I saw a report (I think it's today's Guardian in fact?) of a UK diplomat in Washington saying to a journalist that they were just gritting their teeth and trying to get through the rest of the Bush term. Hack asks if they're worried about some of potential issues around some of the current crop of candidates; diplomat shudders visibly and says "Nothing, absolutely nothing, could be worse than what we've got now."
And he certainly isn't talking from the perspective that what's bad for America is good for the UK -- absolutely the opposite. Thanks to Blair's voluntary suspension of disbelief and following Dubya into Iraq, we've got a (according to MI5) the risk of so-called "Islamist" terrorist attacks to worry about for literally decades, even if we get the hell out of dodge by the end of the year, likely the earliest possible date. Ahhhh, I'm off-topic & ranting. Sorry.
One of the problems is that climatology is very, very complicated. I'm a layperson with some science O levels (for kids and non-Brits: exams we used to take at 16) and I'm generally interested in science. I read Scientific American every so often - I used to get it regularly but I just haven't the time these days. I keep up on some particular interests, the usual Slashdot-type areas like cosmology, material science, astronomy etc and some you'll never see here (civil engineering is great!). Anyway I've been interested in climate change for donkey's years, since 87/88 or so at least, when our A level lecturer talked about it (presumably influenced by the landmark Hansen 88 paper.) Anyway someone pointed me at RealClimate.org, and I read all the articles and believe I'm reasonably well informed, but lots of it is still very very complicated. There are so many different processes involved, at so many scales - global, continental / ocean basin scale, right down to atmospheric chemistry at molecular and atomic level. And the statistics - !! Admittedly I'm no mathematician, but I still can't claim to have even a good knowledge of the processes at that (realclimate) level.
We need to get off this rock right now. We need to be more than just one planet. We need this so that we can look up at night and know there are people up there. Not just a scientist or two.. but an entire civilization.
I know that's a very popular view, but I personally disagree -- I don't agree it's necessary, and I don't think it's practical anyway. But this isn't the right story to have that, uh, debate... I wish someone would do something relevant to the question, publish it, and there'd a be a good ol' Slashdot flamefest on the subject and we could all get ourselves into nice entrenched positions... Well, time will tell which of us is right, anyway.
The MER rovers are astonishing and the successes of their missions doubly so. I've been following the rovers since they landed in Jan 04 (*three years ago*!) with an expected lifetime of 90 sols each. Spirit's getting very, very dusty now, so the solar panels aren't generating much power - and Spirit has a bust wheel it has to drag behind it, which means it'll never climb Husband Hill as originally planned - but Oppy just had the dust cleaned off by a gust of wind, is generating over 800W/hr and despite a couple of arthritic joints and a broken steering actuator, is currently preparing to enter the enormous Victoria crater. Really, really fantastic stuff. I'm old enough to remember the Voyager flybys of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus; these missions seem to throw us something amazing every few months on average, and exciting and interesting on a daily basis. And the icing on the cake is that all the raw imagery goes up on the web as soon as it's downlinked from the vehicles and the orbiting relays.
I do wish NASA were investing more in the DSN though...
Many people argue that philosophy has nothing to do with the problems of real life. Nonsense, say the philosophers, we're very interested in the problems of real life, such as "how can we reach an empirical definition of 'real'? " and "what do we mean by 'life'? "
Are you sure? There are plenty of differences between robots and humans, but they're all made of matter and that matter's all subject to the same physical laws.
I am a zombie (or robot), and so's my wife. And so, dear reader, are you. If you're thinking "...but I don't feel like a zombie/robot, (a) how do you know what it would feel like to be a (philosophical) zombie or robot of equivalent complexity to your current state? and (b) I think you are watching the shadows on the cave wall and believing them to be alive.
This is turning out to be a good year for good news! It was only when I started thinking of things this is better than, that I realised we've also had the apparent collapse of DRM for music (it's not over yet, admittedly, but if you were around between 1987-1990 you may remember that from Glasnost to the collapse of the USSR was also a slow motion thing...), the apparent flop of Vista, the imminent failure of the whole Palladium/TCM foundation of Vista's treacherous computing, Dell shipping Ubuntu pre-installed... whatever next? Darl McBride's corpse dragged through the streets by an angry mob of lawyers? Bush / Cheney resign?:)
The footage is not picked specifically to show the military in a good light...
Oh really? So what is the criteria then? number of shots on target? cost to the taxpayer of munitions expended? rounds discharged per second?
Entertainment value?
I mean, c'mon, that's just such a silly statement. What other reason can the military ever have for releasing any media at all beyond terse official communiques?
