"People are not guilty for the sins of their fathers." Not so, traditionally the guilt lasts for seven generations, or in certain cases forever. However, in the Bhagavad Gita a good argument is made that the repercussions of evil are generally realized in the entire population, in an almost ecological sense, like the aftermath of a Chernobyl or a particularly nasty toxic spill.
The fact is, our future was truncated by the loss of Turing, just as it was disfigured by the loss of Oppenheimer.
If your ruler is as stretchy as the thing you measure, you're not likely to notice a difference. It's a frame problem. On the other hand, "gravity waves" could be simple nonsense, like Chomsky's "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," which has semantics but denotes nothing.
Far better to have a bag of 8 ounce robots that you throw into a situation like a box of ball bearings. Let them scatter, sprout eyes, ears, chemical sensors and IR antennae, instantly network with each other and move in coordinated swarms toward a target. Just watching the beasties react to your presence would send you into a heebie jeebie fit, with a strong incentive to move away. Especially if a few of 'bots are C4 grenades which can be maneuvered forward by the network and detonated by independent circuitry. Since this can be a re-programmable network, you could have a medic fog as well as a search and destroy fog.
I'm pretty sure a chip would think chiplike thoughts, eschewing the merely human on grounds of aesthetics, or possibly simple revulsion. What's the incentive for thinking like an ape with delusions of grandeur? Sounds like clear grounds for intervention and probable deprogramming.
Aren't we special? But truthfully, the wisdom in this oh-so-human realm of experience is millenia old, maybe even aeons old, and I doubt you and yours will find anything radically new to brag (or moan) about. Are you good people? Are you friends? Do you like kids? Can your little family unit support itself? Take it from an anti-social geek who's been there and done that — your theories evaporate like the morning dew when your first kid arrives. Suddenly, one man plus one woman fuses in a synergy with the strength of ten and all your personal boundaries and sophomoric bull about identity jump five lightyears in radius. Be honest with each other, and you will quite soon discovery mysteries and joys, pangs and regrets, you can't imagine exist.
I like the $5 wrench applied to shins idea, but fortunately TrueCrypt can do entirely without passwords in the conventional sense. Just copy a couple k of junk from/dev/urandom to your USB flash drive and name it Fred. When you create a TrueCrypt volume, use keyfiles and point to the aforementioned Fred on the USB flash drive; you can leave the password blank or trivial. Be sure not to automate a turnkey system — you want to manually point at Fred each and every time you open your encrypted volume.
Don't lose the USB flash drive. In case of emergencies, smash it. The advantage is, you have NO idea at any time what your "key" is, but it's very good.
Why do Japanese franchises turn into fangirl shrines for everyone's favorite character? There was high art in the pixelated versions, too small to be pretty, so the images got along with strong story and some very funny wit.
Now that we've got a lot of Deviant Art goddesses who can do better than that, the production values lean heavily toward dreamy-eyed fantasy (or hell-eyed fantasy, depending who rubs your nub), and the players get shafted on brutally convoluted battle schemes and impossibly difficult endgame dungeons. The games are prettier by the minute, and absolutely incoherent.
Maybe it would be better to create a ensemble cast of named AI's who can play any role (hypersprites?), seal the doors, and let writers create the next few iterations?
I came. I saw. I found five things. I went to Google. I found five things sorted by everyone else in the whole damn world to the top of a nearly useless commercial-cum-blogosphere popularity contest. Puhleeze. Make a librarian that understands cognitive differences. Let a thousand flowers bloom, to quote somebody. (Red Buttons?)
We had a guy down in the bowels of the beast who wore a T with the legend "I don't know where the hardware ends and the software starts," so I guess it's all about what your Young Programmer is up to, right? Personally, I was an autodidact on the Apple ][+'s 6502 assembler (Lisa 2.5, IIRC), AppleSoft and the Apple Pascal language card, who soon switched to CP/M and MSC 4.0. just because you had more control over what were doing. After that, Turbo C got me my first paying job, and it took me years to understand I was being hired in order to outsource some CS major's job to my private third world. Hallucinations of grandeur aside, it was fun while it lasted. Some 20 years later, there seems to be a lot more phylogeny to recapitulate in order to bring the pups up to speed. I no longer program at all, frankly, except in the inflated redefinition of the term in which "programming" is pulling acceptable subset behaviors out of the Open Office menu structure.
