to become that commoditized OS, and M$ was able to step in and fill the vacuum. (Apple might have been able to due this except for its commitment at the time to proprietary hardware and high prices).
But, as we all know, there are huge drawbacks to the M$ monopoly. But usurping that monopoly is enormously difficult. Linux is the best hope of that happening, starting with the server, then to embedded devices and Consumer Electronics, then finally with a price advantage on the desktop. But if this works, Linux will become dominant, and we will all win. The benefits of one Open source commodity OS that no one "monopolizes", but which provides a common base for all to build on far outweighs any possible drawbacks.
I started programming years ago using FORTRAN on old IBM mainframes. An amusing trick on those machines was to pass an actual integer to a subroutine and redefine it. It would work. You could redefine "1" to be "2" and get rather curious results from later calculations. (This won't work with g77).
Most FORTRAN code I had to work with was simply horrid -- huge common blocks and spaghetti code. Bad programming by engineers. Also, "buffer overflows" were possible in the langauge. If FORTAN were the lingua franca of the UNIX world instead of "C" (it was not capable of being so, but it if were), it would be just as full of holes and security issues as "C". Most large FORTRAN code bases are instable in their own way in that large FORTRAN programs crash regularly due to programming errors. The only reason you do not read about these kinds of problems with FORTRAN is because it is not used to write operating systems or user interfaces. FORTRAN crashes are not normally critical. Users learn to work around the errors.
Regardless, I think you are right that there are better languages to teach young programmers. But -- PHP is already here, widely implemented and readily available for use in web pages. So teaching good PHP is a good idea. It is something like teaching sex education to teenagers. You want to emphasis abstinence (don't use PHP as your first languae -- learn programming in a better language), but if you do use PHP, here is how to do it . . . (I don't know that the reviewed book teaches good style or not, hopefully so. Yes, I do think that it is possible to develop a good style for any language in which you work.
Slashdot Mirror
I would have thought so also, but I was surprised in reading the article that Thomas voted with the majority and it was Stephen Breyer who voted with the minority in this case. Interesting.
That may be. I do have question -- perhaps some of you have the knowledge to speculate -- could one of these LEO objects be an anchor for a space elevator, to get one going sooner rather than later in this century?
Exactly what I though when I looked at this sight! The gif of the guy with a wrench coming out of his skull was the most informative element on the page. It depicts what the fate of the drivers of this death machine.
Hmmm ... I work with one of these -- a SCO system.
Great article, but you can improve it for us with just a little bit of html, making links is not hard:
No major disagreements here, but ... I believe (and hope) that economic growth in Asia over the next 50 years wiil be such that everyone in China & India will start to drive.
I like your argument and would like to believe it. But .. I believe that as stated, there is an error in #2. It should say that a normal person is only conscious once.
There is also an unstated assumption, that consciousness only resides in "normal" persons with normal left undefined.
Now, here is a possibility, perhaps. Suppose a person's brain is cut in half and put into separate bodies. Granting (1), then it seems possible that we could have two similar, but different fully conscious people, with some "consciousness" being present in both of the new persons. The "persons" in this hypothetical case are not "normal" persons, but I don't think your proof disallows this.
Interesting argument, but if you are using it to disprove Penrose, then it fails because it is circular. When you say, "there is no reason to think that a simulation of every particle that makes up a human . . . successfully simulate consciousness," you are assuming what you have set out to prove.
Shatner also has a guest role on The Practice . He plays plays a pompus ass of a lawyer. He is perfect for the part!
You mean you expect the various story lines to be consistent! That has never stopped Berman and company before. Why would they care now?
Your probably right. In retrospect, I see that my knee was jerking a bit.
For all who are interested Godwin's law states:
Thanks for your clarifying logic on the parent's attempted guilt by association equating religion with Nazism. That was bigotry pure and simple.
I partly with you about the earlier post. Software will have bugs, and the dominant OS will always be a target. The First internet worm was unleashed in 1988 and attacked UNIX systems. The earlier poster has not explained why he blames "windows users" and may just be trying to troll. I wouldn't have modded it up certainly.
But -- the earlier poster could have made this point -- that Microsoft OS's are insecure by design. They create systems full of unneeded security issues for nothing more than commercial advantage. This subject was covered here a few months back.
They could not have avoided the problems we have today, but they did make them much worse. And, yes, it was foreseeable -- witness the security measures in UNIX, present long before Win 95. So, they are morally culpable.
