The patch allows you to specify any zone (in this case com and net) as delegation-only; only nameserver (NS) records for subdomains will be returned. Since the address records returned for nonexistent domains are undelegated wildcard records, they won't be returned whatever the wildcard points to. Of course, Verisign could just return an NS record to an ordinary nameserver which would then serve up an address record, but DNS admins can mark those servers as bogus without any need for patching.
It is configurable enough. The patch isn't enabled by default, you need to specify the zones you want to avoid wildcards for as delegation-only. So, as well as com. and net., add ws. and cc.. The wildcards are undelegated RRs and so won't be heeded. Note that all undelegated RRs in those zones will be hidden this way, but unless you have some obscure and pressing need to see them, you won't be missing out on anything. --
How's writing in assembler for two years going to help you with functional programming ? Language Semantics ? Are you really going to get a good intuitive understanding of algorithms when you're worrying about minutiae ? Sure it'll help a bit you for compilers, but beyond that...
Don't get me wrong, I can see your point about actually implementing data structures yourself; but you can implement them yourself in Java; what's to stop lecturers from making students write their own hash table classes ?
If you restrct yourself to low level stuff, or slavishly follow whatever brain-wrong industry is currently touting, you'll miss out on one of the fundamental aspects of computer science, ie the use of abstraction.
If you can teach students how to think abstractly (or rather provide an environment which leads them to learn about it), to see the connections and correspondences between languages, you've got someone who can teach themselves and come to a good understanding of any new language in a few days or less. Students should be taught the tools they need to look at and understand new concepts, and then apply them. This is what a good CS course should do, and you can't do it if you make them piss around with assembler for two years.
"We have spent decades training ourselves to think of history in terms of ideologies, motives, influences and world views. Why does one think the way he thinks? Who indoctrinates a person? The "old world" spent decades worrying about the long-term effects Hollywood might have on our children. And now that we know the answer to this question, now that we are indeed confronted with the results of Captain Kirk, the educator -- are contempt and ridicule our only response? Haven't at least our professional, cultural and literary critics noticed what is going on here?"
Umm, yes they have, and some time ago, too... Jean baudrillard wrote on it back in 1976 in "Symbolic Exchange and Death". He defines the four orders of simulacra:
it is the reflection of a basic reality.
it masks and perverts a basic reality.
it masks the absence of a basic reality.
it bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.
Humans interpret reality through a series of symbols and signs (indeed, language is just this). A sign, or a model might start out as a representation of reailty, and people substitute the sign for meaning. However, signs can become invested with other meanings and connotations; the sign can begin to distort people's notion of reality, the relation between the sign and reality can become tenuous, and even become wholly disconnected with reality. Signs begin to get their meaning, not from reference to reality, but by reference to other signs, and reality can become cut out of the picture altogether. The signs, rather than representing reality, construct reality for us. This led Baudrillard to make the claim that reality has ceased to exist (from the point of view of the person), since it has stopped giving out the signs which let us know it's there. The signs simulate the real for us, and the simulation seems to us more real than the real itself... the simulation is hyperreal.
Now, Baudrillard was a social theorist, and it's more the social and cultural that this is applicable to. But his basic arguent that there's too much meaning is appealing. Think of the connotations words or symbols such as lawyer, Democrat, socialist have. Think of the stock-market... hardly very strongly connected tothe real, and even the money on which it depends is pure simulacrum; it's not even tied to gold reserves any more, but when the various terms of the economic model are right, you can print more money than you have gold to cover. The economic model ? Simulacrum... what reality does it refer to ? Economic "laws"... and so on...
Think of the Cold War... a simulated war, and nuclear weapons the simulated threat. They were never used, and no country would have used them given that it would ensure their own destruction, but that didn't stop the arms race, and having them gave a country power.
Politics as well... it's negotiated through image, displaying the right signs. Al Gore kisses Tipper on TV, and his poll ratings show a dramatic boost. The right to bear arms, the holy cow which starts some frothing at the mouth, isn't even about carrying guns any more, it's a sign of freedom which has been magnified out of proportion (yay, karma suicide)... if guns were outlawed in the US tomorrow, it wouldn't be the fear of attack which causes the outrage, it'll be the outrage that freedom has been curtailed.
Politicians employ spin doctors to give out the right signs through the media -- most people don't directly experience the political reality directly, the signs given out by the media construct the political reality for them, and politicians manipulate not the real, but the simulation constructed by the media to further themselves. Businesses spend huge amounts on advertising to give their brand and their products the right image, to send out the right signs that make people want to buy it.
Fashion... the circulation and collection of signs which construct "beauty"... if clothes were truly beautiful, why would we have the fads of fashion ? Fashion is all about signs, people collect the changing signs of beauty in order to appear beautiful.