That said, genius being universal and all, the next CS paradigms will probably come out of some idiosyncratic kid in North Korea, sweep the internet bistros of Cantonese China before anyone knows it, and next decade we'll all be learning SkyNet.
As a convinced Fundamental Solipsist, I find that delegating my great ideas to the huge pool of cosmic consciousness I'm not using at the moment is a great way to slowly improvise A Better Universe for All of Me.
Seriously, what's wrong with altruism? Open Source? Public domain? Better minds than yours will develop your idea better than you could do it yourself, if its worth anything. Bang the rocks together, like Douglas Adams said. You get what you need...;-)
Seriously seriously, haven't you already noticed that large cooperative synergies own more of the future than enterprise-based competition? Linux will eventually link us to the stars, when Microsoft and Apple have morphed into game consoles. It's evolution.
I notice somebody mentioned IronKey, a jazzed up USB thumb drive. Shounds good. If you'd rather not spend money, you can also use Open Source tools like TrueCrypt, which can encrypt an entire USB thumb drive. All the usual caveats apply about weak spots in apparently secure systems: Suboptimum human behavior (both laziness and ignorance), weak passwords, failure to actually use the encrypted volume, residual OS or Application (such as FireFox!) data caches in unencrypted storage, backup routines that back up unencrypted data to insecure volumes, etc.
There's some utility in farming out that kind of foresight and expertise to off-the-shelf solutions, but you balance that against the value of the data you're protecting so assiduously. Of course, if you put a TrueCrypt file on your onboard HD, it appears as a separate volume when mounted. Use a keyfile (an MP3 file, e.g.) which you store on USB thumb, then if the two are separated they're both useless. In theory.
Not all TrueCrypts are equal, apparently. The Mac and Windoze versions may have better thought out user interfaces than Linux does, although I haven't actually seen these for awhile. Good front ends can ameliorate newbie or casual or business user blunders, such as automating a "turnkey" logon which completely defeats the purpose of security in the first place.
TrueCrypt uses 256-bit AES, Serpent, TwoFish and cascading versions of these on 128 bit blocks in XTS mode. It's hash algorithms are RIPEMD-160, SHA-512 or Whirlpool, user selectable. Open source and recommended, and reasonably idiot proof, not for beginners or sophomores.
Uhhhh, sorry if this is dumb, but... WTF?! Was there a threat to UK national security? Have the Brits gone completely bonkers? I don't understand. What happened to "Just don't frighten the horses?"
I'm way beyond the tinfoil skullcaps stage. It really doesn't matter to me if the feds want to park a block away in black vans deciphering my screen's radio haze. Good luck to them, and best wishes at the world's dullest job, but if they need to plant bugs the least they could do is debug their @#$%ing software. You expect that kind of crap from Microsoft — Bill Gates' entire fortune isn't worth the cost of a single nuclear aircraft carrier, after all, so he can't really afford QA. From the feds, though, you kinda expect a higher standard. A black ops budget can afford a few world-class, genius-level systems debuggers, wooden cha think?
No bald babes projected by obscenely hybridized Voyager 6, because who needs robots when Manned Space Flight takes up soooooo much GDP that the Roddenberries have to realize the whole Q arc on YouTube.
What's humble about HR? Hiring decisions based on zero knowledge about tech functions is laughable hubris, although maybe things are different in Oz. My best jobs came from interviews with project leaders, not HR, and the project leaders then told HR who was getting hired.
For all the pious wingwang about "being able to prove" skill, attitude and popularity, HR couldn't hire a techie with a Tardis. What "skill" do you want to ramble on about? The ability to spin a widget in a.NET library? Or the ability to solve a problem nobody's thought of yet? Usually that involves teamwork and cooperation, but can you spot the ten guys/gals who can actually contribute in a highpressure vacuum until a solution presents itself? Sometimes, I think HR is designed to prevent synergy.
