Sure, it doesn't seem like a rat will be able to fly a plane anytime soon. But what if an airline company used one of these rat brains to augment a human pilot? Then the pilot is a navigator who can land and steer a plane, without worrying about keeping the plane absolutely level.
This only becomes an issue when you actually need to steer. Well, not necessarily--just angle the camera that's being used as input to the rodent brain. Then it corrects for the new angle and turns the plane.
You'd probably still want full manual control for landing, of course, and as an emergency backup.
'Loosing' is the present participle of the word 'to loose', as in 'to untie, unfetter, free': 'Cry "havoc", and let loose the dogs of war!' is a common misquote of Shakespeare.
'Loosening' is the present participle of the word 'to loosen', as in 'to make less tight'.
If you're going to correct someone, at least get it right.
Not exactly true. An AI's available attention is based on how much processor power and RAM it currently controls; if an AI spread virally, it would then have more attention with which to avoid detection and attack the next target.
That said, a LiveCD could probably cure most wounds, if you knew what to look for.
The client sends data when it has data to send, and it listens on a port for incoming data. If the remote connection zones out for a couple of seconds, no matter; it resends any lost packets (or the remote computer buffers them; not entirely certain).
So, technically, you were kicked off and then put back on quickly enough that nobody noticed.
If your *nix system needs occasional kernel upgrades without interrupting uptime long enough to reboot, use modules for everything. It uses slightly more memory, and when you do reboot it's slower, but most systems needing vast amounts of uptime will probably use a pared-down kernel anyway. So it'd be a minimal cost.
That said, why would you need to upgrade the kernel without interrupting the system? You'd at least need to test it, during which time you'd throw up a backup.
Why haven't we seen a computer virus take control of computers on a large scale? The attacker would need a whole lot of time and computational power in order to divine the functions and content of each computer controlled.
I believe it would be possible to achieve large-scale control of computers. It would take a few steps: 1. Infect as many computers as possible with a diverse set of viruses that access various IRC channels or FTP sites that you control. 2. Allow those viruses to escalate their privileges via code downloaded via IRC/FTP. Also have them acquire unique serial numbers. 3. Install rootkits to hide the viruses. 4. Have the computers to which you now have access record their IP address (internal and external) and a listing of programs that have been running plus frequency and duration periodically. They send that information to various servers that you control. 5. Create scripts to execute on particular machines, keyed by serial number. 6. ???
It's doable. It would be like crafting unique attacks against a large number of individual machines, though, and would require a large amount of computing power just to start.
If I could chroot into Windows, then I'd use it. From Linux, of course, but it'd be nice to be able to use one of the new Express Editions of MS Visual Studio in Enlightenment with XMMS playing. I guess that I essentially want a desktop version of Xenix.
If you want a minimal Windows install, use nLiteOS -- it creates an install CD for Windows from your existing copy, only including what you choose.
Also, remember to have a sane partitioning scheme, in case you need to reinstall. You might want to use FAT for your data partition; that way, you can read it via a Knoppix CD in a real emergency.
That particular drawing is just rather hideously stretched, and almost certainly posthumous. Tarsiers in the wild cling to branches huddled up, and look very cute. Sort of a cuddly cross between frogs and spider monkeys.
"I think the flood of microsoft biased studies in the last year go a long way toward bolstering linux's claims. If they weren't to some extent true, microsoft wouldn't be trying so hard to discredit them."
Not saying that Windows is secure or reliable, but this is patently absurd. What if you were wrongly accused of murder? Would you argue less firmly in your defense because you weren't guilty?
Rather, if there were no perception that these claims were true, Microsoft wouldn't try very hard to discredit them. Perception is more important than reality here.
I'd prefer it oriented the other way, and I'm right handed. If the buttons were on the right side, I could hold it along my left forearm with my fingers by the buttons. But that's just my preference.
Microsoft has sixty thousand employees worth of developer bandwidth. The question is, is each developer allowed the freedom necessary to see innovation?
With Google, which Slashdot hails as the chief innovator, when someone has an idea about a new feature or product, they have two options: pursue it on their own, given their ~20% personal project time, or make a proposal and get a small group (usually around five people, from what I've heard) to at least make a mockup.
With an operating system, inflexibility is an inherent feature of production, I think. Microsoft has taken steps, as previously reported here, to modularize OS design and production; that way, they can reduce a problem with large complexity into a number of moderately complex problems and give each programming team one of those problems. Similar methods have been or will soon be applied to other Microsoft projects.