While this state of affairs can be partially evaded or at least minimised locally by direct experience, you can't directly experience everything in the modern world without missing out lots of it, and even when you do, the meaning is going to be parsed and understood in terms of existing concepts, which themselves may bear little relation to any reality. The simulacrum has become inescapable -- the real unreachable.
Of course, anyone at all familiar with Zen and its koans will note that some of Baudrillard's ideas weren't exactly new... NP
Well, the guy is evaluating the OS according to a specific criterion, namely how much innovation has happened in the OS. The best response to this was that GNU/Linux is not designed to be an innovative project; it is designed to provide a Unix-like environment, although being open source is clearly something of an innovation; now it's matured, we may see more innovative features appearing, but chances are you're not going to see anything that just completely changes the way you look at an OS, that comes up with something obviously new, something that pushes back the boundaries, and will open up new areas, styles, ways of writing programs and using your computer. (I'm not going to use the p-word.)
If you want innovation in the OS area, GNU/Hurd is looking particularly interesting, and is pretty fundamentally different to the way Unix normally works. True, this means it's taking ages to write and debug, but it is progressing, and Debian now have the beginnings of a distro based around it.
Elsewhere, well, the language theorists are beginning to throw up more interesting ideas, things like aspect orientation, etc, and there are some genuinely exciting prospects coming out of this work.
I don't think it's a criticism of Linux to say it doesn't break any new technical frontiers, since it's not really its purpose; I certainly hope that as it matures, it'll provide some stuff that'll really set people onto something new, but it's certainly no wasted effort, precisely the opposite. But Linux doesn't have to win in every category, and you really shouldn't expect it to.
All that said...
Microsoft haven't really provided anything in the way of genuine technical innovation of this kind, and I really can't see how anyone could claim they have. NP
Multimeter with polished aluminium drinks cans attached. Not only does it audit all those nasty engrams, it also gives a true indication of your own potential.
This bias shows up on the Democratic Party (Socialist outside the US)
Sorry, I'm still giggling at the idea that you can possibly consider the US Democratic Party as being isomorphic to socialist...
Socialism does not require strong laws on private property, it prefers to state very clearly what is public property, and acts to restrict the monopolisation or restricted use of resources. power tends to follow resources, and especially capital (which is essentially an abstraction on resources) and if you think that you can prevent the centralisation of power in corporations and big business without strong laws, you're mistaken. The trick is to put in place a minimal mechanism which acts to prevent the centralisation of power, but doesn't impinge excessively on individual liberties.
It seems my liberal-left is a shade redder than your left libertarian, but I think you'll agree that the decentralisation (and maintaining of decentralisation) of power is an important step to precluding its abuse. The trick would seem to be finding the balance between the need to minimise control, and the need to prevent a new source of control appearing in its place. It seems I just draw the line further left than you do, but I would point out to you that wage slavery is as powerful a form of control as any other.
With regard to unionisation of tech workers, I agree fully; however, the tech industry calls for a different type of union than the labour unions... where pay and conditions were the main bone of contention, in IT, the battles tend to be more to do with things such as Intellectual Property clauses in contracts, working hours (it's one thing to work late because you want to finish off debugging or writing a piece of code... another thing entirely if that's expected of you...), etc. This is the kind of place where group action is needed, but because pay is generally good, there hasn't yet been the motivation to unionise. NP
Add more to the list... hmm... well, first up, I am manic depressive, have been hospitalised (against my will I should add), so this is not someone entirely clueless wrt these matters posting. I'm manic depressive, and I wouldn't change it. I get the highs, and I get the lows, big time. In a short space of time I can take in two fundamentally different points of view... from ridiculously enthusiastic optimism, to the deepest darkest pessimism, and all shades in between. I don't think the value of that should be underestimated too much, it's quite an experience, and certainly provides much food for thought (which I tend to do an unhealthy amount of when I hit a depression, but it's not all worthless).
The highs give impulsiveness, creative thinking, sharp, fast thought, and the ability to do infeasible numbers of things at once. (unfortunately not always the attention span to cope with it though:P ). I'm not going to be subtle about it, manic episodes can be a hell of a lot of fun... yes, it can turn hairy, but sometimes, it's like you've got that feeling of excitement you get as a rollercoaster comes to the top of a steep downward plunge, except constantly... yes, the euphoria has to die eventually, but an episode like that is good while you've got it.
The lows, where they are not crippling, give a quieter, analytical perspective, which is very strongly critical, granted, but I'd be wrong to say it hasn't been useful. The things I've done, the person I am, are all strongly linked to my illness. That's not to say I use it as an excuse, that's to say I make use of what I've got, and sometimes wind up doing better than I do when I'm supposedly being "normal".
My point is not that manic depression is a Good Thing, but that it's not necessarily as bad a thing as you make out. Sure, there are people who get it much worse than I do, people who can't continue to function at all, and their lot is by no means a happy one... but I don't want people to think that a diagnosis of manic depression is necessarily life-destroying (though in some cases, unfortunately, it is). There are a great many people with bipolar disorder who have made great contributions, indeed disproportionately many according to some...
