Re:If the journalist was stupid enough to sign it.
on
AMD NDA Scandal
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· Score: 1
AMD is stupid enough to think it should be able to get away with this bullshit.
AMD might be able to get away with it in Singapore? I wonder if Singaporean journalists just get used to the censorship that their (benign and efficient, but totally authoritarian) government imposes on them. I mean, after you've been self-censoring for the government for your whole career, what's the big deal if some other power-that-be start making similar demands?
Of course, there are groups -- particularly among journalists, actually -- who want more freedom of speech. But the devil's advocate inside me has to ask: If Singapore has done so well under the current government, then why mess with success? I mean, hell, CNN has "free speech" and what does it buy Americans? Maybe we need a benevolent autocracy of technocrats too.
I am not a fluid dynamicist. But: To increase thrust at a certain RPM, it seems that you can either (1) increase the diameter of the propeller, or (2) increase the number of blades. The problem with increasing the diameter is that the velocity at the tips increases, which leads to effects like cavitation (which, besides being very noisy, damages propellers). So what you do is increase the number of blades.
Prop-driven airplanes produced near the end of WWII had many-blade propellers for this reason as well: They wanted a lot of thrust, but, if they made the blades any longer, then the tips would have been supersonic. (I think I got this factoid from the History Channel.)
My guess is that a quiet high-thrust propeller would spin slowly and have many, very wide and heavily-curved blades. Let's see if somebody who knows more agrees.
(Viva Ayn Rand! Drive your Lexus around in a grove of Olive trees! Flat taxes! Home schooling! Power to the individual!^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hauthoritarian corporations!)
YET: Distributed control is a big deal now. Lots of people are doing research into -- well, yes -- using "market" systems to get groups of, say, mobile robots to do something without having a single controller. Markets are really just negative feedback systems -- which can sometimes converge to what you want, sometimes to local minima, or sometimes never at all, instead going unstable.
So, I wonder: Is there distributed control work to be done in, say, task scheduling in compute clusters? Can some sort of market approach allow individual CPUs to reach optimal or near-optimal schedules with minimal inter-CPU communication?
This might actually not be a horrible idea. And even if it is -- hey, you can probably publish a paper on it, right?
If the actions permitted by the BSD license are a superset of those permitted by the GPL, then, logically, requiring the AND interpretation is equivalent to just distributing under the BSD license, right? So then why would anyone bother to dual license?
The simple fact that "BSD AND GPL" seems to reduce to "BSD" implies to me that the AND interpretation cannot be correct.
...retroactively, please. Sometime pre-Neuromancer would be nice. Bonus: You'd prevent Pattern Recognition while you were at it!
These journalists! They try too hard to be hip; they pretend to be well-versed in technology -- and yet they coin nonsense phrases like "Cyberspace!" It is they who are responsible for this! (Regina Lynn on Wired: I'm looking at you too. At least Gibson wrote some Cyberpunk.) So, while -- fine -- shooting might be a bit harsh, I do think the pillory could be in order...
[Neal Stephenson gets off the hook completely, 'cus even though he had a "Metaverse" in Snow Crash, he at least (1) clearly knows what he's talking about, and (2) wrote Cryptonomicon (and after you write something as mindshatteringly awesome as Cryptonomicon, you can get away with a lot.)]
I wish, so very much, that projectors were available whose light bulbs didn't cost a fortune and need frequent replacement.
My vote goes for a trio of lasers -- red, blue, and green -- that would scan quickly across your wall. I feel like such a thing has got to be possible, and has the potential to be pretty efficient.
It's possible that what follows will be accompanied by the sound of sarcasm rushing over my head, but I'll write it anyway just in case it might actually be helpful:
I noticed you wrote "Kw/hr." FYI, that's not correct; it's not a ratio of units, but a product -- really, "kilowatts TIMES hours" -- and it's generally written "Kw-hr." It doesn't mean "kilowatts per hour," but rather "the amount of energy consumed in one hour if you're drawing it at a rate of one kilowatt."
I wish the power companies (et. al.) wouldn't use "Kw-hr" as a unit. It'd be like measuring distance in "knot-minutes" or something (the distance traveled during one minute if you're going at a speed of one nautical mile per hour). Dumb and confusing.
(I feel like getting self-explanatory units of energy and power into the language would go a long way to educating the public, implicitly, about energy -- which is an important public issue. When people don't even understand that the "Watt" label on their lightbulb measures the same thing as the "horsepower" figure for their car, I feel like something's not exactly right.)
A friend of mine was telling me about a restaurant like that somewhere in... Iowa? -- out Midwest, at any rate -- which worked with a system somewhat like that. Actually, it was even more impressive: There were no posted prices, and the policy was that people simply paid whatever that thought was fair!
Once or twice a year, someone would leave without paying. But over the course of a typical day, apparently, no meal would cost the establishment more than was paid for it! And occasionally, it'd even happen that someone in a particularly generous mood would leave a $100 bill for a meal! Overall, they made quite a reasonable profit.
