As was recently suggested in the context of dolphins, increased brain size might simply be a result of the pressure on the organism's metabolism caused by cooler climate conditions (abstract on PubMed; summary on random blog). So European brains might be bigger, just because they have to keep thinking in the frosty winters. And as with dolphins, there's no reason to link brain size to intelligence unless you're not terribly bright yourself. Of course, none of this rational debate will happen in the mainstream press.
Many of the methods he mentions aren't that novel. Singing, rhyming, and any way of consciously turning the act of speech into a performance - these are all employed in other branches of speech therapy. Stammerers are told to sing to unblock their stammer, and stutterers are played their own voice with a slight delay to make their speech sound more declamative and even. (Disclaimer: I am not a speech therapist. I can sing, though.)
Possibly in the medical profession there's a systemic disconnect surrounding this condition: because it's so rare, nobody has picked up on the transferability of other methods to its treatment. Possibly Adams just hasn't had gold-class medical advice: it happens, even with good doctors (and even, alarmingly, with good specialists). But maybe that's too many statistical improbabilities stacked on top of each other to be feasible to anyone except the affirmation crowd.
... Sorry. A whole post without a reference to Loud Howard. Where are my manners? I said, WHERE ARE MY MANNERS?
Or, even worse, will it be unable to detect idiom (like all other translation software ever)? We'd have to make sure the soldiers are trained to stick to the most translatable of Americanian, or sooner or later it's all going to kick off, isn't it?
Naive soldier: "Dude, that was a total no-brainer!" [whirr: ping!]
Stephen Hawking voice: "YOU FOOL: TO BE WITH A COMPLETELY EMPTY SKULL!"
Naive soldier: "... Do you think they understood?"
Still, as long as nobody loses their head then there'll be no problems. Wait! I didn't mean that the way it came ou-
> Will the browser shield require signatures and/or heuristics like virus scanners, and thus get outdated?
Not only that, but will it end up with massively overprotective and poorly assembled heuristics that can't be easily turned off?
A lot of existing software (nobody mention N****n) seems to do what Microsoft purports this browser shield will do: looks for script code that (as far as I can see) contains e.g. suspicious function names (from the mentality that brought you "his first name's Mohammed; let's detain him!"). It then snips out this code, regardless of its impact on the rest of the browser. Its absence could crash the browser, but that's not the point: safety first! And as long as you don't have a Javascript function called "l33tIAmScriptKiddie()" then you're safe, right?
In future will the only workaround be to add Browser Shield to our list of unintentionally malicious programs that try hamfistedly to protect the user from actually malicious programs, and recommend to our clients that it be switched off before using script-heavy apps, then switched on for the rest of the web (if they remember)?
How will that protect the user? Or is this about piling unwieldy solutions onto the user and then disclaiming all responsibility when the user has to crawl out from under them to do the simplest task, and gets shafted by a malicious third party? Chip and pin, anyone?
I suppose George Bush being given an honorary degree by the University of Toronto (at a ceremony which half of the faculty walked out of in protest) rather blows a hole in this theory.
Honorary degrees are often bandied around by institutions to give them good press and get them in well with the famous and influential. Whilst I can see Linus' contributions to computing are as good a portfolio of evidence as any thesis, I certainly wouldn't suggest that honorary degrees, which are given out generally for political rather than academic reasons, are "closer to what the real meaning of the degree should be."
So yes, congratulations to Dr Linus Torvalds, but we all knew you were this good before any university thought what good publicity they could get out of it.
It's an interesting point, though: how much must scientists predict the morality or immorality of what they're doing?
I mean, in the case of nuclear research in general, the long term moral worth of nuclear power, for example, is a lot harder to qualify than nuclear weapons research. Should people have researched nuclear power? If not, how far back would you stunt the research, given a chance? Would you deny any nuclear research at all, including such things as Positron Emission Tomography, an occasionally vital medical tool?
I hope I'm not drifting too far off-topic with this -- although I don't think general scientists' morality (as opposed to scientific morality, of which Teller might be justified in getting huffy about the suggestion) can be off-topic when you're talking about the Father of the Bomb -- but surely any scientist is, at the same time as being a scientist, a human being and must therefore be responsive to the morality of his situation?