Tim Burton, Francis Ford Coppola, Ray davies, Carrie Fisher, Spike Milligan, Graham Greene, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett... to name but a few. So, yes it can be bad, and yes, more should be done (for instance not having the drug companies charge such ludicrous prices would be nice... many people in the US are not on the ideal treatments or medications for their particular symptoms simply because they can't afford them), but it's not necessarily going to mess up your life, and you should try damned hard to make sure it doesn't. NP
Just to provide an example to back up my original argument...
Jon Atack writes in "The cancellation of Fair Game":
77. In Wollersheim v. Church of Scientology of California (the "mother church" of the Churches of Scientology at the time the suit was filed), the California Appeal Court ruled, in a decision upheld by the US Supreme Court: "Wollersheim was compelled to abandon his wife and his family through the policy of disconnect. When his mental illness reached such a level he actively planned his suicide, he was forbidden to seek professional help. Finally, when Wollersheim was able to leave the Church, it subjected him to financial ruin through its policy of 'fair game'." (JCA-147, pp.A-7, 15 & 16). At appeal, Scientology asserted that "fair game" was a "core practice of Scientology", and therefore protected as "religious expression". This position was also made on behalf of Scientology in the case against Gerald Armstrong, in 1984, by religious expert Dr. Frank Flinn (JCA-45).
Tolerance of religion must always be curtailed by reason. Religion is not provable using reason; it is based on faith. Therefore, where religious expression exceeds the boundaries set by reason, ie by attacking other people unfairly, that mode of religious expression must be considered harmful, and should not be tolerated.
When it screws up, religion should be bashed for it. There's nothing wrong with bashing religion, some of it is ridiculous to me, but that's alright; the problem is religions which are blatantly pathological... take scientology. This cult has caused more trouble than comes to enough, and there are many clam fronts around whining about the lack of religious tolerance for their ridiculous beliefs... I would consider ridiculous any argument which says I should respect the quackery of a dangerous psycho-group such as Scn'gy. Sure, respect the people based on their own actions, not by their beliefs; but religions, like political beliefs are Fair Game. People are not, but unfortunately Scientology hasn't grasped this fact. (Scientology's Fair Game Policy)
However, before I piss everybody off totally, where religion does work, it should be congratulated for it. Yes, religion, and Christianity has done a lot of damage to a lot of people; but they have changed over time, and have come to do a lot of good -- look at liberation theology, widespread social programs, etc. I'm still going to bash churches and religions for bigoted behavior, they deserve it because their position is rationally indefensible; I'm still going to bash the RC chuch for its position on contraception because it causes great suffering through increasing poverty and aiding spread of disease; but I will also acknowledge the good that they do as well. Not to do so would be a very sorry form of hypocrisy.
There's nothing stating the two primes must be different:-)
As an aside the Goldbach Conjecture explicitly states that it holds only for even numbers greater than 2, so all the people shouting about 2 not being the sum of two primes, and claiming the conjecture is false are pointless. But at least some people manage to realise that a trivial disproof is most likely flawed... NP
At least Mathematica has a Student Linux version... if I wanted to get Maple for Linux, I'd have to pay about £500 for the privelege, as opposed to £35 for Windows.
Naturally, I bought Mathematica for Linux because it's a far better package, and not that much more expensive under student license... NP
Lest the Slashdot community get too holier-than-thou when it comes to security, let us remember that GNU/Linux has had its share of security problems over the years.
Yes, but have they ever cocked it up quite so spectacularly as MS did with their implementation of PPTP ? I would be hard pressed to trust any company who produced something like that and called it a security feature, (feature in the opposite sense to "feature").
If a company is so massively incompetent as to implement a protocol so that it transmits a weaker hash along with a secure hash of the same password string by design, without even allowing the user to turn it off, I think I'd have doubts about that company. If the weaker hash had no salt, and converted all characters to upper case, making a dictionary attack trivial beyond belief, I'd start pointing to them and being generally derisory. And this is only part of the monumental failure that was MS-CHAPv1.
For the full (and more than slightly amusing) details, check the paper here
Microsoft have been stepping up their political contributions to both parties over the past few years. Any judgement against Microsoft will result in them lobbying Congress to nullify the courts decision "in the interests of the American People". A quick glance at the history books shows that AT&T managed very successfully to have several of the more painful decisions overturned in much the same way.
It looks like things will go against Microsoft, but nobody is so sure that Congress will have the guts to go through with any serious enough measures to open up the markets. Remember, you're dealing with a company that is an accomplished wielder of FUD... it's been doing it from DR-DOS through to Linux (though thankfully with little success in the latter case). They're more than capable of FUD'ing an economy without a full-strength Microsoft to Congress.