Still, if Microsoft ever releases a version of its operating system that is quite stable and secure, then maintenance will require many fewer people, allowing the remainder to work entirely on new products and features.
So Microsoft does have the developer bandwidth; it's just mostly taken by MS Office and MS Windows.
As for software production becoming easy...you want a pretty advanced problem solving system. It's not going to happen any time soon. A more reasonable request is that the average teenager become reasonably well versed in a programming language.
While on the face of it that seems reasonable, remember that it's the decision of individual teachers whether to spend most of the time on evolution or Intelligent Design, and how to present each. If the teacher is a devout believer in ID, then they'll tend to spend most of their time praising the wonders of ID and extolling the flaws of evolutionary theory. And if the teacher is of the opinion that evolution is the correct explanation for the current state of biological affairs, then they'll tend to encourage their students to believe that.
It's almost not an issue of what's right. Given the freedom, teachers will subvert their students, knowingly or unknowingly, into believing one theory or another. More for solidarity than factuality, I think, we mandate that evolution rather than religion be taught. (It's factuality that causes us to prefer evolution and solidarity that causes us to choose only one.)
I think that it wouldn't be terribly difficult to move from a computational linguistics job to a software engineering job. As long as you get a fair amount of training in software design (what do you think you'll be doing with a PhD in computational linguistics? Creating databases by hand for a grad student?) and general theory of computation, you should be able to transfer most of your skills.
The only issue is language specialization--if you only know Prolog very well, you might have trouble switching to Java or C. The solution, of course, is to make a systems programming language do what you need for computational linguistics--it might be clunky sometimes, but it offers much better integration.
AI doesn't have much to do with NLP, actually. You'd employ some sort of semantic parser after the phonetic analysis, phonemic analysis, and morphosyntactic analysis, depending on your needs. That parser would likely employ some probabilistic AI techniques to deal with ambiguity via context--depending on the quality of the parser.
On the other hand, the biggest problems in NLP are building large machine-readable corpuses (lots of grunt work) and interpreting the parsed results. That could involve AI techniques, since it's less efficient to enumerate all possible formations with their meanings.
Databases and data structures would be quite important. So would syntax and semantics. Minimalism is, in my opinion, one of the most mechanical syntactic theories, so you should probably study it (also since it's one of the leading theories); but I might be biased by two semesters of minimalism at the graduate level (I'm an undergrad). You should also be comfortable with generic syntax, since full-blown minimalism is overkill for most utilities.
Morphology tends to be convenient--complex morphologies tend to be very regular, whereas irregular ones tend to be simple. Discounting systematic irregularity, that is. A few weeks of planning should produce a decent morphological parser.
Well, if I recall, in the 2000 election Bush and Gore both got about 53,000,000 votes. That's 106M voters. Figure another 10M for third parties, and we're looking at 115M voters out of a population of 300M.
Of course, with a 75-80 year life span, we can assume that ~25% of those can't vote, leaving 225M voters.
Slightly more than half.
One problem with the party system, though: people don't know about other parties. Even without media coverage, the Libertarian Party got on average 2% of the vote last election. Ralph Nader did much worse, though he actually got mentioned once in a while. The media only covers the unelectable because, hey, it's boring when you have respectable candidates--and if they're neither Republican nor Democrat, they don't stand a chance of reimbursing the media.
Unfortunately, this project seems to have died (coincidence?), but it provided deniable cryptography by filling an entire hard drive partition with encrypted data, arranged in ~50MB files. You could slice the drive in multiple ways, with multiple levels of encryption, and there was no way to prove that you had or had not provided all the keys used to encrypt the data.
It was so named because of the tactic it was supposed to protect data against.
And in the 200 hours of gerbil pron that you encrypted, every 19428th bit is actually part of that uber-secret diary of all the illegal stuff you've been up to.
"All I have to do is come up with a very large prime number...." --Bob Page
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, it doesn't seem like a rat will be able to fly a plane anytime soon. But what if an airline company used one of these rat brains to augment a human pilot? Then the pilot is a navigator who can land and steer a plane, without worrying about keeping the plane absolutely level.
This only becomes an issue when you actually need to steer. Well, not necessarily--just angle the camera that's being used as input to the rodent brain. Then it corrects for the new angle and turns the plane.
You'd probably still want full manual control for landing, of course, and as an emergency backup.
Why do you think I said that Shakespeare was *misquoted* as saying 'Let loose the dogs of war'?
And when it runs Linux, you get to play oggs and .au's and mp3s!