It's gonna be a hell of a Good Thing to happen that will outweigh the loss of essentially all current ports and coastal cities (note: a quick look at the map will show how many cities are built on coasts or on tidal rivers near the coast; the river transports the crap away, the river and sea provide transport links to the rest of the world (and thus are trading centres), and people used to get a lot of their food from the sea back in the day.
I'm a UK cit, I work in infosec, and I've a friend who's an IT hack (er, that is, journalist:) ) I have no idea who the UKITSJotY might be. Mine non-UK SIJOTY is Bruce Schenier, same as last year and the year before that, with Peter Neumann a close second.
(lame to reply to my own post, my apologies) I should have added that some theories suggest that traditional white minty tic-tacs can spontaneously flip state into orange or lime flavoured particles. None of these confectionary items interact with normal baryonic matter; in fact, billions of invisible tic-tacs are streaming through your body this very second. No such state changes have ever been directly observed, although a million-litre capacity corner CTN corner shop filled with sensitive CCTV detectors keeps watch for the tell-tale flash of light caused by a tic-tac changing state, from deep in a Uranium mine beneath a filling station on the A40.
I propose that dark matter is actually composed of jellybeans and M&M's, and that the first massive objects were stars fuelled by the crushing force of the crunchy shells of the M&Ms piercing the relatively soft outer coating of the jellybeans. Gravitational separation eventually turned the masses into giant Cadbury Creme Eggs. Now you're just being silly. Imagine sphere with a radius of 1 AU (the size of earth's orbit, remember!) composed of milk chocolate and "fondant filling". The enormous pressures in the core would crush the crude, macroscopic proteins in the chocolate into their component molecules, then heat and pressure would eventually overwhlem the degeneracy pressure, causing the entire gooey mass to break down into a seething mass of elementary particles. This event also causes observable evidence, in the form of a huge burst of massless particles accelerated to relativistic velocities. These are called tic-tacs.
Well goshdarnheckitall - Scuttlebmonkey chop()d my final sentence! My submission originally ended:
No word yet from John Carpenter on the prospect of solipsistic thermostellar bombs...
So, hey thanks for posting my submission, man, but enough with the sub-editing, already! Don't I got no artistic rights here?
Now we see the violence inherent in the system! Don't give me any of that intelligent life crap... this is Slashdot. Just give me something I can troll. Help! Help! I'm being oppressed!!!
Emacs (a full source distribution with all the docs.) I've wanted to learn e-lisp for ages, and I only finished the first 10% or so of the built-in tutorial.
This incident is a result primarily of poor physical security, firstly lack of controls preventing someone deliberately or accidentally moving it out of the secured area, and secondly the config of the data. If it's in an encrypted fs (Windows EFS or Linux loopback crypto fs or equivalent), which it should be, there's no problem with Dr Evil carrying it back to his volcano lair, even if he has a crack team of inwinceable cryptanalysts (is that a word?).
Where I work, all company data on a laptop goes into an encrypted directory, with no exceptions. (Selected stuff on desktops and servers likewise, but laptops are the No.1 threat vector for data loss threads. Verification and enforcement? I'm planning to get to it next week as it happens - I'm polishing my rubber hose and hammering another rusty nail into my Louiseville LARTer and looking forward the the first senior manager to be randomly selected by our computerised random enforcement monitor system, aka BOFH with a mark 1 finger >:) )
Better... 100 greatest movies, 120" concave immersive mini-Imax style display, surroundsound, vibrating chair, perhaps a hot date impatiently waiting for him to show her this fantastic movie he's been telling her about... and a Linux box, with a full GNU toolchain. Let him figure out how to reverse engineer the damn thing himself. How hard can it be? Jon Johannsen was only 15 when he released deCSS, back in '99.
Perhaps we could let him have one of my deCSS tshirts with the source on the back. It's been washed so many times it's/almost/ undecipherable >:) (And it's not the full source anyway; there are two shirts, one with a large lookup table, the other being the actual deciphering functions.
It's a comms rack in fact - 19" wide but not properly deep enough for full-size pizza-boxes; their arses hang out the back. The server's arses, that is. It was TMI because what kind of sad bastard has not just a PC in their bedroom, but servers - lots of servers...
Actually they're mostly powered down most of the time. But I find it hard getting to sleep without the soothing whirr of the fans...