Hiring is a personal process that involves the usual human foibles. I'll admit to loving the smell of fear in an applicant. Hey, if I can deepsix this guy, my job is safe for another few months. (Purely fictional account, of course.)
Mine came in the first Tomb Raider demo. Couldn't figure out the controls, and Lara just stood there — until she shifted her weight and sighed pointedly.
39? Maybe, depends how resilient you can stay. 43? No. Absolutely not. You'll go down in flames and kill your chance to get into management. Nobody wants you when you're old and gray.
Be beautiful. All you need for that is high school.
Be beautiful and black. All you need for that is an ignorant old man with a quick temper and a ready belt.
It amazes me how many jobs there are that make sense in urban environments. Developed means not having to apologize for selling what is essentially a protection racket — insurance.
I'd be happy with beasts that aren't basically jelly bags on rigid armatures. A cat's sacrum has more than fifty degrees of freedom, not just forward and backward, as the Japanese have successfully illustrated for over three hundred years.
As far as women go, I once watched a woman walk across a playground using eight independent and unsynchronized rhythms — right leg, left leg, right arm, left arm, hip sway on three axes and Balinese head waggles — completely unaware of anyone watching. Old enough to be a well-schooled dancer with kids, and pretty memorable.
If someone can detect spam in public-key encrypted email, how is this different from knowing my private key? Even if they promise they haven't read my mail, only "analysed" it, hasn't my encryption scheme been compromised?
In particular, hasn't the long-standing suspicion that public-key encryption reduces to a trivial case been confirmed? (A suspicion that arose when NSA dropped its objections to Phil Zimmerman's PGP scheme involving public-key encryption of the actual key being used to encipher plaintext using Triple-DES or IDEA or whatever it was. Either NSA knew how to crack a 256-bit key, or public-key encryption was already compromised.)
Similarly, to calculate the time required to discover Major Kong's OPE code prefix, given the 28 SAC B-52 bombers proceding to targets inside Russia on the Dr. Strangelove Big Board, we simply divide 26 cubed by 28, distributing a range of 628 prefix combinations to as many teams of radiomen who can send perhaps 20 prefices a minute to a single B-52. Major Kong's OPE prefix should turn up in 21 minutes, well within the deadline, provided his CRM 114 Discriminator isn't already toast. Now that's useful.
The Paris Commune? The Bolshevik Revolution? The Cuban Revolution? The French Revolution? The American Revolution? The Industrial Revolution? The Green Revolution? The concept of "revolution" seems to be a fairly modern concept, though. I don't know if it existed prior to the Age of Reason. Before that was just bloody war between rival princes — Machiavelli, the Mahabharata, Jews and Canaanites, etc. Revolution implies upheaval, sod-busting, death to tyrants, up with people, etc. The moment of emphatic realignment in the West may be the Gutenberg Revolution, the printing press and near-universal literacy. Chinese history is another story, not restricted to Mao's Communist Revolution ("Sieze the means of communications!"), but tumultuous in periodic paroxysms which overthrough dynasties and establish new ways of thinking (the T'ang, e.g.), which is partly the reason the current regime fears the Falun Gong and any breath of Tienanmen.
Considering what Iranians have managed to accomplish with Bluetooth, why step back into the dark ages of 1950's single sideband? I can just imagine it — a Morse code rendition of ASCII Art of Neda Agha-Soltan drawing her last breath in defiance of the Ayatollahs.
Duh, people. Iran is already technologically sophisticated. They don't need us, except as witnesses.
Eschar! Point for you, I had to look that up. But I don't think a meaning that precisely technical is implied by either the German or the fairly benign-looking photograph. (Eschar is a scab particularly associated with burns or excoriating skin diseases.) I suppose a thin hot iron plasma in the vicinity of human flesh for some few milliseconds could produce that sort of injury. It might resemble wounds caused by a lightning strike, I suppose. The English "paver" might be too specific; and it's not a piece of roadbuilding equipment, but an ordinary paving stone from current landscaping jargon, that's intended. "A sound like cracking a flat rock" might be closer to the German, although that's free too.