An order of magnitude, in situations like this, is best defined using scientific notation.
A number, let's say the cost of an iPod, is represented as a value and an order of magnitude:
149.99 = 1.4999 x 10^2
A number exactly one order of magnitude above that one would be represented much the same, but with an exponent one higher:
1499.90 = 1.4999 x 10^3
'Loosing' is the present participle of the word 'to loose', as in 'to untie, unfetter, free': 'Cry "havoc", and let loose the dogs of war!' is a common misquote of Shakespeare.
'Loosening' is the present participle of the word 'to loosen', as in 'to make less tight'.
If you're going to correct someone, at least get it right.
Not exactly true. An AI's available attention is based on how much processor power and RAM it currently controls; if an AI spread virally, it would then have more attention with which to avoid detection and attack the next target.
That said, a LiveCD could probably cure most wounds, if you knew what to look for.
The client sends data when it has data to send, and it listens on a port for incoming data. If the remote connection zones out for a couple of seconds, no matter; it resends any lost packets (or the remote computer buffers them; not entirely certain).
So, technically, you were kicked off and then put back on quickly enough that nobody noticed.
If your *nix system needs occasional kernel upgrades without interrupting uptime long enough to reboot, use modules for everything. It uses slightly more memory, and when you do reboot it's slower, but most systems needing vast amounts of uptime will probably use a pared-down kernel anyway. So it'd be a minimal cost.
That said, why would you need to upgrade the kernel without interrupting the system? You'd at least need to test it, during which time you'd throw up a backup.
Why haven't we seen a computer virus take control of computers on a large scale? The attacker would need a whole lot of time and computational power in order to divine the functions and content of each computer controlled.
I believe it would be possible to achieve large-scale control of computers. It would take a few steps:
1. Infect as many computers as possible with a diverse set of viruses that access various IRC channels or FTP sites that you control.
2. Allow those viruses to escalate their privileges via code downloaded via IRC/FTP. Also have them acquire unique serial numbers.
3. Install rootkits to hide the viruses.
4. Have the computers to which you now have access record their IP address (internal and external) and a listing of programs that have been running plus frequency and duration periodically. They send that information to various servers that you control.
5. Create scripts to execute on particular machines, keyed by serial number.
6. ???
It's doable. It would be like crafting unique attacks against a large number of individual machines, though, and would require a large amount of computing power just to start.
If I could chroot into Windows, then I'd use it. From Linux, of course, but it'd be nice to be able to use one of the new Express Editions of MS Visual Studio in Enlightenment with XMMS playing. I guess that I essentially want a desktop version of Xenix.
If you want a minimal Windows install, use nLiteOS -- it creates an install CD for Windows from your existing copy, only including what you choose.
Also, remember to have a sane partitioning scheme, in case you need to reinstall. You might want to use FAT for your data partition; that way, you can read it via a Knoppix CD in a real emergency.
They're editors for a tech news site. Of course they will, no matter their expressed attitudes toward the originating company.
Or do you think that Microsoft shouldn't give out its console to reviewers?
That particular drawing is just rather hideously stretched, and almost certainly posthumous. Tarsiers in the wild cling to branches huddled up, and look very cute. Sort of a cuddly cross between frogs and spider monkeys.
Regarding your sig:
VIRI NON SVMVSNE DEVO SVMVS
The -ne postfix _always_ appears on the first word in the question, though never on a preposition. Or at least rarely.
I'm not sure about the translation of "devo"; I haven't been able to find anything for the stem "dev-".
"I think the flood of microsoft biased studies in the last year go a long way toward bolstering linux's claims. If they weren't to some extent true, microsoft wouldn't be trying so hard to discredit them."
Not saying that Windows is secure or reliable, but this is patently absurd. What if you were wrongly accused of murder? Would you argue less firmly in your defense because you weren't guilty?
Rather, if there were no perception that these claims were true, Microsoft wouldn't try very hard to discredit them. Perception is more important than reality here.
I'd prefer it oriented the other way, and I'm right handed. If the buttons were on the right side, I could hold it along my left forearm with my fingers by the buttons. But that's just my preference.
Microsoft has sixty thousand employees worth of developer bandwidth. The question is, is each developer allowed the freedom necessary to see innovation?
With Google, which Slashdot hails as the chief innovator, when someone has an idea about a new feature or product, they have two options: pursue it on their own, given their ~20% personal project time, or make a proposal and get a small group (usually around five people, from what I've heard) to at least make a mockup.
