It's about the conference and its complete lack of review.
The targeted conference's MO appears to be accepting anything, but demanding registration fees. In other words, it's pretty much a specialized vanity press in which the submitters are guaranteed to lose money and gain approximately zero prestige among anybody who's ever gotten spam from the conference or otherwise heard about their methods.
Some conferences are bad jokes from the persepective of quality and prestige.
Yeah, for some conferences. For ACM SIGMOD 2005, for instance, 65 acceptances out of 431 papers; the acceptance rate for VLDB '04 was also non-trivial 16.1%. These are not unusually low for these conferences.
Such is not, however, the universal practice for computer science journals or conferences. It's rather more typical to (a) not include sufficient details to replicate results; this is hardly difficult to do given the number of parameters and choices of implementation for any given method; and (b) to not make the code available, or perhaps to grudgingly provide it with the least documentation possible.
The intentional solicitation of an illegal action, however, is not exactly the same as being an innocent bystander. There may be a case for contributory copyright infringement.
From news i've heard, we're getting very close to being able to breed dinosaurs from their preserved DNA....at which point we'll probably use them in the entertainment, agriculture, military and food service industries. Mmm, dino-burgers.
Perhaps I'm a bit too cynical, but I've a certain suspicion that if there were an apocalyptic event which left just millions of isolated survivors, you'd see a sharp rise in religious fanaticism, proclamations about Chosen Ones, armed malcontents preying on less-organized survivors, and paranoid conspiracy theorists blaming events on others and seeking revenge.
Humanity might survive in terms of pure biology, but civillization might be far less robust.
Certain problems might be ameliorated by the need to start anew, however.
For instance, modern industrial manufacturing facilities can be made more efficient and ecologically less damaging since we know much more about designing them. It'd just be incredibly expensive to tear down everything that's old in order to rebuild it. We also have much better resources for city/settlement planning -- while it'd be wasteful to level and rebuild an old city to conform to better planning that wasn't done a few hundred years ago, we could do a lot of planning for a new settlement, and colonists would have a much better ability to adjust plans on their own with modern science and computers compared to cities that grew around medieval strongholds and so forth.
The risk of war may also be mitigated, at least internally, if a colony has a single political structure -- which is likely unless it's so large that multiple competing settlements will be started. There'd also be more of a need to cooperate, at least initially, to survive. And one can screen colonists for pure weapons (not dual-use items such as explosives that would be useful for construction) before departure, if necessary.
Some years ago when alt.destroy.the.earth was an active newsgroup not obliterated by spam, one of the oft-cited motivations was encouraging human spaceflight by making the Earth unhabitable for humans. It would certainly add an incentive to leave...
Yes; that would have the mass and volume, and should be more robust than an entirely artificial habitat I'd think unless we get a LOT more advanced in construction techniques.
Could such a mass be conceivably moved afterwards, however, or would it be stuck to its orbit? Depends on the mass of the asteroid, I suppose.
It may also be helpful to have an atmosphere and underground space, if you want long-term insurance against such things as micrometeorites, equipment failure, or the radiation bath of being in space. A planetary colony, unless it's under a single dome, is still vulnerable to massive failure from such things as *big* meteor strikes, but should be likely to fail from a small incident.
Actually, no. I've little reason to dislike the people who run Microsoft Encarta or their research staff, as far as I know, and even if I did, denial-of-service attacks don't strike me as the right approach to take.
I'd rather vote by withholding dollars or support, freely criticizing where and when it seems appropriate, and backing legal action if and when they cross legal red lines. Sue 'em if they attempt to leverage their monopoly by blocking competing efforts in their web browser or if they violate IP restrictions; point out bogosities in their marketing claims; but DOSing is a line I don't see it useful to cross, and as a tactic helps a victim discredit its users.
It's possible that because Microsoft will be filtering through a staff rather than immediately accepting updates, that fewer people will post because they know that their updates won't necessarily even be used.
Of course, since it's Microsoft, the company a considerable number of people love to hate, you could also see the anti-Micro$oft crowd trying to DOS their poor encyclopaedia staff with bogus submissions, but I hope folks aren't THAT hard-up for something to do.