Possibly not: many jobs require the employee to withhold e.g. compassion, or pity. Or does morality stand apart from that, as a fundamental way in which we can ever be part of a race, not merely a society?
(Of course, I have chosen a DPhil on the cooling of ions in quantum computers, which at least for now holds no ethical problems unless you're against the wilful confinement of innocent calcium ions...)
It's probably a "wake-up call" to people who feel they are running robust systems and therefore have no kind of back-up systems. However stable your OS, there is no weapon against the HERF gun, other than covering your computer in lead, dropping it in concrete and then burying the block at sea.
Which may be preferable to day-to-day sysadmin, if you're running NT.
Linux's "few differences" don't stop X or Netscape from running. They also don't stop Netscape crashing more often than not (I managed to get www.java.sun.com to crash Netscape 4.5something under GNOME/Enlightenment earlier today, which was a major achievement:)
I agree that, in day-to-day running, the minor difrerences between Linux distros and kernels has very little effect on me. But you simply can't trust your life to things working fine after you've tweaked Linux in any major, MAJOR way.
Java has to be completely secure and robust, or it wouldn't be Java. If Linux can't offer it that, then you can't really blame Gosling.
These holy wars ("holy wares" - Freudian typo?) have been around as long as, ooh, as long as the jargon dictionary can remember. It's unlikely that/. will ever be immune, in the same way that IRC/bulletin boards/USENET/any given mailing list/a meeting of bofhs will never be truly immune.
Personally, I think "funny" should definitely count to positive karma. Quite often, especially in the terser and deeper discussions, someone is needed to prick other people's bubbles, or to otherwise alleviate the tension.
If someone's just being cruel, or taking cheap shots, then maybe they shouldn't be given a higher rating. Or maybe they should -- isn't that why we have moderators?
Being funny has its place, along with being informative, or being insightful, in making/. an interesting place to be. Or don't you agree that being funny is important?:)
Well, I'd hope that CmdrTaco, Hemos and (err, quick backpedal to "About..." - I'm bad enough with names, let alone nicknames) Roblimo are scaling up, using the number of people they've got visiting it now and the load averages now to predict as best as possible how often it will fall over^W^W^W^W^W well it will perform when everyone is using it. Of course they are. Yes.
It/is/ nice and fast, though. Even using Netscrape.
Computers in the Turing sense have to have a finite set of internal states: they then move between the states depending on the input to the computer. Otherwise it'd just be a transformer, converting one form of analogue data into another. It'd be an electrically-powered barometer.
So it depends a lot on the processing of your "computer" as to whether it really is one. Is there no digitisation at any point, at all? Does it not react to its input in a way suggesting it has discrete internal states, other than producing an analogue output with a fairly simple relationship to its input?
Good heavens. I never thought I'd see someone who really believed that "the innocent man has nothing to fear from the police." I particularly liked the bit about "big brother(sic)... can protect you." Have you actually read 1984?
"Catching more criminals" is all very well, but you DO always have to offset such things against civil liberties infringements. Even if it meant the abolition of petty theft in the whole country, I don't think I would be willing to accept, say, video cameras in every room of my house. There has to be some sort of a balance.
Personally, I think this bit of gadgetry is going to be sufficiently useless -- I saw a demo' on UK television a while back, where they tried to "see" a woman through the wall, and it only really worked because they knew she was there already, and couldn't tell them very much -- that they're not going to be used invasively for quite a while yet. But when they do, I hope I for one won't just lie down and let the government walk all over me, even if it is in the cause of "protecting me." There's only so much protection I can take before I need some fresh air instead...
Personally I thought it was hilarious that, for the past few months, www.starwars.co.uk was registered to someone random and just had the Apache "successfully installed" screen on it. But I suppose that counts less as piracy than as ripping the piss out of Beardy Lucas and his Legendary Bank Balance.
Anyway, though: isn't all of this already covered by e.g. trade descriptions acts, that, if you're passing yourself off as another business (and it can be shown to the satisfaction of a court that you are) then you're breaking the law? In which case that sort of cybersquatting was already illegal.
The original point was, I think, that someone was pretending to be Melbourne IT, or whatever, to get customers. Just because a website doesn't have exactly what it says in the name is no reason to be put in jail; you need to be further misleading customers to the detriment of other businesses and your profit.