I appreciate your perspective, but I disagree. Intenet usage ought to be a RIGHT. Why? Because the guarantee of free speech in our constitution is meaningless if it does not entail an access to the communications media. Free speech was coupled in its time with freedom of assembly, freedom of association and freedom of the press. The freedom of the press is essentially a freedom to access and use the predominant media of the time. In the future (its already happening), the internet will be the dominant communications media.
The problem is not your ignorant user. Your ignorant user is a victim of abuse and theft. Viruses, adware and spyware are all theft of computer resources by the perpetuators. Even SPAM is theft and an abuse of free speech rights -- the level of spam is destroying email and literally drowning out speech. Your ignorant use ought to be able to get on the internet, communicate with others, and put up websites, etc. without being subject to all this illegal activity.
The ultimate fix will involve both technological solutions and law enforcement, both of which are woefully deficient. It is the duty of government to fix these problems. If done right, it does not require any curtailment of freedoms we have under the constitution. In fact, if the goverment makes the defense of liberty and rule of law as its guiding principle (as opposed to another principle like maximizing corporate shareholder value), it will more likely than not do the right thing. But, whether or not it will is a real concern. Real freedoms may be curtailed if we do not all work to defend out rights and to help society come up with good solutions to these problems.
That is an interesting and excellent article you linked. It may show how to provides a solution to permitting a user to take home a verifiable ballot receipt.
However ... the other part of my objection is how to keep your vote secret from the government. The article said, "Either one you take has the vote information you saw coded in it, but it cannot be read (except with numeric keys divided among computers run by election officials)." If the government has a ballot anywhere that can be traced back to you with a record of how you voted -- one that they can decrypt -- then the concept of the secret ballot is violated.
Also, an encrypted reciept also destroys confidence in the integrity of the voting procedure because we end up just trusting that the government's tech is all honest and correct. Shakrai's post nailed it quite well when he said, "I don't trust any balloting scheme that can't be recounted by my 85 year old Grandmother who volunteers for election day -- and neither should you."
I have no argument that absentee ballots can be and perhaps are being abused. We may need to fix that problem also.
That's good.
But -- just to be clear. I don't think it is important, or even a good idea for me to have a paper copy of my vote. In fact, sending me out of the polling place with a copy of how I voted is a potential violation of the secret ballot.
One could imagine how this would work in some third world country. Perhaps the national police or an organized militia or gang could force people to vote a certain way -- and could check on them by asking to look at their ballot copy. This is not that far fetched of a scenario even in the USA. Here in Orange County, we have had instances of "volunteers" policing (and intimidating) Latino voters at polling places to prevent voting by "illegal aliens." The potential abuses are enough to require that no one leave a polling place with a paper ballot showing how they voted.
The point to having a paper ballot is so that I can stuff it into a box (after I have verified that it is correct) at the polling location where it gets mixed with all the other ballots and cannot be traced back to me. The paper ballots are then stored using an auditable, public and secure method. They are them made available for random audits and manual recounts to verify the integrity and correctness of the vote.
I made another post here about the problems with Orange Counties "access codes" and how they endanger the concept of the secret ballot.
The access code is a horrible idea!
I voted in Orange County using one of these machines. My name and precinct was given to a person who created an access code after entering in my personal information into a computer. I got the right ballot, but .... How can I know that my ballot is secret? Isn't the access code tied to me? And to my ballot? What the hell happened to the secret ballot?
Oh, yes, I am sure that OC bureaucrats will assure me that they do not keep those records and the ballot really is secret. Maybe so, but how do I know that? For that matter, how do they know if the machine source code is closed source? It is important that the voter can know with some certainty that thier ballot is truly secret for the voting process to have true integrity.
This whole system literally destroys some very fundamental principles.
Oh yes. There was no paper ballots, so third party audits of the election results are impossible. Now, California is now requiring papar ballots for all voting machines by 2006 -- a good step, but the not so secret ballot issue is also critical.
The only way for e-voting to be secure (open source or closed) is with a paper audit trail. Print me out a paper ballot based on my voting selections and let me drop it into a drop box. Until that happens I won't trust any e-voting system (closed or open source | copyleft or copyright).
I live in Orange County and voted here. There were no paper ballots. I am alarmed and unhappy about the whole situation. I agree with you completely about the papar ballots. On a more positive note, the California Secretary of State is now requiring paper ballots for all voting machines by 2006 -- too late for the presidential election.