Won't work for dynamically linked libraries, or old SVGAlib programs that require root access. Likewise, there are programs that expect to have SUID access to write system-wide logs in/var or/usr/local. Using --prefix isn't going to magically fix applications that expect this.
The first bit can be worked around using LD_LIBRARY_PATH, but the latter cannot.
For most people, rent and food are rather more immediate priorities.
And as for Van Gogh, well, he ended up poor and a bit mentally unbalanced -- a prime example of the OP's note that historically, artists were either feeding off of wealthy patrons, or ended up impoverished. That's not a very encouraging model for people who would mind poverty, and that's the great bulk of the population.
They merely have to offer what would be a more sellable alternative, through
(a) support services, and (b) better responsiveness
With regards to (a), OS doesn't cover customer support. That's still going to take money, because few people will volunteer to support commercial software installation and troubleshooting.
With regards to (b), it's not an unusual refrain in the OS world to say "We really aren't interested in writing this. You have the source and the interest, so why don't you do it?". A for-profit company can *pay* developers to make them interested in developing even features that OS developers aren't necessarily both skilled and interested in. Likewise, OS developers may be more interested in writing code than doing serious regression testing and examining migration issues -- which is something that will concern customers which/cannot/ afford to be beta-testers on their industrial-scale systems which must have good, stable uptime. In addition, they could capitalize on anything that the OS community *did* do -- after it seems to be stable and useful.
Money helps. In particular, unless you're independently wealthy or have a paying patron, it's going to be difficult to devote the time required to become a competent artist or other creative worker rather than a mere hobbyist.
How often, for instance, does one see good novels from writers who do their writing only in their off-hours?
Why would copying require decryption? If you send me an encrypted digital file, I can copy the encrypted digital file verbatim even if I can't decrypt it to reveal the plaintext. Unless every system that could duplicate it has hardware protection to prevent reading it as bytes rather than sending it to some approved playing software?
DARPA, after all, is not a for-profit entity; nor is most of the research funding going into for-profit projects. Instead, it has a specific mission for supporting research relevant to the needs of the Department of Defense -- not general-purpose research.
There's other infrastructure for supporting other forms of research, such as the National Science Foundation, which provides a LOT of grants and does actually have a broader mandate. Other departments as well fund research relevant to their particular areas. One could actually argue that DARPA's treading on the territory of the NSF with a lot of the research it funds. Even if DARPA focused completely on defense-related work, that does not mean that the government as a whole would no longer be funding non-defense related work because it's hardly the only public giver of grants.
It's not a bad thing for government agencies to focus on their assigned missions. Doing so is rather necessary if one's going to sanely assign budget allocations, for instance.
The military does not really have a problem finding "whole new classes of weapons systems" to research for the long term. It's rather the other way around, if you look at something like Future Combat Systems -- an extremely expensive, quite possibly pie-in-the-sky redesign that goes against decades of military thinking which will require success in a rather large number of utterly unproven technologies to work. Lightweight, lightly armored heavily networked vehicles complimented by large numbers of mobile attack / recon robots?
It's the people outside the Pentagon pointing out that the money spent on futuristic weapons systems will hurt the ability to find funding for shorter-term but still rather useful projects.
No. It's merely directed research with a heavy emphasis on real-world applicability.
If you leaf through modern comp-sci disserations and research projects, you'll find that it's unusual for them to say "we really don't know what the hell is going to happen if we try". Instead, they state specific objectives and methods such as improving database performance through reordering lock queues or aggregating transactions that work with shared code or data. It's no less engineering than what DoD likes to see.
It's the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. What should its priorities be, if not defense? Defense-related research should be its bread-and-butter; it needs to be done, and it's more logically their province rather than, say, the more-general NSF or the public-health NIH.
There's a rather large difference between a government institution or a regulated utility with a government-sanctioned monopoly and a decent search engine which is neither government-owned nor a monopoly.
Two that might be of interest for those looking for TBS empire-management games instead of mission-driven games are Anacreon and the Space Empires series.