In fact, given the speeches I've heard in recent weeks from Republicans (during the debate on giving tax breaks to developing countries exporting their goods) about how America "isn't really in that strong a position globally" and suchlike it seems quite likely MS could get most of the nastier looking teeth extracted between and any actual consequences. NP
Microsoft have been stepping up their political contributions to both parties over the past few years. Any judgement against Microsoft will result in them lobbying Congress to nullify the courts decision "in the interests of the American People". A quick glance at the history books shows that AT&T managed very successfully to have several of the more painful decisions overturned in much the same way.
Judgement is anticipated by many to go against Microsoft, but nobody is so sure that Congress will have the guts to go through with any serious enough measures to open up the markets. Remember, you're dealing with a company that is an accomplished wielder of FUD... it's been doing it from DR-DOS through to Linux (though thankfully with little success in the latter case). They're more than capable of FUD'ing an economy without Microsoft.
In fact, given the speeches I've heard in recent weeks from Republicans (during the debate on giving tax breaks to developing countries exporting their goods) about how America "isn't really in that strong a position globally" and suchlike it seems quite likely MS could get most of the nastier looking teeth extracted between the now and any actual consequences. NP
The only thing which will be accomplished by a national missile defence system is to piss off Russia. The reason is that any ABM system that the US can design would be trivial to counter, by one of many means; dummy warheads, chaff, and various other avoidance techniques. Given the pitiful rate of success of these missiles in trials (something like 2 hits in 18 attempts) it's really not going to be very useful. There was a good article on this in SciAm a while back, titled "Why anti-missile defence systems won't work". Had a damn fine article on Turing, too, but that's beside the point. NP
This doesn't affect just geeks, and I think the problem is Katz tries to personalise it too much in order to engender a stronger response; that's fine, there's nothing sinister about it, writing is all about manipulating the reader, all that differs is how subtle (or not) you make it.
There is a sizeable quantity of social risk to Mosaic and it's ilk. To make the point, consider the effect Columbine had on schools in its immediate wake. Suspicions were inevitably raised; people were scared, confused, and generally made paranoid by the whole thing. So, you had people feeling suspicious of anybody displaying behavioural traits associated with the columbine incident. This made things very uncomfortable for a whole lot of people.
Then Mosaic comes along, just in time to cash in on the remnants of the Something Must Be Done response. Any initiative, concept, tool, whatever, will be accepted if they allay fears of a repeat occurrence, regardless of whether or not they actually work (For an example of this, look at the recently proposed bill in the UK to lock up severely personality disordered people without trial even if they haven't committed a crime). The upshot of this is you're not going to be able to dissuade people much from using this software.
Now, you'll have people running this software, operators. They will not be trained in psychology. They don't realise that psychology is a soft science. They don't know that even trained psychologists can't can't make an accurate diagnosis (and they freely admit this), since what's being tested for has absolutely no somatic symptoms whatsoever. They don't know that many psychologists refute the very idea that such a thing as "potential for violence" exists as a mental disorder that is "testable for". They just get a machine that gives them an answer, maybe a risk from 1 to 5.
There's the quote from one of the teachers about this; the software's "immediate virtue would be in producing detailed documentation of its evaluation of a troubled student so that doubting parents could no longer challenge an administrator's judgement as too subjective." This belies the kind of problem being faced. People think because it's a computer doing the work, there won't be mistakes; there won't be false positives. This is blatantly wrong. The subjective element still exists; simply because it is applied uniformly does not make a difference; it exists inherently in the rules of the evaluation procedure.
There is a place for tests like these, but such information should only be made available to qualified psychologists in the field. These are the only people with enough training, experience, and knowledge to interpret the data correctly.
There are massive privacy concerns with a system such as this. Due to the precise nature of the thing you're testing for, tests aren't going to be very successful, and this has been exemplified by any number of attempts to formulate a reliable automated (ie test-based) diagnosis process for severe personality disorders; figures for false positives are estimated at between 1 in 3 and 1 in 5 (according to the Royal College of Psychiatry). That said, you can gather a lot of information about a person if the questions are answered accurately, since it will contain explicit questions such as "I worry about loneliness often -- agree or disagree (on a scale of 1 to 5)" "I often do things impulsively" etc etc. There is a significant amount that can be deduced from this, and you are basically talking about one of the most fundamental invasions of privacy you can imagine; to require the provision of this highly personal information is to me abhorrent.
It would appear that the best way of avoiding provision of this information would be to fill in false answers... not noticeably false, or perhaps simply to automatically choose the lowest "risk" category for each question. There are checks which can compensate for false answers, but they're not as good as is made out, and they have an even lower rate of accuracy than a correct one, so nobody's going to be able to prove you filled it out wrong, especially since a lot of the questions will be subjective. I'd certainly also wonder about the legal grounds of requiring people to fill out these tests (truthfully at least), but unfortunately legal grounds become somewhat fungible in the wake of a high profile disaster like Columbine. NP
The reason Celera have been able to file patents on their discoveries is because they've carried out the work themselves, independently of the Human Genome Project. They've managed to decode over a third of the genome inside of a month (!) by using a much faster technique than the publicly funded HGP, but one that gives much less information about the gene action, and precisely what a particular gene does. Evidently they're trying to file patents so they can exploit profits from any further work on genes that they've identified, but others have studied to determine precisely what it does and how.