But then, this was located in a small town, and, generally, you'd expect that the people who'd eat there would be repeat customers. That sounds like the key in the place you're describing? In game theory, it's often proven that the "rational" person is pretty horrible, doing all sorts of nasty things -- but those results change completely once you add the assumption of repeated interaction with other players. [This touches on DDLKermit007's post (It'd be nice if Slashdot would let you reply to multiple posts with a single reply, so that forums could take on a more general directed graph topology than the heirarchical tree structure we have now... but I digress) to the effect that Japanese bus-riders feared ostracism, but I'm not sure I intend my point to have connotations that are quite as negative.]
I wonder what would happen if you set up a restaurant like that in a city?
Even if they can't decode the second one, anyone listening still knows I was talking to the "Enemy of the People," Bob.
So, seeing how what's at issue in this article is who you're talking to more than what you're saying, encryption is, unfortunately, not super relevant.
I think the only technical solution here is to use steganography and communicate through a very large (unwitting) third party -- like Slashdot: one might post reasonable-sounding forum posts containing hidden information. And even this solution is low-bandwidth, high-latency, and precariously-secure at best (were it high-bandwidth, it would come to dominate the traffic to and from that third party [Slashdot], and then the communication would become obvious). So basically, it's a pretty crappy compared with what we're used to.
I agree with your premise that we should routinely encrypt stuff; I'm all for encryption. But here I don't think it helps in particular, and, sometimes, a false sense of security is worse than no security at all.
...that the South Korean Air Force has an official Starcraft team.
I'd say that getting your videogame elevated to the status of stadium-worthy spectator sport is a pretty huge achievement. Blizzard's Starcraft is surely up there.
(This is complicated only by the fact that it has so many worthy competitors from the same era: Age of Empires is the first that comes to mind.)
I think the distinction between compiled and scripting languages being made is largely historical and cultural. Because, take a step back: Practically, is there much difference?
As you develop -- doing incremental development, testing as you go -- you write some code, and then you run it. How relevant really is it to you that there's a "compilation" step in the middle? Ten bucks says you're working in an IDE with a single button to click that compiles your code and runs it. So what's the big deal?
(Compiling does add an additional time lag, especially on large projects, but chances are you're only recompiling one or two object files and linking, so it's not like compiling from scratch; it's not bad at all.)
In the grand scheme (was that a LISP pun?) of things, Javascript and C++ are pretty damn similar. They're imperative, OO languages. They even have similar syntax. What is so hugely different about writing Javascript? Writing an algorithm in one is pretty much like writing an algorithm in the other.
Javascript lets you interact with HTML and the whole DOM, so you've got a lot of interface stuff set up ahead-of-time for you: That's the difference. But in theory, a nice library in C++ could give you the same thing. And using Qt or GTK, often in conjunction with something like (in the year 2007) Glade, even that gap is narrower now than it used to be.
The distinction between compiled and scripted languages also doesn't give, say, Javascript, its due. Javascript is a nice language; it's easy to write code in; it's Turing-complete (of course). If somebody wrote a binary compiler for it and some Unix libraries (maybe this has already happened?), it could compete in a niche similar to C++-and-Java's. (In fact, it'd almost be nicer than Java;-) ).
I will agree that "web developers" tend to care more about the visual aspect: 'Design,' presentation, and the UI. But that says more about where they're coming from, I think -- they got into programming via writing webpages, once upon a time -- than it does about the tools they're using now. Because algorithms are algorithms.
This is what I've heard, and I tend to believe it.
The place is a mess; tons of projects have been improperly disposed of, and many employees have become sick with what looks like heavy metal poisoning (the government has refused to reveal what it was they might have been exposed to, however, so many have been unable to get appropriate treatment).
Basically, because it's classified, there's no oversight, and because there's no oversight, the place is a disaster. "Area 51" is nothing but a neglected Superfund site where they fly airplanes.
[Sources: There was a 60 Minutes episode interviewing some very sick people, and there were satellite photos in Popular Mechanics (I know, it's a rag), also showing chemical pools, etc.]
________________________
And here's more info on the above:
For the fifth year in a row, President Bush has granted the Air Force an executive exemption from legal requirements to disclose information regarding solid or hazardous waste disposal operations at Area 51.
[...]
Area 51's annual exemption stems from lawsuits filed in 1996 on the behalf of two former civilian employees at the facility. Both employees, Robert Frost and Wally Kasza, died of illnesses attributed to inhalation of smoke from toxic materials being disposed of at Area 51.
Plaintiffs in the lawsuits, Frost v. Perry and Kasza v. Browne, claimed that the Air Force and EPA had violated the RCRA by illegally burning Area 51's hazardous waste in open pits.
Base workers risking imprisonment came forward to tell CNN how government contractors reportedly used Area 51 as a secret dumping ground. They described how truckloads of hazardous wastes were dumped into large open trenches and set on fire as armed guards stood watch. The workers, who demanded anonymity in speaking to CNN, said they developed health problems after breathing smoke from the burning trenches. They claim their complaints were ignored and that requests for protective clothing were denied.