The former is very high-level oriented: quasi-linear research tree, ship classes instead of ship design, assignment of priorities (e.g. "raw material world" for focusing on mining, "jumpship base" for producing jumpdrive ships, etc) and import/export policies (so you can demand that worlds try to be self-sufficient, or permit them to base their economy on imports brought in through transports on repeating-orders). Efficiencies matter in that specialized worlds are a LOT more efficient at what they do, but the required export/import system leaves you vulnerable to interdiction. Manage your worlds, produce minefields if you'd like, build massive industrial complexes that build ships with resources from adjacent worlds, put whole worlds on an addictive drug that removes the need for sleep but has/bad/ withdrawal consequences... It's not for the obsessive micromanager, and puts you more in the shoes of a grand strategist rather than tactician or city planner. Focus on the role for each planet, and amass fleets for use however you choose.
The latter is more suited for those desiring traditional tactical combat and ship design. It's also incredibly moddable (not just cosmetically; replace the entire tech tree(s) if you'd like, for instance, subject to limits about what abilities have been implemented of course. Want to produce a mod in which the only mining allowed is strip mining that eventually makes the mined worlds essentially worthless and uninhabitable? Want to make suns explode with a far higher probability? Want an optional facility that gives you greatly reduced, perhaps even negative, population growth in exchange for research? You could). You can (and must!) manage facility production on individual worlds, choose which research paths to focus on first, design your ship classes for a myriad of reasons, turn planets into asteroid fields or vice versa... and turn somebody's star into a black hole, obliterating everything in the system, if you want to send an obvious declaration of war.
Why post anti-government rhetoric from a traceable IP address?
Well, for one reason, there may not have been a real expectation of an investigation. Somebody who's mostly mouthing off and not actually conspiring to do anything might expect that he'll be left alone, and not really care about the IP. Even those that are involved in activities of great interest to the Feds might figure that there's so many forums that the odds that the Feds are specifically onto that one might be very low. Others may not be technologically sophisticated enough to have considered the existence of the logs and their value to investigation, or may be believe that actively looking to be untraceable might be suspicious enough to make an investigation more likely. Posting through a compromised machine to hide yourself, for instance, could cause problems if the compromise is ever discovered.
Slashdot Mirror
It's about the conference and its complete lack of review.
The targeted conference's MO appears to be accepting anything, but demanding registration fees. In other words, it's pretty much a specialized vanity press in which the submitters are guaranteed to lose money and gain approximately zero prestige among anybody who's ever gotten spam from the conference or otherwise heard about their methods.
Some conferences are bad jokes from the persepective of quality and prestige.
Yeah, for some conferences. For ACM SIGMOD 2005, for instance, 65 acceptances out of 431 papers; the acceptance rate for VLDB '04 was also non-trivial 16.1%. These are not unusually low for these conferences.
ACM SIGMOD '05
VLDB '04
Such is not, however, the universal practice for computer science journals or conferences. It's rather more typical to (a) not include sufficient details to replicate results; this is hardly difficult to do given the number of parameters and choices of implementation for any given method; and (b) to not make the code available, or perhaps to grudgingly provide it with the least documentation possible.
The intentional solicitation of an illegal action, however, is not exactly the same as being an innocent bystander. There may be a case for contributory copyright infringement.
From news i've heard, we're getting very close to being able to breed dinosaurs from their preserved DNA. ...at which point we'll probably use them in the entertainment, agriculture, military and food service industries. Mmm, dino-burgers.
Not the best fate to count on, 'tho.
Perhaps I'm a bit too cynical, but I've a certain suspicion that if there were an apocalyptic event which left just millions of isolated survivors, you'd see a sharp rise in religious fanaticism, proclamations about Chosen Ones, armed malcontents preying on less-organized survivors, and paranoid conspiracy theorists blaming events on others and seeking revenge.
Humanity might survive in terms of pure biology, but civillization might be far less robust.
Certain problems might be ameliorated by the need to start anew, however.
For instance, modern industrial manufacturing facilities can be made more efficient and ecologically less damaging since we know much more about designing them. It'd just be incredibly expensive to tear down everything that's old in order to rebuild it. We also have much better resources for city/settlement planning -- while it'd be wasteful to level and rebuild an old city to conform to better planning that wasn't done a few hundred years ago, we could do a lot of planning for a new settlement, and colonists would have a much better ability to adjust plans on their own with modern science and computers compared to cities that grew around medieval strongholds and so forth.