(Disclaimer: IANAL, and I'm only speaking from an English perspective here.)
-- Maybe Linux would win this challenge, however most companies would probably go with the "reliable" Microsoft. --
What surprises me is that Microsoft software really *isn't* reliable. Like, at all. In our office, the workstations all have NT on them, and what do we do? We all ssh to a Linux box, and have five or six terminals open and work remotely.
Yet we have to have Microsoft compatibility in a BIG way, because that is demanded of us by everyone else, because so many people have no idea how you would live outside of Windoze...
This is where nice-looking front-ends come in: much as I really, really despise Gnome and KDE (I am a cut-down wm, usually fvwm, person myself) they look *reassuring* to exactly the kind of people that wouldn't think, oh, I should really be using Linux. If a window manager looks like Win95, then, much as hardcore people (like meself) scream and rant, it's not us it's aimed at.
"Hey! Cryptography doesn't kill people! People kill people!"
Likening this to gun control is a bit weird, especially given the nature of the original story. People in Canada tend to do just fine without a gun in the bedside drawer, although that may be because of Canada's comparatively better health, welfare and education systems that go some way to lessening crime and so you don't have to fear for your life as much in Canada: there's nothing for the mad NRA people to focus on in Johnny Canuck's mind.
To some extent, this story doesn't surprise me at all: Canada is a much more laid back and liberal place than the States. Maybe I should move there away from "The Long Arm Of The Straw" here in the UK(copyright NTK.now, I think) -- it would be interesting to see some sort of test case come out, if the Canadian government ever has any problems over encryption. If indeed the USA or UK governments ever have any serious problems over conviction too -- has anyone heard of any such things?
There's only so much money you could spend on Windows 2000, though, and after that you get no returns. Why? Because the number of people working on bug fixes and patches worldwide for Linux have far, far exceeded the number of people in Microsoft's software "engineering" department.
Linux has been tested to destruction by so many people, all of whom could have a good poke around in the code and say, hey! this bit doesn't work under this condition, so let's change it. Microsoft software has been tested in that way just by the people who wrote it. What do they expect?
Slashdot Mirror
As was recently suggested in the context of dolphins, increased brain size might simply be a result of the pressure on the organism's metabolism caused by cooler climate conditions (abstract on PubMed; summary on random blog). So European brains might be bigger, just because they have to keep thinking in the frosty winters. And as with dolphins, there's no reason to link brain size to intelligence unless you're not terribly bright yourself. Of course, none of this rational debate will happen in the mainstream press.
... Wait a minute. Slashdot covered the dolphin story, for heaven's sake: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/2 1/0358215. Never mind all this talk of sea-bound mammals: the /. community has the combined memory of goldfish!
Many of the methods he mentions aren't that novel. Singing, rhyming, and any way of consciously turning the act of speech into a performance - these are all employed in other branches of speech therapy. Stammerers are told to sing to unblock their stammer, and stutterers are played their own voice with a slight delay to make their speech sound more declamative and even. (Disclaimer: I am not a speech therapist. I can sing, though.)
Possibly in the medical profession there's a systemic disconnect surrounding this condition: because it's so rare, nobody has picked up on the transferability of other methods to its treatment. Possibly Adams just hasn't had gold-class medical advice: it happens, even with good doctors (and even, alarmingly, with good specialists). But maybe that's too many statistical improbabilities stacked on top of each other to be feasible to anyone except the affirmation crowd.
... Sorry. A whole post without a reference to Loud Howard. Where are my manners? I said, WHERE ARE MY MANNERS?
Or, even worse, will it be unable to detect idiom (like all other translation software ever)? We'd have to make sure the soldiers are trained to stick to the most translatable of Americanian, or sooner or later it's all going to kick off, isn't it?