Have you ever wondered about the mentality of those who advocate government financing of intellectual and artistic pursuits, in the name of intellectual independence and creative freedom?
There are some things that monopolies, like governments, can better provide than many smaller competing companies; infrastructure and technology research are two of the most important ones. The simple reason for this is that monopolies can be relatively sure that they will be around in many years' time to reap the benefits of their investments, whereas in a hypercompetitive market, risk is higher and the "rational" investor will focus on smaller, shorter-term investments; this maximizes his expected return.
You see: if government doesn't fund research, who will? Gone are the days of Bell Labs.
Also, Ms. Rand, you forget: The absence of civic government does not imply the existence of individual freedom. Quite the contrary: Civic government is a necessary check on corporate government.
You mention...
Ayn Rand wrote:
the fear, the intrigues, the rigid censorship, and the abject bootlicking in which and with which the recipients of governmental favors have to live moment by precarious moment. Are you so naive, Ms. Rand, to think that politics is unique to organizations run by the State?
Anarcho-capitalist "libertarianism" is no recipe for freedom.
Ayn Rand wrote:
How can today's intellectuals fail to know it? ...which -- funny thing, this -- is also my question, exactly.
Flamebait? Sure. But badly-constructed flamebait- the only people who use the expression "politically correct" are those attacking the concept.
Very true.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that "political correctness" only ever really existed as a convenient strawman caricature, useful for smearing anything remotely smacking of "liberal" or left wing views.
Heh, I don't know: I'd always considered myself reasonably to the left, but... I was surprised to run into a bunch of socially-acceptable racial bigotry during college, and the only way I can think to characterize it, is as having been "ok" because it was "politically correct." And this is the real point of my post.
What am I talking about? People complaining, over and over, about "rich white kids;" they'd use sneering language like "bastion of white privilege," repeat racial slurs like W.A.S.P. as though that was somehow acceptable (besides, at least get your facts straight: second-wave European immigrants were neither Anglo-Saxon nor Protestant), and harp on hundred-year-old European imperialism (as though they, going to an Ivy League school, were somehow victims thereof). This was insidious stuff, nothing more than socially-acceptable racism. And it wasn't just something that affected interactions with strangers; it infected friendships, sowing mistrust and contributing to the slow self-segregation that students settled into by senior year. Watching this happen was the saddest part of college for me.
An example:
I started out as good friends, my freshman year, with a Chinese-American girl, but by senior year this language had gotten even to her. In particular, she began to use the phrase "rich white kids" over and over -- never "spoiled rich kids" or "spoiled jerks;" always "rich white kids." In her case, there was irony written all over it, as (1) her father was a well-to-do doctor; (2) she had traveled all over the world at his expense; (3) I remember her being demonstrably shocked when one day I mentioned that I was responsible for paying for all of my own credit card bills ("What, you mean your parents don't pay them for you? Mine do!"); and (4) she'd had a number of important opportunities handed to her that she hadn't had to work for at all. It was a little infuriating to hear her, of all people, call someone else spoiled.
It got worse with time. I remember one incident in particular: I was walking down the sidewalk with her and an African-American (male) friend of hers (and so an acquaintance of mine), and she was complaining that Barak Obama wasn't dark enough: that the Caucasian part of his ancestry polluted him. She said that his skin looked "like mud." It was then that this other guy and I started exchanging meaningful glances, and I spoke our shared thought, "So, I'm not sure how to say this, [her name], but... look: You're standing between a dark black guy and a pale white guy *holds out arm with forearm up*, and... you're complaining that people with skin tones in-between are ugly? [(Implication: Look at yourself.)]" (I never understood how the racial ideas she'd begun to develop could withstand even a drop of sarcasm: You'd have thought that their self-contradictoriness would have caused them to annihilate each other at the tiniest hint of ironic illumination.)
A large part of the reason she was acting as she was at that time in particular was that she'd just broken up with another guy -- who, as always for her, was white. Now, the people you date are the people who get close to you and the people who cause you emotional pain, so it's easy to hate them and their groups -- hence the ubiquity of sexism -- so I understand, in part, how her anti-white sentiments had developed. But I don't think that this history of hers is the full explanation: I really think that the politically-correct norms on racial discourse had something to do with it too: She was using its language to justify her hate. Her pol
but this can never happen unless the gov't fully deregulates the market itself and we all know this will never happen.
Some of the most successful rollouts of high-speed broadband have happened with significant government regulation and involvement: South Korea, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark, among others. Conversely, in the United States where there was less regulation to begin with (and a steady push towards even less), we have seen much less broadband growth, and we are behind other countries.
[The U.S. government actually did invest in broadband (during the Clinton administration) but since effective regulatory oversight did not accompany the money, we didn't get what we'd hoped for from the Baby Bells.]
Some argue that this is because the US has a low population density: This argument ignores the fact that there still exist within the US large, dense markets on the coasts (the Northeast corridor, from Boston to Washington, for instance), that are surely as profitable as, say, South Korea, which have remained underdeveloped. Why?