The risk of war may also be mitigated, at least internally, if a colony has a single political structure -- which is likely unless it's so large that multiple competing settlements will be started. There'd also be more of a need to cooperate, at least initially, to survive. And one can screen colonists for pure weapons (not dual-use items such as explosives that would be useful for construction) before departure, if necessary.
Some years ago when alt.destroy.the.earth was an active newsgroup not obliterated by spam, one of the oft-cited motivations was encouraging human spaceflight by making the Earth unhabitable for humans. It would certainly add an incentive to leave...
http://jult.net/adte.htm
Yes; that would have the mass and volume, and should be more robust than an entirely artificial habitat I'd think unless we get a LOT more advanced in construction techniques.
Could such a mass be conceivably moved afterwards, however, or would it be stuck to its orbit? Depends on the mass of the asteroid, I suppose.
The availability of resources, perhaps.
It may also be helpful to have an atmosphere and underground space, if you want long-term insurance against such things as micrometeorites, equipment failure, or the radiation bath of being in space. A planetary colony, unless it's under a single dome, is still vulnerable to massive failure from such things as *big* meteor strikes, but should be likely to fail from a small incident.
Actually, no. I've little reason to dislike the people who run Microsoft Encarta or their research staff, as far as I know, and even if I did, denial-of-service attacks don't strike me as the right approach to take.
I'd rather vote by withholding dollars or support, freely criticizing where and when it seems appropriate, and backing legal action if and when they cross legal red lines. Sue 'em if they attempt to leverage their monopoly by blocking competing efforts in their web browser or if they violate IP restrictions; point out bogosities in their marketing claims; but DOSing is a line I don't see it useful to cross, and as a tactic helps a victim discredit its users.
It's possible that because Microsoft will be filtering through a staff rather than immediately accepting updates, that fewer people will post because they know that their updates won't necessarily even be used.
Of course, since it's Microsoft, the company a considerable number of people love to hate, you could also see the anti-Micro$oft crowd trying to DOS their poor encyclopaedia staff with bogus submissions, but I hope folks aren't THAT hard-up for something to do.
Won't work for dynamically linked libraries, or old SVGAlib programs that require root access. Likewise, there are programs that expect to have SUID access to write system-wide logs in /var or /usr/local. Using --prefix isn't going to magically fix applications that expect this.
The first bit can be worked around using LD_LIBRARY_PATH, but the latter cannot.
For most people, rent and food are rather more immediate priorities.
And as for Van Gogh, well, he ended up poor and a bit mentally unbalanced -- a prime example of the OP's note that historically, artists were either feeding off of wealthy patrons, or ended up impoverished. That's not a very encouraging model for people who would mind poverty, and that's the great bulk of the population.
Individual performances are still copyrighted, IIRC, regardless of when the sheet music was written.
Not necessarily.
/cannot/ afford to be beta-testers on their industrial-scale systems which must have good, stable uptime. In addition, they could capitalize on anything that the OS community *did* do -- after it seems to be stable and useful.
They merely have to offer what would be a more sellable alternative, through
(a) support services, and
(b) better responsiveness
With regards to (a), OS doesn't cover customer support. That's still going to take money, because few people will volunteer to support commercial software installation and troubleshooting.
With regards to (b), it's not an unusual refrain in the OS world to say "We really aren't interested in writing this. You have the source and the interest, so why don't you do it?". A for-profit company can *pay* developers to make them interested in developing even features that OS developers aren't necessarily both skilled and interested in. Likewise, OS developers may be more interested in writing code than doing serious regression testing and examining migration issues -- which is something that will concern customers which
Money helps. In particular, unless you're independently wealthy or have a paying patron, it's going to be difficult to devote the time required to become a competent artist or other creative worker rather than a mere hobbyist.
How often, for instance, does one see good novels from writers who do their writing only in their off-hours?
Why would copying require decryption? If you send me an encrypted digital file, I can copy the encrypted digital file verbatim even if I can't decrypt it to reveal the plaintext. Unless every system that could duplicate it has hardware protection to prevent reading it as bytes rather than sending it to some approved playing software?
That's not necessarily the tightest analogy.