There have been rumblings from within the US govt, since Celera told a Senate Committee that it was planning to make its results freely available; it seems likely from the statements made by various people closely involved that these patents are unlikely to be considered legally defensible.
But in any case, Celera Genomics are guilty of some pretty reprehensible behaviour for the sake of extorting a quick buck... NP
Well, I've filled out an MMPI as a diagnosis, and it picked me up as manic depressive, which was right. But I have been able to persuade MMPI I was perfectly normal without any bother. I've also tried several other forms of testing as part of someones research project, and none of them were particularly resistant to "bluffing". (This is what happens when you live with a psychology student; endless experimentation:-)
Now, the problem with testing for something so ill-defined, and arbitrary as this makes it an incredibly difficult task -- it's not like you have concrete physical symptoms, or obvious disordered behaviour which might indicate, say, bipolarism, or depression. In brief, the test will give you lots of false negatives, and lots of false positives. Now, a test like that isn't really worth much, now, is it ? The opportunity for extremely damaging social consequences from the (ab)use of these tests by non-professional people is, to me, extremely worrying. NP
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but BIND already lets you mark nameservers as bogus. If that happens, it's just a simple matter of editing and reloading configuration files.
--
The patch allows you to specify any zone (in this case com and net) as delegation-only; only nameserver (NS) records for subdomains will be returned. Since the address records returned for nonexistent domains are undelegated wildcard records, they won't be returned whatever the wildcard points to. Of course, Verisign could just return an NS record to an ordinary nameserver which would then serve up an address record, but DNS admins can mark those servers as bogus without any need for patching.
If you don't like your ISP's or whoever's policy, you can just set up your own nameserver. Problem solved.
It is configurable enough. The patch isn't enabled by default, you need to specify the zones you want to avoid wildcards for as delegation-only. So, as well as com. and net., add ws. and cc.. The wildcards are undelegated RRs and so won't be heeded. Note that all undelegated RRs in those zones will be hidden this way, but unless you have some obscure and pressing need to see them, you won't be missing out on anything.
--
How's writing in assembler for two years going to help you with functional programming ? Language Semantics ? Are you really going to get a good intuitive understanding of algorithms when you're worrying about minutiae ? Sure it'll help a bit you for compilers, but beyond that...
Don't get me wrong, I can see your point about actually implementing data structures yourself; but you can implement them yourself in Java; what's to stop lecturers from making students write their own hash table classes ?
If you restrct yourself to low level stuff, or slavishly follow whatever brain-wrong industry is currently touting, you'll miss out on one of the fundamental aspects of computer science, ie the use of abstraction.
If you can teach students how to think abstractly (or rather provide an environment which leads them to learn about it), to see the connections and correspondences between languages, you've got someone who can teach themselves and come to a good understanding of any new language in a few days or less. Students should be taught the tools they need to look at and understand new concepts, and then apply them. This is what a good CS course should do, and you can't do it if you make them piss around with assembler for two years.
Condorcet's criticisms are but a quibble. See Arrow's Impossibility Theorem for real problems.
NP
Umm, yes they have, and some time ago, too... Jean baudrillard wrote on it back in 1976 in "Symbolic Exchange and Death". He defines the four orders of simulacra:
Humans interpret reality through a series of symbols and signs (indeed, language is just this). A sign, or a model might start out as a representation of reailty, and people substitute the sign for meaning. However, signs can become invested with other meanings and connotations; the sign can begin to distort people's notion of reality, the relation between the sign and reality can become tenuous, and even become wholly disconnected with reality. Signs begin to get their meaning, not from reference to reality, but by reference to other signs, and reality can become cut out of the picture altogether. The signs, rather than representing reality, construct reality for us. This led Baudrillard to make the claim that reality has ceased to exist (from the point of view of the person), since it has stopped giving out the signs which let us know it's there. The signs simulate the real for us, and the simulation seems to us more real than the real itself... the simulation is hyperreal.
Now, Baudrillard was a social theorist, and it's more the social and cultural that this is applicable to. But his basic arguent that there's too much meaning is appealing. Think of the connotations words or symbols such as lawyer, Democrat, socialist have. Think of the stock-market... hardly very strongly connected tothe real, and even the money on which it depends is pure simulacrum; it's not even tied to gold reserves any more, but when the various terms of the economic model are right, you can print more money than you have gold to cover. The economic model ? Simulacrum... what reality does it refer to ? Economic "laws"... and so on...
Think of the Cold War... a simulated war, and nuclear weapons the simulated threat. They were never used, and no country would have used them given that it would ensure their own destruction, but that didn't stop the arms race, and having them gave a country power.