Slashdot Mirror
"People are not guilty for the sins of their fathers." Not so, traditionally the guilt lasts for seven generations, or in certain cases forever. However, in the Bhagavad Gita a good argument is made that the repercussions of evil are generally realized in the entire population, in an almost ecological sense, like the aftermath of a Chernobyl or a particularly nasty toxic spill.
The fact is, our future was truncated by the loss of Turing, just as it was disfigured by the loss of Oppenheimer.
Not only is depression (in others) useful, it gives billions of airheaded Trillians something to do while they're torking off their daily boyfriends.
If your ruler is as stretchy as the thing you measure, you're not likely to notice a difference. It's a frame problem. On the other hand, "gravity waves" could be simple nonsense, like Chomsky's "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," which has semantics but denotes nothing.
Far better to have a bag of 8 ounce robots that you throw into a situation like a box of ball bearings. Let them scatter, sprout eyes, ears, chemical sensors and IR antennae, instantly network with each other and move in coordinated swarms toward a target. Just watching the beasties react to your presence would send you into a heebie jeebie fit, with a strong incentive to move away. Especially if a few of 'bots are C4 grenades which can be maneuvered forward by the network and detonated by independent circuitry. Since this can be a re-programmable network, you could have a medic fog as well as a search and destroy fog.
Why not just replace Wine with Virtual PC, move everybody onto a stable Ubuntu platform, and let them eat Quake?
I'm pretty sure a chip would think chiplike thoughts, eschewing the merely human on grounds of aesthetics, or possibly simple revulsion. What's the incentive for thinking like an ape with delusions of grandeur? Sounds like clear grounds for intervention and probable deprogramming.
Aren't we special? But truthfully, the wisdom in this oh-so-human realm of experience is millenia old, maybe even aeons old, and I doubt you and yours will find anything radically new to brag (or moan) about. Are you good people? Are you friends? Do you like kids? Can your little family unit support itself? Take it from an anti-social geek who's been there and done that — your theories evaporate like the morning dew when your first kid arrives. Suddenly, one man plus one woman fuses in a synergy with the strength of ten and all your personal boundaries and sophomoric bull about identity jump five lightyears in radius. Be honest with each other, and you will quite soon discovery mysteries and joys, pangs and regrets, you can't imagine exist.
I like the $5 wrench applied to shins idea, but fortunately TrueCrypt can do entirely without passwords in the conventional sense. Just copy a couple k of junk from /dev/urandom to your USB flash drive and name it Fred. When you create a TrueCrypt volume, use keyfiles and point to the aforementioned Fred on the USB flash drive; you can leave the password blank or trivial. Be sure not to automate a turnkey system — you want to manually point at Fred each and every time you open your encrypted volume.
Don't lose the USB flash drive. In case of emergencies, smash it. The advantage is, you have NO idea at any time what your "key" is, but it's very good.
Why do Japanese franchises turn into fangirl shrines for everyone's favorite character? There was high art in the pixelated versions, too small to be pretty, so the images got along with strong story and some very funny wit.
Now that we've got a lot of Deviant Art goddesses who can do better than that, the production values lean heavily toward dreamy-eyed fantasy (or hell-eyed fantasy, depending who rubs your nub), and the players get shafted on brutally convoluted battle schemes and impossibly difficult endgame dungeons. The games are prettier by the minute, and absolutely incoherent.
Maybe it would be better to create a ensemble cast of named AI's who can play any role (hypersprites?), seal the doors, and let writers create the next few iterations?
I came. I saw. I found five things. I went to Google. I found five things sorted by everyone else in the whole damn world to the top of a nearly useless commercial-cum-blogosphere popularity contest. Puhleeze. Make a librarian that understands cognitive differences. Let a thousand flowers bloom, to quote somebody. (Red Buttons?)
We had a guy down in the bowels of the beast who wore a T with the legend "I don't know where the hardware ends and the software starts," so I guess it's all about what your Young Programmer is up to, right? Personally, I was an autodidact on the Apple ][+'s 6502 assembler (Lisa 2.5, IIRC), AppleSoft and the Apple Pascal language card, who soon switched to CP/M and MSC 4.0. just because you had more control over what were doing. After that, Turbo C got me my first paying job, and it took me years to understand I was being hired in order to outsource some CS major's job to my private third world. Hallucinations of grandeur aside, it was fun while it lasted. Some 20 years later, there seems to be a lot more phylogeny to recapitulate in order to bring the pups up to speed. I no longer program at all, frankly, except in the inflated redefinition of the term in which "programming" is pulling acceptable subset behaviors out of the Open Office menu structure.