DARPA, after all, is not a for-profit entity; nor is most of the research funding going into for-profit projects. Instead, it has a specific mission for supporting research relevant to the needs of the Department of Defense -- not general-purpose research.
There's other infrastructure for supporting other forms of research, such as the National Science Foundation, which provides a LOT of grants and does actually have a broader mandate. Other departments as well fund research relevant to their particular areas. One could actually argue that DARPA's treading on the territory of the NSF with a lot of the research it funds. Even if DARPA focused completely on defense-related work, that does not mean that the government as a whole would no longer be funding non-defense related work because it's hardly the only public giver of grants.
It's not a bad thing for government agencies to focus on their assigned missions. Doing so is rather necessary if one's going to sanely assign budget allocations, for instance.
The military does not really have a problem finding "whole new classes of weapons systems" to research for the long term. It's rather the other way around, if you look at something like Future Combat Systems -- an extremely expensive, quite possibly pie-in-the-sky redesign that goes against decades of military thinking which will require success in a rather large number of utterly unproven technologies to work. Lightweight, lightly armored heavily networked vehicles complimented by large numbers of mobile attack / recon robots?
It's the people outside the Pentagon pointing out that the money spent on futuristic weapons systems will hurt the ability to find funding for shorter-term but still rather useful projects.
No. It's merely directed research with a heavy emphasis on real-world applicability.
If you leaf through modern comp-sci disserations and research projects, you'll find that it's unusual for them to say "we really don't know what the hell is going to happen if we try". Instead, they state specific objectives and methods such as improving database performance through reordering lock queues or aggregating transactions that work with shared code or data. It's no less engineering than what DoD likes to see.
It's the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. What should its priorities be, if not defense? Defense-related research should be its bread-and-butter; it needs to be done, and it's more logically their province rather than, say, the more-general NSF or the public-health NIH.
There's a rather large difference between a government institution or a regulated utility with a government-sanctioned monopoly and a decent search engine which is neither government-owned nor a monopoly.
Two that might be of interest for those looking for TBS empire-management games instead of mission-driven games are Anacreon and the Space Empires series.
/bad/ withdrawal consequences... It's not for the obsessive micromanager, and puts you more in the shoes of a grand strategist rather than tactician or city planner. Focus on the role for each planet, and amass fleets for use however you choose.
The former is very high-level oriented: quasi-linear research tree, ship classes instead of ship design, assignment of priorities (e.g. "raw material world" for focusing on mining, "jumpship base" for producing jumpdrive ships, etc) and import/export policies (so you can demand that worlds try to be self-sufficient, or permit them to base their economy on imports brought in through transports on repeating-orders). Efficiencies matter in that specialized worlds are a LOT more efficient at what they do, but the required export/import system leaves you vulnerable to interdiction. Manage your worlds, produce minefields if you'd like, build massive industrial complexes that build ships with resources from adjacent worlds, put whole worlds on an addictive drug that removes the need for sleep but has
The latter is more suited for those desiring traditional tactical combat and ship design. It's also incredibly moddable (not just cosmetically; replace the entire tech tree(s) if you'd like, for instance, subject to limits about what abilities have been implemented of course. Want to produce a mod in which the only mining allowed is strip mining that eventually makes the mined worlds essentially worthless and uninhabitable? Want to make suns explode with a far higher probability? Want an optional facility that gives you greatly reduced, perhaps even negative, population growth in exchange for research? You could). You can (and must!) manage facility production on individual worlds, choose which research paths to focus on first, design your ship classes for a myriad of reasons, turn planets into asteroid fields or vice versa... and turn somebody's star into a black hole, obliterating everything in the system, if you want to send an obvious declaration of war.
Why post anti-government rhetoric from a traceable IP address?
Well, for one reason, there may not have been a real expectation of an investigation. Somebody who's mostly mouthing off and not actually conspiring to do anything might expect that he'll be left alone, and not really care about the IP. Even those that are involved in activities of great interest to the Feds might figure that there's so many forums that the odds that the Feds are specifically onto that one might be very low. Others may not be technologically sophisticated enough to have considered the existence of the logs and their value to investigation, or may be believe that actively looking to be untraceable might be suspicious enough to make an investigation more likely. Posting through a compromised machine to hide yourself, for instance, could cause problems if the compromise is ever discovered.