There are some things that monopolies, like governments, can better provide than many smaller competing companies; infrastructure and technology research are two of the most important ones. The simple reason for this is that monopolies can be relatively sure that they will be around in many years' time to reap the benefits of their investments, whereas in a hypercompetitive market, risk is higher and the "rational" investor will focus on smaller, shorter-term investments; this maximizes his expected return.
Full deregulation in electricity caused blackouts across California in 2001. Our deregulation so far has not produced an American broadband market comparable to other countries'. So no, the evidence I see does not lead me to blind faith in 100% laissez-faire economic policies.
See The Liberal Paradox: Markets by themselves are not sufficient to create a Pareto-optimal society.
Occasional government involvement, and well-designed, unencumbering regulation are useful and promote growth. The world is full of prisoners' dilemmas and tragedies of the commons: Markets cannot solve these problems by themselves, which is why we need government.
What happened in 1948 was the founding of one country and the immediate launching of a war to eradicate said country by angry arabs that didn't get their way
"What happened in 1675 was the founding of one country and the immediate launching of a war to eradicate said country by angry native americans that didn't get their way."
The Arabs see Israel as a country set up in their back yard without their permission: Some guy builds a house on your lawn, and then insists he just wants everybody to be friends. The Pilgrims said they came in peace too, and we see how that worked out for the Native Americans.
However, history cannot be reversed. Israel is not leaving the Middle East any more than the United States is leaving North America. I agree it's time the Arabs accepted that.
The cafe bomb was employed in the early days also by those agitating for an Israeli state.
So what I'm saying is this: It is easy to kill people if you are sure that you are right and they are wrong. So don't buy the nationalist fairytale. Evil (and good) permeate all sides of all conflicts.
I always thought that the races should be more differentiated by their building and scout types.
I've thought that the Earth 2150-2160 games are some of the most innovative RTS offerings to date, and they do just this -- particularly Earth 2160.
The two games -- 2150, and 2160 -- are very different. Earth 2150 feels a little like Total Annihilation: You have air, land, and sea units -- plus tunnels, all manner of deformable terrain (trenches, etc), long-range weapons... a full tech tree.... units you design yourself (choose chassis/weapon/etc combinations)... it goes on. It's pretty awesome.
Earth 2160 is a little more pared-down, so it feels more like Starcraft than TA. But that game does the Zerg like Starcraft should have: You don't have buildings; you just tell your units to reproduce! The other races, for their part, have very different building strategies: One race build bases compactly, stacking buildings atop one another in towers; another has sprawling tinker-toy looking bases, with all the buildings joined by tubes; and another has more traditional buildings. Not only that: Each race uses different resources! Some races need iron and water; others need silicon and water; etc.
Even the graphics rock. Earth 2150 looked sexy for its time -- it's TA-Spring-level graphics, roughly -- but 2160 is just beautiful.
Downsides? Lame single-player campaigns, bad voice-acting, and too few online players.
Still, I think the games are awesome. From the sorts of comments you're making about RTS games, you might like them too.
CS is pretty, applied math. And the culture of computer scientists is creative, inventive, and intellectual. Hell? No!
(This distinction, others have pointed out before me.)
More, some exposure to CS teaches people how to think. Before I started to program, I was horrendous at math. Every standardized test I ever took told me I should be a writer. But by turning logic into play, the computer changed everything. Sure, I can still barely add. But I'm going for a Ph.D. in theoretical control -- which is essentially an applied math field. Because, give me a calculator, and I can do pretty cool stuff.
How many people "hate math" because they think it's all about adding up numbers? Tons! (Including, unfortunately, most of the elementary school teachers who teach math). That's not what it's about! Computer Science is beautiful. It changed my mind, and my life: That's no overstatement.
Once upon a time, a poll was sent around my college campus asking respondants to define "sexual assault." One girl's definition ended, "...or even just unwanted flirting."
It's people like this -- the above respondant, and this Belgian woman -- who trivialize sexual assault, and who trivialize rape. I wonder what actual victims would think of her claim.
Rape is a serious crime, a kind of real violence. That you felt uncomfortable does not mean that you were raped. At most, you were harassed. And in a virtual world -- where it is understood that committing acts normally considered to be crimes in the real world is just part of the game, and where people consent at each moment to remain in the game by choosing not to log out at that moment -- it's hard to even say that.
I wonder if part of the problem is that we as society really haven't bothered to understand very well what various sex crimes really are, and why they are actually bad. We see the word "sex" and stop there, letting the connotation "sex = bad" do the work for us of explaining why some act is wrong or some person is bad, instead of actually thinking about why the word "crime" is there, and about what makes an act a crime.
Slashdot Mirror
AMD might be able to get away with it in Singapore? I wonder if Singaporean journalists just get used to the censorship that their (benign and efficient, but totally authoritarian) government imposes on them. I mean, after you've been self-censoring for the government for your whole career, what's the big deal if some other power-that-be start making similar demands?
Of course, there are groups -- particularly among journalists, actually -- who want more freedom of speech. But the devil's advocate inside me has to ask: If Singapore has done so well under the current government, then why mess with success? I mean, hell, CNN has "free speech" and what does it buy Americans? Maybe we need a benevolent autocracy of technocrats too.