Politics as well... it's negotiated through image, displaying the right signs. Al Gore kisses Tipper on TV, and his poll ratings show a dramatic boost. The right to bear arms, the holy cow which starts some frothing at the mouth, isn't even about carrying guns any more, it's a sign of freedom which has been magnified out of proportion (yay, karma suicide)... if guns were outlawed in the US tomorrow, it wouldn't be the fear of attack which causes the outrage, it'll be the outrage that freedom has been curtailed.
Politicians employ spin doctors to give out the right signs through the media -- most people don't directly experience the political reality directly, the signs given out by the media construct the political reality for them, and politicians manipulate not the real, but the simulation constructed by the media to further themselves. Businesses spend huge amounts on advertising to give their brand and their products the right image, to send out the right signs that make people want to buy it.
Fashion... the circulation and collection of signs which construct "beauty"... if clothes were truly beautiful, why would we have the fads of fashion ? Fashion is all about signs, people collect the changing signs of beauty in order to appear beautiful.
While this state of affairs can be partially evaded or at least minimised locally by direct experience, you can't directly experience everything in the modern world without missing out lots of it, and even when you do, the meaning is going to be parsed and understood in terms of existing concepts, which themselves may bear little relation to any reality. The simulacrum has become inescapable -- the real unreachable.
Of course, anyone at all familiar with Zen and its koans will note that some of Baudrillard's ideas weren't exactly new...
NP
If you want innovation in the OS area, GNU/Hurd is looking particularly interesting, and is pretty fundamentally different to the way Unix normally works. True, this means it's taking ages to write and debug, but it is progressing, and Debian now have the beginnings of a distro based around it.
Elsewhere, well, the language theorists are beginning to throw up more interesting ideas, things like aspect orientation, etc, and there are some genuinely exciting prospects coming out of this work.
I don't think it's a criticism of Linux to say it doesn't break any new technical frontiers, since it's not really its purpose; I certainly hope that as it matures, it'll provide some stuff that'll really set people onto something new, but it's certainly no wasted effort, precisely the opposite. But Linux doesn't have to win in every category, and you really shouldn't expect it to.
All that said...
Microsoft haven't really provided anything in the way of genuine technical innovation of this kind, and I really can't see how anyone could claim they have.
NP
Hail Xemu!
Sorry, I'm still giggling at the idea that you can possibly consider the US Democratic Party as being isomorphic to socialist...
Socialism does not require strong laws on private property, it prefers to state very clearly what is public property, and acts to restrict the monopolisation or restricted use of resources. power tends to follow resources, and especially capital (which is essentially an abstraction on resources) and if you think that you can prevent the centralisation of power in corporations and big business without strong laws, you're mistaken. The trick is to put in place a minimal mechanism which acts to prevent the centralisation of power, but doesn't impinge excessively on individual liberties.
It seems my liberal-left is a shade redder than your left libertarian, but I think you'll agree that the decentralisation (and maintaining of decentralisation) of power is an important step to precluding its abuse. The trick would seem to be finding the balance between the need to minimise control, and the need to prevent a new source of control appearing in its place. It seems I just draw the line further left than you do, but I would point out to you that wage slavery is as powerful a form of control as any other.
With regard to unionisation of tech workers, I agree fully; however, the tech industry calls for a different type of union than the labour unions... where pay and conditions were the main bone of contention, in IT, the battles tend to be more to do with things such as Intellectual Property clauses in contracts, working hours (it's one thing to work late because you want to finish off debugging or writing a piece of code... another thing entirely if that's expected of you...), etc. This is the kind of place where group action is needed, but because pay is generally good, there hasn't yet been the motivation to unionise.
NP
The highs give impulsiveness, creative thinking, sharp, fast thought, and the ability to do infeasible numbers of things at once. (unfortunately not always the attention span to cope with it though :P ). I'm not going to be subtle about it, manic episodes can be a hell of a lot of fun... yes, it can turn hairy, but sometimes, it's like you've got that feeling of excitement you get as a rollercoaster comes to the top of a steep downward plunge, except constantly... yes, the euphoria has to die eventually, but an episode like that is good while you've got it.
The lows, where they are not crippling, give a quieter, analytical perspective, which is very strongly critical, granted, but I'd be wrong to say it hasn't been useful. The things I've done, the person I am, are all strongly linked to my illness. That's not to say I use it as an excuse, that's to say I make use of what I've got, and sometimes wind up doing better than I do when I'm supposedly being "normal".
My point is not that manic depression is a Good Thing, but that it's not necessarily as bad a thing as you make out. Sure, there are people who get it much worse than I do, people who can't continue to function at all, and their lot is by no means a happy one... but I don't want people to think that a diagnosis of manic depression is necessarily life-destroying (though in some cases, unfortunately, it is). There are a great many people with bipolar disorder who have made great contributions, indeed disproportionately many according to some...