Still, as long as nobody loses their head then there'll be no problems. Wait! I didn't mean that the way it came ou-
> Will the browser shield require signatures and/or heuristics like virus scanners, and thus get outdated? Not only that, but will it end up with massively overprotective and poorly assembled heuristics that can't be easily turned off? A lot of existing software (nobody mention N****n) seems to do what Microsoft purports this browser shield will do: looks for script code that (as far as I can see) contains e.g. suspicious function names (from the mentality that brought you "his first name's Mohammed; let's detain him!"). It then snips out this code, regardless of its impact on the rest of the browser. Its absence could crash the browser, but that's not the point: safety first! And as long as you don't have a Javascript function called "l33tIAmScriptKiddie()" then you're safe, right? In future will the only workaround be to add Browser Shield to our list of unintentionally malicious programs that try hamfistedly to protect the user from actually malicious programs, and recommend to our clients that it be switched off before using script-heavy apps, then switched on for the rest of the web (if they remember)? How will that protect the user? Or is this about piling unwieldy solutions onto the user and then disclaiming all responsibility when the user has to crawl out from under them to do the simplest task, and gets shafted by a malicious third party? Chip and pin, anyone?
I suppose George Bush being given an honorary degree by the University of Toronto (at a ceremony which half of the faculty walked out of in protest) rather blows a hole in this theory.
Honorary degrees are often bandied around by institutions to give them good press and get them in well with the famous and influential. Whilst I can see Linus' contributions to computing are as good a portfolio of evidence as any thesis, I certainly wouldn't suggest that honorary degrees, which are given out generally for political rather than academic reasons, are "closer to what the real meaning of the degree should be."
So yes, congratulations to Dr Linus Torvalds, but we all knew you were this good before any university thought what good publicity they could get out of it.
It's an interesting point, though: how much must scientists predict the morality or immorality of what they're doing?
I mean, in the case of nuclear research in general, the long term moral worth of nuclear power, for example, is a lot harder to qualify than nuclear weapons research. Should people have researched nuclear power? If not, how far back would you stunt the research, given a chance? Would you deny any nuclear research at all, including such things as Positron Emission Tomography, an occasionally vital medical tool?
I hope I'm not drifting too far off-topic with this -- although I don't think general scientists' morality (as opposed to scientific morality, of which Teller might be justified in getting huffy about the suggestion) can be off-topic when you're talking about the Father of the Bomb -- but surely any scientist is, at the same time as being a scientist, a human being and must therefore be responsive to the morality of his situation?
Possibly not: many jobs require the employee to withhold e.g. compassion, or pity. Or does morality stand apart from that, as a fundamental way in which we can ever be part of a race, not merely a society?
(Of course, I have chosen a DPhil on the cooling of ions in quantum computers, which at least for now holds no ethical problems unless you're against the wilful confinement of innocent calcium ions...)
It's probably a "wake-up call" to people who feel they are running robust systems and therefore have no kind of back-up systems. However stable your OS, there is no weapon against the HERF gun, other than covering your computer in lead, dropping it in concrete and then burying the block at sea.
Which may be preferable to day-to-day sysadmin, if you're running NT.
Linux's "few differences" don't stop X or Netscape from running. They also don't stop Netscape crashing more often than not (I managed to get www.java.sun.com to crash Netscape 4.5something under GNOME/Enlightenment earlier today, which was a major achievement :)
I agree that, in day-to-day running, the minor difrerences between Linux distros and kernels has very little effect on me. But you simply can't trust your life to things working fine after you've tweaked Linux in any major, MAJOR way.
Java has to be completely secure and robust, or it wouldn't be Java. If Linux can't offer it that, then you can't really blame Gosling.
These holy wars ("holy wares" - Freudian typo?) have been around as long as, ooh, as long as the jargon dictionary can remember. It's unlikely that /. will ever be immune, in the same way that IRC/bulletin boards/USENET/any given mailing list/a meeting of bofhs will never be truly immune.
Oh, by the way: use emacs. Or joe if you have to.
Personally, I think "funny" should definitely count to positive karma. Quite often, especially in the terser and deeper discussions, someone is needed to prick other people's bubbles, or to otherwise alleviate the tension.
/. an interesting place to be. Or don't you agree that being funny is important? :)
If someone's just being cruel, or taking cheap shots, then maybe they shouldn't be given a higher rating. Or maybe they should -- isn't that why we have moderators?
Being funny has its place, along with being informative, or being insightful, in making
Well, I'd hope that CmdrTaco, Hemos and (err, quick backpedal to "About..." - I'm bad enough with names, let alone nicknames) Roblimo are scaling up, using the number of people they've got visiting it now and the load averages now to predict as best as possible how often it will fall over^W^W^W^W^W well it will perform when everyone is using it. Of course they are. Yes.