Why three?
I am not a fluid dynamicist. But: To increase thrust at a certain RPM, it seems that you can either (1) increase the diameter of the propeller, or (2) increase the number of blades. The problem with increasing the diameter is that the velocity at the tips increases, which leads to effects like cavitation (which, besides being very noisy, damages propellers). So what you do is increase the number of blades.
Prop-driven airplanes produced near the end of WWII had many-blade propellers for this reason as well: They wanted a lot of thrust, but, if they made the blades any longer, then the tips would have been supersonic. (I think I got this factoid from the History Channel.)
My guess is that a quiet high-thrust propeller would spin slowly and have many, very wide and heavily-curved blades. Let's see if somebody who knows more agrees.
Best. Post. Ever. I wish I had mod points.
(Viva Ayn Rand! Drive your Lexus around in a grove of Olive trees! Flat taxes! Home schooling! Power to the individual!^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hauthoritarian corporations!)
YET: Distributed control is a big deal now. Lots of people are doing research into -- well, yes -- using "market" systems to get groups of, say, mobile robots to do something without having a single controller. Markets are really just negative feedback systems -- which can sometimes converge to what you want, sometimes to local minima, or sometimes never at all, instead going unstable.
So, I wonder: Is there distributed control work to be done in, say, task scheduling in compute clusters? Can some sort of market approach allow individual CPUs to reach optimal or near-optimal schedules with minimal inter-CPU communication?
This might actually not be a horrible idea. And even if it is -- hey, you can probably publish a paper on it, right?
If the actions permitted by the BSD license are a superset of those permitted by the GPL, then, logically, requiring the AND interpretation is equivalent to just distributing under the BSD license, right? So then why would anyone bother to dual license?
The simple fact that "BSD AND GPL" seems to reduce to "BSD" implies to me that the AND interpretation cannot be correct.
Dude! We should patent those things! Your bullet list sounds vaguely like a list of patent claims. Yes! Then we demand the RIAA pay us royalties. ;-)
...retroactively, please. Sometime pre-Neuromancer would be nice. Bonus: You'd prevent Pattern Recognition while you were at it!
These journalists! They try too hard to be hip; they pretend to be well-versed in technology -- and yet they coin nonsense phrases like "Cyberspace!" It is they who are responsible for this! (Regina Lynn on Wired: I'm looking at you too. At least Gibson wrote some Cyberpunk.) So, while -- fine -- shooting might be a bit harsh, I do think the pillory could be in order...
[Neal Stephenson gets off the hook completely, 'cus even though he had a "Metaverse" in Snow Crash, he at least (1) clearly knows what he's talking about, and (2) wrote Cryptonomicon (and after you write something as mindshatteringly awesome as Cryptonomicon, you can get away with a lot.)]
EOF.I wish, so very much, that projectors were available whose light bulbs didn't cost a fortune and need frequent replacement.
My vote goes for a trio of lasers -- red, blue, and green -- that would scan quickly across your wall. I feel like such a thing has got to be possible, and has the potential to be pretty efficient.
It's possible that what follows will be accompanied by the sound of sarcasm rushing over my head, but I'll write it anyway just in case it might actually be helpful:
I noticed you wrote "Kw/hr." FYI, that's not correct; it's not a ratio of units, but a product -- really, "kilowatts TIMES hours" -- and it's generally written "Kw-hr." It doesn't mean "kilowatts per hour," but rather "the amount of energy consumed in one hour if you're drawing it at a rate of one kilowatt."
I wish the power companies (et. al.) wouldn't use "Kw-hr" as a unit. It'd be like measuring distance in "knot-minutes" or something (the distance traveled during one minute if you're going at a speed of one nautical mile per hour). Dumb and confusing.
(I feel like getting self-explanatory units of energy and power into the language would go a long way to educating the public, implicitly, about energy -- which is an important public issue. When people don't even understand that the "Watt" label on their lightbulb measures the same thing as the "horsepower" figure for their car, I feel like something's not exactly right.)
EOF.
Cool. Thanks for the link!
Nice typo. Confusing a Democratic candidate with Al Quaeda's head demagogue? Apropos, given we're talking about Fox.
A friend of mine was telling me about a restaurant like that somewhere in... Iowa? -- out Midwest, at any rate -- which worked with a system somewhat like that. Actually, it was even more impressive: There were no posted prices, and the policy was that people simply paid whatever that thought was fair!
Once or twice a year, someone would leave without paying. But over the course of a typical day, apparently, no meal would cost the establishment more than was paid for it! And occasionally, it'd even happen that someone in a particularly generous mood would leave a $100 bill for a meal! Overall, they made quite a reasonable profit.