Tim Burton, Francis Ford Coppola, Ray davies, Carrie Fisher, Spike Milligan, Graham Greene, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett... to name but a few. So, yes it can be bad, and yes, more should be done (for instance not having the drug companies charge such ludicrous prices would be nice... many people in the US are not on the ideal treatments or medications for their particular symptoms simply because they can't afford them), but it's not necessarily going to mess up your life, and you should try damned hard to make sure it doesn't.
NP
Jon Atack writes in "The cancellation of Fair Game":
Tolerance of religion must always be curtailed by reason. Religion is not provable using reason; it is based on faith. Therefore, where religious expression exceeds the boundaries set by reason, ie by attacking other people unfairly, that mode of religious expression must be considered harmful, and should not be tolerated.This extract taken from www.xenu.net
When it screws up, religion should be bashed for it. There's nothing wrong with bashing religion, some of it is ridiculous to me, but that's alright; the problem is religions which are blatantly pathological... take scientology. This cult has caused more trouble than comes to enough, and there are many clam fronts around whining about the lack of religious tolerance for their ridiculous beliefs... I would consider ridiculous any argument which says I should respect the quackery of a dangerous psycho-group such as Scn'gy. Sure, respect the people based on their own actions, not by their beliefs; but religions, like political beliefs are Fair Game. People are not, but unfortunately Scientology hasn't grasped this fact. (Scientology's Fair Game Policy)
However, before I piss everybody off totally, where religion does work, it should be congratulated for it. Yes, religion, and Christianity has done a lot of damage to a lot of people; but they have changed over time, and have come to do a lot of good -- look at liberation theology, widespread social programs, etc. I'm still going to bash churches and religions for bigoted behavior, they deserve it because their position is rationally indefensible; I'm still going to bash the RC chuch for its position on contraception because it causes great suffering through increasing poverty and aiding spread of disease; but I will also acknowledge the good that they do as well. Not to do so would be a very sorry form of hypocrisy.
www.xenu.net
Lisa McPherson
Of course, if you were to look for Arthur C Clarke's "The Nine Billion Names of God" you might get a result...
Try http://loki.sacredheart.e du/cas/math/mattej/godnames.html :-)
There's nothing stating the two primes must be different :-)
As an aside the Goldbach Conjecture explicitly states that it holds only for even numbers greater than 2, so all the people shouting about 2 not being the sum of two primes, and claiming the conjecture is false are pointless. But at least some people manage to realise that a trivial disproof is most likely flawed...
NP
Naturally, I bought Mathematica for Linux because it's a far better package, and not that much more expensive under student license...
NP
Yes, but have they ever cocked it up quite so spectacularly as MS did with their implementation of PPTP ? I would be hard pressed to trust any company who produced something like that and called it a security feature, (feature in the opposite sense to "feature").
If a company is so massively incompetent as to implement a protocol so that it transmits a weaker hash along with a secure hash of the same password string by design, without even allowing the user to turn it off, I think I'd have doubts about that company. If the weaker hash had no salt, and converted all characters to upper case, making a dictionary attack trivial beyond belief, I'd start pointing to them and being generally derisory. And this is only part of the monumental failure that was MS-CHAPv1.
For the full (and more than slightly amusing) details, check the paper here
Keeping the source freely available is more important than preventing forks.
Okay, how many people really trust Faraday that much ? :-)
NP
Microsoft have been stepping up their political contributions to both parties over the past few years. Any judgement against Microsoft will result in them lobbying Congress to nullify the courts decision "in the interests of the American People". A quick glance at the history books shows that AT&T managed very successfully to have several of the more painful decisions overturned in much the same way.
It looks like things will go against Microsoft, but nobody is so sure that Congress will have the guts to go through with any serious enough measures to open up the markets. Remember, you're dealing with a company that is an accomplished wielder of FUD... it's been doing it from DR-DOS through to Linux (though thankfully with little success in the latter case). They're more than capable of FUD'ing an economy without a full-strength Microsoft to Congress.
In fact, given the speeches I've heard in recent weeks from Republicans (during the debate on giving tax breaks to developing countries exporting their goods) about how America "isn't really in that strong a position globally" and suchlike it seems quite likely MS could get most of the nastier looking teeth extracted between and any actual consequences.
NP
Judgement is anticipated by many to go against Microsoft, but nobody is so sure that Congress will have the guts to go through with any serious enough measures to open up the markets. Remember, you're dealing with a company that is an accomplished wielder of FUD... it's been doing it from DR-DOS through to Linux (though thankfully with little success in the latter case). They're more than capable of FUD'ing an economy without Microsoft.
In fact, given the speeches I've heard in recent weeks from Republicans (during the debate on giving tax breaks to developing countries exporting their goods) about how America "isn't really in that strong a position globally" and suchlike it seems quite likely MS could get most of the nastier looking teeth extracted between the now and any actual consequences.