Very amusing, but seriously - when will low-end Cell CPU-powered boxes arrive? I'm thinking of the ProLiant / PowerEdge type servers, 1-6U commodity servers of the sort I'm planning to install in the new rack in my bedr^h^h^h E_TOO_MUCH_INFORMATION
(Come to that, what about middling-high end workstations of the sort most of us probably spend most of our day? I've the germ of a nice computer collection here, with a 68000, a Z80, various Pentium "0" and upwards intel boxes and couple of Sparc machines. Not enough architectures!! I won't be happy until I have one example of every compile target in the Perl makefile:)
Point (1) about disabled voters - I agree. There are in fact a variety of alternative systems available for the disabled. The effort going into improving accessibility throughout life is gradually increasing; two steps forward, one back, of course, but progress is being made.
How does computerised voting help here?
Point 2 - hmmm, that's a good thought. However UK ballot papers include only the name of the candidates, the name of their party, and a big black box. What you do with the bit of paper is pretty self-evident, but (a) I believe multi-lingual communications are in place in the relatively small number of places with significant numbers of non-English speakers[1]. You may argue that speakers of, say, Arabic or Thai may not even comprehend Latin script. That is probably the current de-facto low bar.
Now tell me how computers solve this problem. Are you going to display 150 different flags on the welcome screen, and provide 150 different translations of human and party names? Again, we have it easier than you in that we keep elections pretty simple; you're voting in either local council elections (there are a couple of differently sized admin regions with different names, but the principle's the same), or you're voting in a national election. We don't elect civil servants and judges, we appoint them after they pass exams:)
[1] I should note that patterns of immigration and language use are very different in the UK than in the USA. We have many more languages in small areas, for one thing - for example, I used to live in the London Borough of Lambeth, where apparently over 150 languages are spoken. Some of those communities are very small, others are more substantial. It's a really interesting (and great!) place to live, actually; there's definitely a (positive) difference between having two or three distinct communities in one area, and having dozens. *everyone's* a minority... anyway, < tangent/ >
Slashdot Mirror
And he certainly isn't talking from the perspective that what's bad for America is good for the UK -- absolutely the opposite. Thanks to Blair's voluntary suspension of disbelief and following Dubya into Iraq, we've got a (according to MI5) the risk of so-called "Islamist" terrorist attacks to worry about for literally decades, even if we get the hell out of dodge by the end of the year, likely the earliest possible date. Ahhhh, I'm off-topic & ranting. Sorry.
One of the problems is that climatology is very, very complicated. I'm a layperson with some science O levels (for kids and non-Brits: exams we used to take at 16) and I'm generally interested in science. I read Scientific American every so often - I used to get it regularly but I just haven't the time these days. I keep up on some particular interests, the usual Slashdot-type areas like cosmology, material science, astronomy etc and some you'll never see here (civil engineering is great!). Anyway I've been interested in climate change for donkey's years, since 87/88 or so at least, when our A level lecturer talked about it (presumably influenced by the landmark Hansen 88 paper.) Anyway someone pointed me at RealClimate.org, and I read all the articles and believe I'm reasonably well informed, but lots of it is still very very complicated. There are so many different processes involved, at so many scales - global, continental / ocean basin scale, right down to atmospheric chemistry at molecular and atomic level. And the statistics - !! Admittedly I'm no mathematician, but I still can't claim to have even a good knowledge of the processes at that (realclimate) level.
I know that's a very popular view, but I personally disagree -- I don't agree it's necessary, and I don't think it's practical anyway. But this isn't the right story to have that, uh, debate... I wish someone would do something relevant to the question, publish it, and there'd a be a good ol' Slashdot flamefest on the subject and we could all get ourselves into nice entrenched positions... Well, time will tell which of us is right, anyway.
I do wish NASA were investing more in the DSN though...
Many people argue that philosophy has nothing to do with the problems of real life. Nonsense, say the philosophers, we're very interested in the problems of real life, such as "how can we reach an empirical definition of 'real'? " and "what do we mean by 'life'? "
I am a zombie (or robot), and so's my wife. And so, dear reader, are you. If you're thinking "...but I don't feel like a zombie/robot, (a) how do you know what it would feel like to be a (philosophical) zombie or robot of equivalent complexity to your current state? and (b) I think you are watching the shadows on the cave wall and believing them to be alive.
This is turning out to be a good year for good news! It was only when I started thinking of things this is better than, that I realised we've also had the apparent collapse of DRM for music (it's not over yet, admittedly, but if you were around between 1987-1990 you may remember that from Glasnost to the collapse of the USSR was also a slow motion thing...), the apparent flop of Vista, the imminent failure of the whole Palladium/TCM foundation of Vista's treacherous computing, Dell shipping Ubuntu pre-installed... whatever next? Darl McBride's corpse dragged through the streets by an angry mob of lawyers? Bush / Cheney resign? :)
Oh really? So what is the criteria then? number of shots on target? cost to the taxpayer of munitions expended? rounds discharged per second?