/is/ nice and fast, though. Even using Netscrape.
It
Computers in the Turing sense have to have a finite set of internal states: they then move between the states depending on the input to the computer. Otherwise it'd just be a transformer, converting one form of analogue data into another. It'd be an electrically-powered barometer.
So it depends a lot on the processing of your "computer" as to whether it really is one. Is there no digitisation at any point, at all? Does it not react to its input in a way suggesting it has discrete internal states, other than producing an analogue output with a fairly simple relationship to its input?
Good heavens. I never thought I'd see someone who really believed that "the innocent man has nothing to fear from the police." I particularly liked the bit about "big brother(sic) ... can protect you." Have you actually read 1984?
"Catching more criminals" is all very well, but you DO always have to offset such things against civil liberties infringements. Even if it meant the abolition of petty theft in the whole country, I don't think I would be willing to accept, say, video cameras in every room of my house. There has to be some sort of a balance.
Personally, I think this bit of gadgetry is going to be sufficiently useless -- I saw a demo' on UK television a while back, where they tried to "see" a woman through the wall, and it only really worked because they knew she was there already, and couldn't tell them very much -- that they're not going to be used invasively for quite a while yet. But when they do, I hope I for one won't just lie down and let the government walk all over me, even if it is in the cause of "protecting me." There's only so much protection I can take before I need some fresh air instead...
Personally I thought it was hilarious that, for the past few months, www.starwars.co.uk was registered to someone random and just had the Apache "successfully installed" screen on it. But I suppose that counts less as piracy than as ripping the piss out of Beardy Lucas and his Legendary Bank Balance.
Anyway, though: isn't all of this already covered by e.g. trade descriptions acts, that, if you're passing yourself off as another business (and it can be shown to the satisfaction of a court that you are) then you're breaking the law? In which case that sort of cybersquatting was already illegal.
The original point was, I think, that someone was pretending to be Melbourne IT, or whatever, to get customers. Just because a website doesn't have exactly what it says in the name is no reason to be put in jail; you need to be further misleading customers to the detriment of other businesses and your profit.
(Disclaimer: IANAL, and I'm only speaking from an English perspective here.)
-- Maybe Linux would win this challenge, however most companies would probably go with the "reliable" Microsoft. --
What surprises me is that Microsoft software really *isn't* reliable. Like, at all. In our office, the workstations all have NT on them, and what do we do? We all ssh to a Linux box, and have five or six terminals open and work remotely.
Yet we have to have Microsoft compatibility in a BIG way, because that is demanded of us by everyone else, because so many people have no idea how you would live outside of Windoze...
This is where nice-looking front-ends come in: much as I really, really despise Gnome and KDE (I am a cut-down wm, usually fvwm, person myself) they look *reassuring* to exactly the kind of people that wouldn't think, oh, I should really be using Linux. If a window manager looks like Win95, then, much as hardcore people (like meself) scream and rant, it's not us it's aimed at.
Horses for courses. (TM)
"Hey! Cryptography doesn't kill people! People kill people!"
Likening this to gun control is a bit weird, especially given the nature of the original story. People in Canada tend to do just fine without a gun in the bedside drawer, although that may be because of Canada's comparatively better health, welfare and education systems that go some way to lessening crime and so you don't have to fear for your life as much in Canada: there's nothing for the mad NRA people to focus on in Johnny Canuck's mind.
To some extent, this story doesn't surprise me at all: Canada is a much more laid back and liberal place than the States. Maybe I should move there away from "The Long Arm Of The Straw" here in the UK(copyright NTK.now, I think) -- it would be interesting to see some sort of test case come out, if the Canadian government ever has any problems over encryption. If indeed the USA or UK governments ever have any serious problems over conviction too -- has anyone heard of any such things?
There's only so much money you could spend on Windows 2000, though, and after that you get no returns. Why? Because the number of people working on bug fixes and patches worldwide for Linux have far, far exceeded the number of people in Microsoft's software "engineering" department.
Linux has been tested to destruction by so many people, all of whom could have a good poke around in the code and say, hey! this bit doesn't work under this condition, so let's change it. Microsoft software has been tested in that way just by the people who wrote it. What do they expect?