NP
The only thing which will be accomplished by a national missile defence system is to piss off Russia. The reason is that any ABM system that the US can design would be trivial to counter, by one of many means; dummy warheads, chaff, and various other avoidance techniques. Given the pitiful rate of success of these missiles in trials (something like 2 hits in 18 attempts) it's really not going to be very useful. There was a good article on this in SciAm a while back, titled "Why anti-missile defence systems won't work". Had a damn fine article on Turing, too, but that's beside the point.
NP
This doesn't affect just geeks, and I think the problem is Katz tries to personalise it too much in order to engender a stronger response; that's fine, there's nothing sinister about it, writing is all about manipulating the reader, all that differs is how subtle (or not) you make it.
There is a sizeable quantity of social risk to Mosaic and it's ilk. To make the point, consider the effect Columbine had on schools in its immediate wake. Suspicions were inevitably raised; people were scared, confused, and generally made paranoid by the whole thing. So, you had people feeling suspicious of anybody displaying behavioural traits associated with the columbine incident. This made things very uncomfortable for a whole lot of people.
Then Mosaic comes along, just in time to cash in on the remnants of the Something Must Be Done response. Any initiative, concept, tool, whatever, will be accepted if they allay fears of a repeat occurrence, regardless of whether or not they actually work (For an example of this, look at the recently proposed bill in the UK to lock up severely personality disordered people without trial even if they haven't committed a crime). The upshot of this is you're not going to be able to dissuade people much from using this software.
Now, you'll have people running this software, operators. They will not be trained in psychology. They don't realise that psychology is a soft science. They don't know that even trained psychologists can't can't make an accurate diagnosis (and they freely admit this), since what's being tested for has absolutely no somatic symptoms whatsoever. They don't know that many psychologists refute the very idea that such a thing as "potential for violence" exists as a mental disorder that is "testable for". They just get a machine that gives them an answer, maybe a risk from 1 to 5.
There's the quote from one of the teachers about this; the software's "immediate virtue would be in producing detailed documentation of its evaluation of a troubled student so that doubting parents could no longer challenge an administrator's judgement as too subjective." This belies the kind of problem being faced. People think because it's a computer doing the work, there won't be mistakes; there won't be false positives. This is blatantly wrong. The subjective element still exists; simply because it is applied uniformly does not make a difference; it exists inherently in the rules of the evaluation procedure.
There is a place for tests like these, but such information should only be made available to qualified psychologists in the field. These are the only people with enough training, experience, and knowledge to interpret the data correctly.
There are massive privacy concerns with a system such as this. Due to the precise nature of the thing you're testing for, tests aren't going to be very successful, and this has been exemplified by any number of attempts to formulate a reliable automated (ie test-based) diagnosis process for severe personality disorders; figures for false positives are estimated at between 1 in 3 and 1 in 5 (according to the Royal College of Psychiatry). That said, you can gather a lot of information about a person if the questions are answered accurately, since it will contain explicit questions such as "I worry about loneliness often -- agree or disagree (on a scale of 1 to 5)" "I often do things impulsively" etc etc. There is a significant amount that can be deduced from this, and you are basically talking about one of the most fundamental invasions of privacy you can imagine; to require the provision of this highly personal information is to me abhorrent.
It would appear that the best way of avoiding provision of this information would be to fill in false answers... not noticeably false, or perhaps simply to automatically choose the lowest "risk" category for each question. There are checks which can compensate for false answers, but they're not as good as is made out, and they have an even lower rate of accuracy than a correct one, so nobody's going to be able to prove you filled it out wrong, especially since a lot of the questions will be subjective. I'd certainly also wonder about the legal grounds of requiring people to fill out these tests (truthfully at least), but unfortunately legal grounds become somewhat fungible in the wake of a high profile disaster like Columbine.
NP
There have been rumblings from within the US govt, since Celera told a Senate Committee that it was planning to make its results freely available; it seems likely from the statements made by various people closely involved that these patents are unlikely to be considered legally defensible.
But in any case, Celera Genomics are guilty of some pretty reprehensible behaviour for the sake of extorting a quick buck...
NP
Well, I've filled out an MMPI as a diagnosis, and it picked me up as manic depressive, which was right. But I have been able to persuade MMPI I was perfectly normal without any bother. I've also tried several other forms of testing as part of someones research project, and none of them were particularly resistant to "bluffing". (This is what happens when you live with a psychology student; endless experimentation :-)
Now, the problem with testing for something so ill-defined, and arbitrary as this makes it an incredibly difficult task -- it's not like you have concrete physical symptoms, or obvious disordered behaviour which might indicate, say, bipolarism, or depression. In brief, the test will give you lots of false negatives, and lots of false positives. Now, a test like that isn't really worth much, now, is it ? The opportunity for extremely damaging social consequences from the (ab)use of these tests by non-professional people is, to me, extremely worrying.
NP