But then, this was located in a small town, and, generally, you'd expect that the people who'd eat there would be repeat customers. That sounds like the key in the place you're describing? In game theory, it's often proven that the "rational" person is pretty horrible, doing all sorts of nasty things -- but those results change completely once you add the assumption of repeated interaction with other players. [This touches on DDLKermit007's post (It'd be nice if Slashdot would let you reply to multiple posts with a single reply, so that forums could take on a more general directed graph topology than the heirarchical tree structure we have now... but I digress) to the effect that Japanese bus-riders feared ostracism, but I'm not sure I intend my point to have connotations that are quite as negative.]
I wonder what would happen if you set up a restaurant like that in a city?
It doesn't matter if I say,
"Hey Bob-The-Anarchist, let's go be subversive!"
or
"Hey Bob-The-Anarchist, KJLJALIUHFFLKAJHSLSAUFRGGFGFGJEUCJDKUEUD"
Even if they can't decode the second one, anyone listening still knows I was talking to the "Enemy of the People," Bob.
So, seeing how what's at issue in this article is who you're talking to more than what you're saying, encryption is, unfortunately, not super relevant.
I think the only technical solution here is to use steganography and communicate through a very large (unwitting) third party -- like Slashdot: one might post reasonable-sounding forum posts containing hidden information. And even this solution is low-bandwidth, high-latency, and precariously-secure at best (were it high-bandwidth, it would come to dominate the traffic to and from that third party [Slashdot], and then the communication would become obvious). So basically, it's a pretty crappy compared with what we're used to.
I agree with your premise that we should routinely encrypt stuff; I'm all for encryption. But here I don't think it helps in particular, and, sometimes, a false sense of security is worse than no security at all.
Yes. And it is absurd that in the US texting is more expensive than voice. It makes absolutely no sense to me.
Basically, the United States' telecommunications infrastructure is tremendously screwed up. One More Thing We Can't Seem To Do Right in America.
...that the South Korean Air Force has an official Starcraft team.
I'd say that getting your videogame elevated to the status of stadium-worthy spectator sport is a pretty huge achievement. Blizzard's Starcraft is surely up there.
(This is complicated only by the fact that it has so many worthy competitors from the same era: Age of Empires is the first that comes to mind.)
I think the distinction between compiled and scripting languages being made is largely historical and cultural. Because, take a step back: Practically, is there much difference?
As you develop -- doing incremental development, testing as you go -- you write some code, and then you run it. How relevant really is it to you that there's a "compilation" step in the middle? Ten bucks says you're working in an IDE with a single button to click that compiles your code and runs it. So what's the big deal?
(Compiling does add an additional time lag, especially on large projects, but chances are you're only recompiling one or two object files and linking, so it's not like compiling from scratch; it's not bad at all.)
In the grand scheme (was that a LISP pun?) of things, Javascript and C++ are pretty damn similar. They're imperative, OO languages. They even have similar syntax. What is so hugely different about writing Javascript? Writing an algorithm in one is pretty much like writing an algorithm in the other.
Javascript lets you interact with HTML and the whole DOM, so you've got a lot of interface stuff set up ahead-of-time for you: That's the difference. But in theory, a nice library in C++ could give you the same thing. And using Qt or GTK, often in conjunction with something like (in the year 2007) Glade, even that gap is narrower now than it used to be.
The distinction between compiled and scripted languages also doesn't give, say, Javascript, its due. Javascript is a nice language; it's easy to write code in; it's Turing-complete (of course). If somebody wrote a binary compiler for it and some Unix libraries (maybe this has already happened?), it could compete in a niche similar to C++-and-Java's. (In fact, it'd almost be nicer than Java ;-) ).
I will agree that "web developers" tend to care more about the visual aspect: 'Design,' presentation, and the UI. But that says more about where they're coming from, I think -- they got into programming via writing webpages, once upon a time -- than it does about the tools they're using now. Because algorithms are algorithms.
Toxic waste.
This is what I've heard, and I tend to believe it.
The place is a mess; tons of projects have been improperly disposed of, and many employees have become sick with what looks like heavy metal poisoning (the government has refused to reveal what it was they might have been exposed to, however, so many have been unable to get appropriate treatment).
Basically, because it's classified, there's no oversight, and because there's no oversight, the place is a disaster. "Area 51" is nothing but a neglected Superfund site where they fly airplanes.
[Sources: There was a 60 Minutes episode interviewing some very sick people, and there were satellite photos in Popular Mechanics (I know, it's a rag), also showing chemical pools, etc.]
________________________
And here's more info on the above:
For the fifth year in a row, President Bush has granted the Air Force an executive exemption from legal requirements to disclose information regarding solid or hazardous waste disposal operations at Area 51.
[...]
Area 51's annual exemption stems from lawsuits filed in 1996 on the behalf of two former civilian employees at the facility. Both employees, Robert Frost and Wally Kasza, died of illnesses attributed to inhalation of smoke from toxic materials being disposed of at Area 51.