The significance of publication in a peer reviewed journal should not be overestimated as the press seems to do so often.
I remember from about 10 years ago that an article on letter on equidistant letter spacing in the Bible (I.e. Bible Codes) was published in "Statistical Science" -- a recongized peer reviewed journal. I also recall that those who approved the article did not agree with it. The reason for publishing it was because they could not refute the mathematics in it. It was a sufficiently interesting finding and methods to merit publication. The work was later effectively refuted, as most knew it would be -- the hypothesis was nutty.
The point here is that Keller's work may have merited publication even if we regard it likely that he is wrong. I don't know one way or the other myself. I guess I am reacting a little bit to the idea that Smits is upset that Keller was even published. It smells of censorship. But maybe he is right.
I've read a fair amount of the Creationist stuff. Views in fact vary widely (young earth, old earth, etc., etc.), but I believe that the position that will be taken is that the life on Mars is Earth life populated via span-spermia.
That view may in fact be a correct one, but we could only know after analysis of Martian life forms bio-chemical strucure, i.e -- does it have earth like DNA? Assuming of course that such life forms are present.
I happened to see the "shill" show as you label it. John Stossel did not claim that DDT was completely harmless to humans or the enviroment. The show showed footage of DDT being used in excess 50 years ago. The implication was that any harm from DDT was due to excessive use.
His claim was that the complete banning of DDT has lead to the large death toll due to malaria in Africa today -- an unnecessary tragedy since it could have been prevented with a moderate use of DDT -- presumably at a level that would not cause environmental issues.
I don't know that he is correct. I agree with your skepticism of Stossel's skepticism. But I do think that we need to represent his claim accurately.
You are right!
Here is an article of interest: The Myth of the Race to the Bottom.
It is easy to be fearful due to the short term pain due to economic dislocations, but growth will continue. We haven't come close yet to exhausting all the new areas. Note two emerging revolutions: nano-tech and bio-tech. Also, we still have a long way to go in the whole knowledge revolution area. My own belief is that total programming jobs in the US will grow over time, not shrink. Expect a new expansion in a few years time. Look for jobs in small business and nich industries.
You mean you work for SCO both as a programmer and as a lawyer?
If Linux (or any OS) dominates to the extent Microsoft has we all lose.
Not so!
There are huge benefits (development savings, training costs, you name it) to having one common commoditized Operating System. In fact, I believe that the OS is a natural monopoly for those reasons. The UNIX wars of the '80s destroyed UNIX's opportunity to become that commoditized OS, and M$ was able to step in and fill the vacuum. (Apple might have been able to due this except for its commitment at the time to proprietary hardware and high prices).
But, as we all know, there are huge drawbacks to the M$ monopoly. But usurping that monopoly is enormously difficult. Linux is the best hope of that happening, starting with the server, then to embedded devices and Consumer Electronics, then finally with a price advantage on the desktop. But if this works, Linux will become dominant, and we will all win. The benefits of one Open source commodity OS that no one "monopolizes", but which provides a common base for all to build on far outweighs any possible drawbacks.
I started programming years ago using FORTRAN on old IBM mainframes. An amusing trick on those machines was to pass an actual integer to a subroutine and redefine it. It would work. You could redefine "1" to be "2" and get rather curious results from later calculations. (This won't work with g77).
Most FORTRAN code I had to work with was simply horrid -- huge common blocks and spaghetti code. Bad programming by engineers. Also, "buffer overflows" were possible in the langauge. If FORTAN were the lingua franca of the UNIX world instead of "C" (it was not capable of being so, but it if were), it would be just as full of holes and security issues as "C". Most large FORTRAN code bases are instable in their own way in that large FORTRAN programs crash regularly due to programming errors. The only reason you do not read about these kinds of problems with FORTRAN is because it is not used to write operating systems or user interfaces. FORTRAN crashes are not normally critical. Users learn to work around the errors.
Regardless, I think you are right that there are better languages to teach young programmers. But -- PHP is already here, widely implemented and readily available for use in web pages. So teaching good PHP is a good idea. It is something like teaching sex education to teenagers. You want to emphasis abstinence (don't use PHP as your first languae -- learn programming in a better language), but if you do use PHP, here is how to do it . . . (I don't know that the reviewed book teaches good style or not, hopefully so. Yes, I do think that it is possible to develop a good style for any language in which you work.