Entertainment value?
I mean, c'mon, that's just such a silly statement. What other reason can the military ever have for releasing any media at all beyond terse official communiques?
I'm not even going into the other effects described in the fourth 5-yearly IPCC climate change report.
Hey, n.p., I was with you all the way until you got into the stuff about girly-men ;p
I'm a UK cit, I work in infosec, and I've a friend who's an IT hack (er, that is, journalist :) ) I have no idea who the UKITSJotY might be. Mine non-UK SIJOTY is Bruce Schenier, same as last year and the year before that, with Peter Neumann a close second.
(lame to reply to my own post, my apologies) I should have added that some theories suggest that traditional white minty tic-tacs can spontaneously flip state into orange or lime flavoured particles. None of these confectionary items interact with normal baryonic matter; in fact, billions of invisible tic-tacs are streaming through your body this very second. No such state changes have ever been directly observed, although a million-litre capacity corner CTN corner shop filled with sensitive CCTV detectors keeps watch for the tell-tale flash of light caused by a tic-tac changing state, from deep in a Uranium mine beneath a filling station on the A40.
So, hey thanks for posting my submission, man, but enough with the sub-editing, already! Don't I got no artistic rights here? Now we see the violence inherent in the system! Don't give me any of that intelligent life crap... this is Slashdot. Just give me something I can troll. Help! Help! I'm being oppressed!!!
E_TOO_MUCH_PYTHON
Emacs (a full source distribution with all the docs.) I've wanted to learn e-lisp for ages, and I only finished the first 10% or so of the built-in tutorial.
Where I work, all company data on a laptop goes into an encrypted directory, with no exceptions. (Selected stuff on desktops and servers likewise, but laptops are the No.1 threat vector for data loss threads. Verification and enforcement? I'm planning to get to it next week as it happens - I'm polishing my rubber hose and hammering another rusty nail into my Louiseville LARTer and looking forward the the first senior manager to be randomly selected by our computerised random enforcement monitor system, aka BOFH with a mark 1 finger >:) )
Better... 100 greatest movies, 120" concave immersive mini-Imax style display, surroundsound, vibrating chair, perhaps a hot date impatiently waiting for him to show her this fantastic movie he's been telling her about... and a Linux box, with a full GNU toolchain. Let him figure out how to reverse engineer the damn thing himself. How hard can it be? Jon Johannsen was only 15 when he released deCSS, back in '99. Perhaps we could let him have one of my deCSS tshirts with the source on the back. It's been washed so many times it's /almost/ undecipherable >:) (And it's not the full source anyway; there are two shirts, one with a large lookup table, the other being the actual deciphering functions.
Actually they're mostly powered down most of the time. But I find it hard getting to sleep without the soothing whirr of the fans...
That's not insane. That's eccentric. Come to England :)
(Come to that, what about middling-high end workstations of the sort most of us probably spend most of our day? I've the germ of a nice computer collection here, with a 68000, a Z80, various Pentium "0" and upwards intel boxes and couple of Sparc machines. Not enough architectures!! I won't be happy until I have one example of every compile target in the Perl makefile :)
Humph, is that you?!
Point (1) about disabled voters - I agree. There are in fact a variety of alternative systems available for the disabled. The effort going into improving accessibility throughout life is gradually increasing; two steps forward, one back, of course, but progress is being made.
How does computerised voting help here?
Point 2 - hmmm, that's a good thought. However UK ballot papers include only the name of the candidates, the name of their party, and a big black box. What you do with the bit of paper is pretty self-evident, but (a) I believe multi-lingual communications are in place in the relatively small number of places with significant numbers of non-English speakers[1]. You may argue that speakers of, say, Arabic or Thai may not even comprehend Latin script. That is probably the current de-facto low bar.
Now tell me how computers solve this problem. Are you going to display 150 different flags on the welcome screen, and provide 150 different translations of human and party names? Again, we have it easier than you in that we keep elections pretty simple; you're voting in either local council elections (there are a couple of differently sized admin regions with different names, but the principle's the same), or you're voting in a national election. We don't elect civil servants and judges, we appoint them after they pass exams :)
[1] I should note that patterns of immigration and language use are very different in the UK than in the USA. We have many more languages in small areas, for one thing - for example, I used to live in the London Borough of Lambeth, where apparently over 150 languages are spoken. Some of those communities are very small, others are more substantial. It's a really interesting (and great!) place to live, actually; there's definitely a (positive) difference between having two or three distinct communities in one area, and having dozens. *everyone's* a minority... anyway, < tangent/ >