Plaintiffs in the lawsuits, Frost v. Perry and Kasza v. Browne, claimed that the Air Force and EPA had violated the RCRA by illegally burning Area 51's hazardous waste in open pits.
http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/weekly/blgrooml ake.htm
Base workers risking imprisonment came forward to tell CNN how government contractors reportedly used Area 51 as a secret dumping ground. They described how truckloads of hazardous wastes were dumped into large open trenches and set on fire as armed guards stood watch. The workers, who demanded anonymity in speaking to CNN, said they developed health problems after breathing smoke from the burning trenches. They claim their complaints were ignored and that requests for protective clothing were denied.http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shadowlands/6583/b ases022.html
Ayn Rand wrote:
Have you ever wondered about the mentality of those who advocate government financing of intellectual and artistic pursuits, in the name of intellectual independence and creative freedom?Actually, I'm quite sane Ms. Rand; thanks.
I wrote (#19300097):
There are some things that monopolies, like governments, can better provide than many smaller competing companies; infrastructure and technology research are two of the most important ones. The simple reason for this is that monopolies can be relatively sure that they will be around in many years' time to reap the benefits of their investments, whereas in a hypercompetitive market, risk is higher and the "rational" investor will focus on smaller, shorter-term investments; this maximizes his expected return.You see: if government doesn't fund research, who will? Gone are the days of Bell Labs.
Also, Ms. Rand, you forget: The absence of civic government does not imply the existence of individual freedom. Quite the contrary: Civic government is a necessary check on corporate government.
You mention...
Ayn Rand wrote:
the fear, the intrigues, the rigid censorship, and the abject bootlicking in which and with which the recipients of governmental favors have to live moment by precarious moment. Are you so naive, Ms. Rand, to think that politics is unique to organizations run by the State?Anarcho-capitalist "libertarianism" is no recipe for freedom.
Ayn Rand wrote:
How can today's intellectuals fail to know it? ...which -- funny thing, this -- is also my question, exactly.Flamebait? Sure. But badly-constructed flamebait- the only people who use the expression "politically correct" are those attacking the concept.
Very true.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that "political correctness" only ever really existed as a convenient strawman caricature, useful for smearing anything remotely smacking of "liberal" or left wing views.
Heh, I don't know: I'd always considered myself reasonably to the left, but... I was surprised to run into a bunch of socially-acceptable racial bigotry during college, and the only way I can think to characterize it, is as having been "ok" because it was "politically correct." And this is the real point of my post.
What am I talking about? People complaining, over and over, about "rich white kids;" they'd use sneering language like "bastion of white privilege," repeat racial slurs like W.A.S.P. as though that was somehow acceptable (besides, at least get your facts straight: second-wave European immigrants were neither Anglo-Saxon nor Protestant), and harp on hundred-year-old European imperialism (as though they, going to an Ivy League school, were somehow victims thereof). This was insidious stuff, nothing more than socially-acceptable racism. And it wasn't just something that affected interactions with strangers; it infected friendships, sowing mistrust and contributing to the slow self-segregation that students settled into by senior year. Watching this happen was the saddest part of college for me.
An example:
I started out as good friends, my freshman year, with a Chinese-American girl, but by senior year this language had gotten even to her. In particular, she began to use the phrase "rich white kids" over and over -- never "spoiled rich kids" or "spoiled jerks;" always "rich white kids." In her case, there was irony written all over it, as (1) her father was a well-to-do doctor; (2) she had traveled all over the world at his expense; (3) I remember her being demonstrably shocked when one day I mentioned that I was responsible for paying for all of my own credit card bills ("What, you mean your parents don't pay them for you? Mine do!"); and (4) she'd had a number of important opportunities handed to her that she hadn't had to work for at all. It was a little infuriating to hear her, of all people, call someone else spoiled.
It got worse with time. I remember one incident in particular: I was walking down the sidewalk with her and an African-American (male) friend of hers (and so an acquaintance of mine), and she was complaining that Barak Obama wasn't dark enough: that the Caucasian part of his ancestry polluted him. She said that his skin looked "like mud." It was then that this other guy and I started exchanging meaningful glances, and I spoke our shared thought, "So, I'm not sure how to say this, [her name], but... look: You're standing between a dark black guy and a pale white guy *holds out arm with forearm up*, and... you're complaining that people with skin tones in-between are ugly? [(Implication: Look at yourself.)]" (I never understood how the racial ideas she'd begun to develop could withstand even a drop of sarcasm: You'd have thought that their self-contradictoriness would have caused them to annihilate each other at the tiniest hint of ironic illumination.)
A large part of the reason she was acting as she was at that time in particular was that she'd just broken up with another guy -- who, as always for her, was white. Now, the people you date are the people who get close to you and the people who cause you emotional pain, so it's easy to hate them and their groups -- hence the ubiquity of sexism -- so I understand, in part, how her anti-white sentiments had developed. But I don't think that this history of hers is the full explanation: I really think that the politically-correct norms on racial discourse had something to do with it too: She was using its language to justify her hate. Her pol
In the year 2007, that's any kid with an Internet connection.
You'd be surprised. You'd be surprised. The phrase "Orange Soda" just never will sound the same after that one fateful night...
Some of the most successful rollouts of high-speed broadband have happened with significant government regulation and involvement: South Korea, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark, among others. Conversely, in the United States where there was less regulation to begin with (and a steady push towards even less), we have seen much less broadband growth, and we are behind other countries.