That said, genius being universal and all, the next CS paradigms will probably come out of some idiosyncratic kid in North Korea, sweep the internet bistros of Cantonese China before anyone knows it, and next decade we'll all be learning SkyNet.
As a convinced Fundamental Solipsist, I find that delegating my great ideas to the huge pool of cosmic consciousness I'm not using at the moment is a great way to slowly improvise A Better Universe for All of Me.
;-)
Seriously, what's wrong with altruism? Open Source? Public domain? Better minds than yours will develop your idea better than you could do it yourself, if its worth anything. Bang the rocks together, like Douglas Adams said. You get what you need...
Seriously seriously, haven't you already noticed that large cooperative synergies own more of the future than enterprise-based competition? Linux will eventually link us to the stars, when Microsoft and Apple have morphed into game consoles. It's evolution.
I notice somebody mentioned IronKey, a jazzed up USB thumb drive. Shounds good. If you'd rather not spend money, you can also use Open Source tools like TrueCrypt, which can encrypt an entire USB thumb drive. All the usual caveats apply about weak spots in apparently secure systems: Suboptimum human behavior (both laziness and ignorance), weak passwords, failure to actually use the encrypted volume, residual OS or Application (such as FireFox!) data caches in unencrypted storage, backup routines that back up unencrypted data to insecure volumes, etc.
There's some utility in farming out that kind of foresight and expertise to off-the-shelf solutions, but you balance that against the value of the data you're protecting so assiduously. Of course, if you put a TrueCrypt file on your onboard HD, it appears as a separate volume when mounted. Use a keyfile (an MP3 file, e.g.) which you store on USB thumb, then if the two are separated they're both useless. In theory.
Not all TrueCrypts are equal, apparently. The Mac and Windoze versions may have better thought out user interfaces than Linux does, although I haven't actually seen these for awhile. Good front ends can ameliorate newbie or casual or business user blunders, such as automating a "turnkey" logon which completely defeats the purpose of security in the first place.
TrueCrypt uses 256-bit AES, Serpent, TwoFish and cascading versions of these on 128 bit blocks in XTS mode. It's hash algorithms are RIPEMD-160, SHA-512 or Whirlpool, user selectable. Open source and recommended, and reasonably idiot proof, not for beginners or sophomores.
Uhhhh, sorry if this is dumb, but... WTF?! Was there a threat to UK national security? Have the Brits gone completely bonkers? I don't understand. What happened to "Just don't frighten the horses?"
I'm way beyond the tinfoil skullcaps stage. It really doesn't matter to me if the feds want to park a block away in black vans deciphering my screen's radio haze. Good luck to them, and best wishes at the world's dullest job, but if they need to plant bugs the least they could do is debug their @#$%ing software. You expect that kind of crap from Microsoft — Bill Gates' entire fortune isn't worth the cost of a single nuclear aircraft carrier, after all, so he can't really afford QA. From the feds, though, you kinda expect a higher standard. A black ops budget can afford a few world-class, genius-level systems debuggers, wooden cha think?
No bald babes projected by obscenely hybridized Voyager 6, because who needs robots when Manned Space Flight takes up soooooo much GDP that the Roddenberries have to realize the whole Q arc on YouTube.
What's humble about HR? Hiring decisions based on zero knowledge about tech functions is laughable hubris, although maybe things are different in Oz. My best jobs came from interviews with project leaders, not HR, and the project leaders then told HR who was getting hired.
.NET library? Or the ability to solve a problem nobody's thought of yet? Usually that involves teamwork and cooperation, but can you spot the ten guys/gals who can actually contribute in a highpressure vacuum until a solution presents itself? Sometimes, I think HR is designed to prevent synergy.