With an operating system, inflexibility is an inherent feature of production, I think. Microsoft has taken steps, as previously reported here, to modularize OS design and production; that way, they can reduce a problem with large complexity into a number of moderately complex problems and give each programming team one of those problems. Similar methods have been or will soon be applied to other Microsoft projects.
Still, if Microsoft ever releases a version of its operating system that is quite stable and secure, then maintenance will require many fewer people, allowing the remainder to work entirely on new products and features.
So Microsoft does have the developer bandwidth; it's just mostly taken by MS Office and MS Windows.
As for software production becoming easy...you want a pretty advanced problem solving system. It's not going to happen any time soon. A more reasonable request is that the average teenager become reasonably well versed in a programming language.
While on the face of it that seems reasonable, remember that it's the decision of individual teachers whether to spend most of the time on evolution or Intelligent Design, and how to present each. If the teacher is a devout believer in ID, then they'll tend to spend most of their time praising the wonders of ID and extolling the flaws of evolutionary theory. And if the teacher is of the opinion that evolution is the correct explanation for the current state of biological affairs, then they'll tend to encourage their students to believe that.
It's almost not an issue of what's right. Given the freedom, teachers will subvert their students, knowingly or unknowingly, into believing one theory or another. More for solidarity than factuality, I think, we mandate that evolution rather than religion be taught. (It's factuality that causes us to prefer evolution and solidarity that causes us to choose only one.)
But what criticisms does ID offer?
And rewritten years ago; it's (at least presumably) 100% MS code.
I think that it wouldn't be terribly difficult to move from a computational linguistics job to a software engineering job. As long as you get a fair amount of training in software design (what do you think you'll be doing with a PhD in computational linguistics? Creating databases by hand for a grad student?) and general theory of computation, you should be able to transfer most of your skills.
The only issue is language specialization--if you only know Prolog very well, you might have trouble switching to Java or C. The solution, of course, is to make a systems programming language do what you need for computational linguistics--it might be clunky sometimes, but it offers much better integration.
AI doesn't have much to do with NLP, actually. You'd employ some sort of semantic parser after the phonetic analysis, phonemic analysis, and morphosyntactic analysis, depending on your needs. That parser would likely employ some probabilistic AI techniques to deal with ambiguity via context--depending on the quality of the parser.
On the other hand, the biggest problems in NLP are building large machine-readable corpuses (lots of grunt work) and interpreting the parsed results. That could involve AI techniques, since it's less efficient to enumerate all possible formations with their meanings.
Databases and data structures would be quite important. So would syntax and semantics. Minimalism is, in my opinion, one of the most mechanical syntactic theories, so you should probably study it (also since it's one of the leading theories); but I might be biased by two semesters of minimalism at the graduate level (I'm an undergrad). You should also be comfortable with generic syntax, since full-blown minimalism is overkill for most utilities.
Morphology tends to be convenient--complex morphologies tend to be very regular, whereas irregular ones tend to be simple. Discounting systematic irregularity, that is. A few weeks of planning should produce a decent morphological parser.
How can you suggest murdering all those innocent zombies that never harmed anyone outside their normal feeding habits? You insensitive clod!
Zombie Rights!
Well, if I recall, in the 2000 election Bush and Gore both got about 53,000,000 votes. That's 106M voters. Figure another 10M for third parties, and we're looking at 115M voters out of a population of 300M.
Of course, with a 75-80 year life span, we can assume that ~25% of those can't vote, leaving 225M voters.
Slightly more than half.
One problem with the party system, though: people don't know about other parties. Even without media coverage, the Libertarian Party got on average 2% of the vote last election. Ralph Nader did much worse, though he actually got mentioned once in a while. The media only covers the unelectable because, hey, it's boring when you have respectable candidates--and if they're neither Republican nor Democrat, they don't stand a chance of reimbursing the media.
Ah well. I'll just move to...damn, Soviet Russia's gone. Maybe Cuba?
Unfortunately, this project seems to have died (coincidence?), but it provided deniable cryptography by filling an entire hard drive partition with encrypted data, arranged in ~50MB files. You could slice the drive in multiple ways, with multiple levels of encryption, and there was no way to prove that you had or had not provided all the keys used to encrypt the data.
It was so named because of the tactic it was supposed to protect data against.
And in the 200 hours of gerbil pron that you encrypted, every 19428th bit is actually part of that uber-secret diary of all the illegal stuff you've been up to.
"All I have to do is come up with a very large prime number...."
--Bob Page