[The U.S. government actually did invest in broadband (during the Clinton administration) but since effective regulatory oversight did not accompany the money, we didn't get what we'd hoped for from the Baby Bells.]
Some argue that this is because the US has a low population density: This argument ignores the fact that there still exist within the US large, dense markets on the coasts (the Northeast corridor, from Boston to Washington, for instance), that are surely as profitable as, say, South Korea, which have remained underdeveloped. Why?
There are some things that monopolies, like governments, can better provide than many smaller competing companies; infrastructure and technology research are two of the most important ones. The simple reason for this is that monopolies can be relatively sure that they will be around in many years' time to reap the benefits of their investments, whereas in a hypercompetitive market, risk is higher and the "rational" investor will focus on smaller, shorter-term investments; this maximizes his expected return.
Full deregulation in electricity caused blackouts across California in 2001. Our deregulation so far has not produced an American broadband market comparable to other countries'. So no, the evidence I see does not lead me to blind faith in 100% laissez-faire economic policies.
See The Liberal Paradox: Markets by themselves are not sufficient to create a Pareto-optimal society.
Occasional government involvement, and well-designed, unencumbering regulation are useful and promote growth. The world is full of prisoners' dilemmas and tragedies of the commons: Markets cannot solve these problems by themselves, which is why we need government.
"What happened in 1675 was the founding of one country and the immediate launching of a war to eradicate said country by angry native americans that didn't get their way."
(That was King Philip's War.)
The Arabs see Israel as a country set up in their back yard without their permission: Some guy builds a house on your lawn, and then insists he just wants everybody to be friends. The Pilgrims said they came in peace too, and we see how that worked out for the Native Americans.
However, history cannot be reversed. Israel is not leaving the Middle East any more than the United States is leaving North America. I agree it's time the Arabs accepted that.
However, Israel has no moral high ground.
The cafe bomb was employed in the early days also by those agitating for an Israeli state.
So what I'm saying is this: It is easy to kill people if you are sure that you are right and they are wrong. So don't buy the nationalist fairytale. Evil (and good) permeate all sides of all conflicts.
I've thought that the Earth 2150-2160 games are some of the most innovative RTS offerings to date, and they do just this -- particularly Earth 2160.
The two games -- 2150, and 2160 -- are very different. Earth 2150 feels a little like Total Annihilation: You have air, land, and sea units -- plus tunnels, all manner of deformable terrain (trenches, etc), long-range weapons... a full tech tree.... units you design yourself (choose chassis/weapon/etc combinations)... it goes on. It's pretty awesome.
Earth 2160 is a little more pared-down, so it feels more like Starcraft than TA. But that game does the Zerg like Starcraft should have: You don't have buildings; you just tell your units to reproduce! The other races, for their part, have very different building strategies: One race build bases compactly, stacking buildings atop one another in towers; another has sprawling tinker-toy looking bases, with all the buildings joined by tubes; and another has more traditional buildings. Not only that: Each race uses different resources! Some races need iron and water; others need silicon and water; etc.
Even the graphics rock. Earth 2150 looked sexy for its time -- it's TA-Spring-level graphics, roughly -- but 2160 is just beautiful.
Downsides? Lame single-player campaigns, bad voice-acting, and too few online players.
Still, I think the games are awesome. From the sorts of comments you're making about RTS games, you might like them too.
Cheers.
IT is hellish bullshit.
CS is pretty, applied math. And the culture of computer scientists is creative, inventive, and intellectual. Hell? No!
(This distinction, others have pointed out before me.)
More, some exposure to CS teaches people how to think. Before I started to program, I was horrendous at math. Every standardized test I ever took told me I should be a writer. But by turning logic into play, the computer changed everything. Sure, I can still barely add. But I'm going for a Ph.D. in theoretical control -- which is essentially an applied math field. Because, give me a calculator, and I can do pretty cool stuff.
How many people "hate math" because they think it's all about adding up numbers? Tons! (Including, unfortunately, most of the elementary school teachers who teach math). That's not what it's about! Computer Science is beautiful. It changed my mind, and my life: That's no overstatement.
My first language, as a child? QBasic.
Once upon a time, a poll was sent around my college campus asking respondants to define "sexual assault." One girl's definition ended, "...or even just unwanted flirting."
It's people like this -- the above respondant, and this Belgian woman -- who trivialize sexual assault, and who trivialize rape. I wonder what actual victims would think of her claim.
Rape is a serious crime, a kind of real violence. That you felt uncomfortable does not mean that you were raped. At most, you were harassed. And in a virtual world -- where it is understood that committing acts normally considered to be crimes in the real world is just part of the game, and where people consent at each moment to remain in the game by choosing not to log out at that moment -- it's hard to even say that.
I wonder if part of the problem is that we as society really haven't bothered to understand very well what various sex crimes really are, and why they are actually bad. We see the word "sex" and stop there, letting the connotation "sex = bad" do the work for us of explaining why some act is wrong or some person is bad, instead of actually thinking about why the word "crime" is there, and about what makes an act a crime.