For all the pious wingwang about "being able to prove" skill, attitude and popularity, HR couldn't hire a techie with a Tardis. What "skill" do you want to ramble on about? The ability to spin a widget in a
Hiring is a personal process that involves the usual human foibles. I'll admit to loving the smell of fear in an applicant. Hey, if I can deepsix this guy, my job is safe for another few months. (Purely fictional account, of course.)
Mine came in the first Tomb Raider demo. Couldn't figure out the controls, and Lara just stood there — until she shifted her weight and sighed pointedly.
39? Maybe, depends how resilient you can stay. 43? No. Absolutely not. You'll go down in flames and kill your chance to get into management. Nobody wants you when you're old and gray.
Be beautiful. All you need for that is high school.
Be beautiful and black. All you need for that is an ignorant old man with a quick temper and a ready belt.
It amazes me how many jobs there are that make sense in urban environments. Developed means not having to apologize for selling what is essentially a protection racket — insurance.
Pink is for hackers, blue is for suits.
I'd be happy with beasts that aren't basically jelly bags on rigid armatures. A cat's sacrum has more than fifty degrees of freedom, not just forward and backward, as the Japanese have successfully illustrated for over three hundred years.
As far as women go, I once watched a woman walk across a playground using eight independent and unsynchronized rhythms — right leg, left leg, right arm, left arm, hip sway on three axes and Balinese head waggles — completely unaware of anyone watching. Old enough to be a well-schooled dancer with kids, and pretty memorable.
If someone can detect spam in public-key encrypted email, how is this different from knowing my private key? Even if they promise they haven't read my mail, only "analysed" it, hasn't my encryption scheme been compromised?
In particular, hasn't the long-standing suspicion that public-key encryption reduces to a trivial case been confirmed? (A suspicion that arose when NSA dropped its objections to Phil Zimmerman's PGP scheme involving public-key encryption of the actual key being used to encipher plaintext using Triple-DES or IDEA or whatever it was. Either NSA knew how to crack a 256-bit key, or public-key encryption was already compromised.)
Similarly, to calculate the time required to discover Major Kong's OPE code prefix, given the 28 SAC B-52 bombers proceding to targets inside Russia on the Dr. Strangelove Big Board, we simply divide 26 cubed by 28, distributing a range of 628 prefix combinations to as many teams of radiomen who can send perhaps 20 prefices a minute to a single B-52. Major Kong's OPE prefix should turn up in 21 minutes, well within the deadline, provided his CRM 114 Discriminator isn't already toast. Now that's useful.
The Paris Commune? The Bolshevik Revolution? The Cuban Revolution? The French Revolution? The American Revolution? The Industrial Revolution? The Green Revolution? The concept of "revolution" seems to be a fairly modern concept, though. I don't know if it existed prior to the Age of Reason. Before that was just bloody war between rival princes — Machiavelli, the Mahabharata, Jews and Canaanites, etc. Revolution implies upheaval, sod-busting, death to tyrants, up with people, etc. The moment of emphatic realignment in the West may be the Gutenberg Revolution, the printing press and near-universal literacy. Chinese history is another story, not restricted to Mao's Communist Revolution ("Sieze the means of communications!"), but tumultuous in periodic paroxysms which overthrough dynasties and establish new ways of thinking (the T'ang, e.g.), which is partly the reason the current regime fears the Falun Gong and any breath of Tienanmen.
Considering what Iranians have managed to accomplish with Bluetooth, why step back into the dark ages of 1950's single sideband? I can just imagine it — a Morse code rendition of ASCII Art of Neda Agha-Soltan drawing her last breath in defiance of the Ayatollahs. Duh, people. Iran is already technologically sophisticated. They don't need us, except as witnesses.
Eschar! Point for you, I had to look that up. But I don't think a meaning that precisely technical is implied by either the German or the fairly benign-looking photograph. (Eschar is a scab particularly associated with burns or excoriating skin diseases.) I suppose a thin hot iron plasma in the vicinity of human flesh for some few milliseconds could produce that sort of injury. It might resemble wounds caused by a lightning strike, I suppose. The English "paver" might be too specific; and it's not a piece of roadbuilding equipment, but an ordinary paving stone from current landscaping jargon, that's intended. "A sound like cracking a flat rock" might be closer to the German, although that's free too.