phlinn said that the node would provide the interface for legitimate matters. Not me. You attributed it to me a couple of posts back and I naively accepted that, but since then I went back and looked, and it wasn't me.
Aside from that, I don't disagree at all with what phlinn said, I certainly don't think that hacker interfaces would be provided by the node being attacked, nor have I ever implied that, and furthermore I have specifically gone into detail as to why the interface is going to be provided by the tool you use to do the hacking.
You have failed to demonstrate why (a) attacking tools would provide an interface and (b) why abstraction into (for instance) an environment that can be manipulated with VR gloves is inherently unlikely, dysfunctional, or otherwise an invalid SF element. We've already established that it is a perfectly good element in scientific terms, and Gibson asserts that this has become the hacking interface (or if you like, movies in that universe asserted it, such as Johnny Mnemonic); While you say that such an interface does not appear to be convenient to you, I would simply observe that in such an environment, the things being manipulated are not the things we manipulate today. The environment postulated is one of AI's, both very smart ones and very dumb ones, as well as dangerous self-defense mechanisms. Neither you nor I are in any position to say "oh, that can't happen, and that's the basis for my objection to your attempt to do so.
You also need to learn the difference between an ad homonym attack, and an accurate attribution of failure or incompetence. The one is a debating tactic; the other is simply an observation, one you should probably learn to take a hint from.
As a story, however, Dune depended upon FTL travel; the society was an interconnected web of planets and planetary sub-societies. Ixians, Bene Gesserit, Harkonnen, Atreides, etc. In addition, Dune depends upon the ability to see the future. These are, so far at least, elements of fantasy. That makes Dune soft SF if you lean that way, or simple fantasy if you consider SF that isn't hard to simply be fantasy.
Either way, the Dune stories would be something else entirely, or non-existent, without FTL travel and precognition. You might be able to fold the story into a single planet by putting those societies into different nations and/or regions and thus eliminate the FTL element without a huge change in the overall storylines, but the precognition is kind of a show-stopper.
Could it have something to do with the fact that MP3 is patent-encumbered?
Well, it could be if you accept the premise that the committee is made up of 14-year old fanbois who can't think their way out of a paper bag.
Look: JPEG is patent encumbered; nonetheless, it is the standard. GIF was encumbered; nonetheless, it was the standard. Likewise MP3. It flat out isn't the place of a committee to define things out of public use because there is a commercial tie; the fact is, MP3 is the standard, and if audio is to be a browser feature, then a browser that can't play MP3 is utter crap. A standards body isn't there to be your your mother; it is there to promote interoperability, usability, commonality, is it not? So WTF are these people doing ignoring MP3 in favor of WAV?
Look at it this way: The first question a person is going to ask when they pick up an audio package or hardware audio player (you'll note the usual term is "MP3 player") — editor, player, recorder — is not going to be: "Does it support WAV?" No, it's almost certain, statistically speaking, to be "Does it support MP3?" And that is why WAV is a stupid choice.
I am no fonder of patents than any of the rest of you. But if you're going to rule out every technology that is patent encumbered, your sorry, optimistic, blindered butt will be in a cave before you even know what hit you.
designed to perform a set function across different devices
Not very well, though. For instance, with regard to the audio tag, "Browsers must support the WAV format. Browsers can also support other formats such as MP3 if they like."
Talk about getting something backwards. MP3 is the defacto standard. WAV? OMG WTF. Way to waste bandwidth.
i don't agree with this at all. the point of insurance is to *distribute risk* across a large pool of people.
Well, that's the insurance company's goal. The consumer's goal is to distribute cost across a large number of people, not risk.
The insurance company benefits when risk is minimized; the consumer benefits when cost is minimized. What the insurance companies are doing here is trying to further minimize risk at the expense of some of the consumers, which is not compatible with the goal of the insurance consumers because it will increase costs for them.
There are several issues here. One is when a consumer increases risk themselves; for instance, if they choose not to wear a seatbelt, or if their diet consists of fatburgers and coke and nothing else. In this case, the consumer is increasing risk, and one could understand the reluctance of the insurance company towards treating this person the same as one who has a less pathological diet.
But a second, quite different issue is that a person with diabetes or leukemia or breast cancer probably isn't responsible for these things in the sense that their behavior is a key element. So in this case, the tendency of the insurance company to lock them into higher costs (or out of the pool entirely) is less easily excused.
Third, the insurance company wants to make money; as a public company, it actually has an obligation to make money. This can so easily come into conflict with the need of the consumer for the best possible coverage that it may be a defining line where we can use ethics to say that pooling health care costs with an idea of profiting may be inherently unethical.
Fourth, there are people who abuse free-ish health care; I know of some of these myself. I suspect that this is one of the extremes - like people who are quite sick in multiple ways - that a pool just has to accept, just as it accepts people who are inordinately healthy and rarely, if ever, call upon the pool to pay for medical care.
The bottom line, it seems to me, is that we do know that medical care is expensive, we can reduce the citizen's overall need for care into statistical likelihoods that are really pretty well nailed down, and we should probably do exactly that because if we do, everyone will have the care they need and that is a very noble and reasonable goal.
Insurance companies would lose out, but there is no guarantee of any particular job or service niche existing; progress and change are constantly creating and eliminating opportunities. Nothing says that because today, you have a successful corporation selling beanie babies, that everyone is forced from now until the end of time to buy beanie babies. Likewise, the insurance companies have built a great gig for themselves, but if tomorrow, we as a society decide that a not-for-profit national pool that includes everyone who can pay whatever it costs is appropriate, then it is time for them to go find a new business to pursue.
There will always be a group of unemployed / insufficient income people who cannot access such a pool in its most basic form, but then again, our society has a strong tradition of caring for those people. Given that they're a rather small percentage of the overall population, probably the best solution is simply to bite the bullet and fold them in. After all, you never know when you might lose your job, eh?
Reading skills not so hot? You quoted me correctly: "Assuming it's meant to be used in a legitimate matter"
Now, in what software producer's or corporate data universe is third-party hacking a "legitimate matter"?
I take it that you've never debugged code before
Oh, please, give it a rest. I have been programming since the 1970's, and I've written and debugged more code in more languages than your average bear, including one heck of a lot of assembly languages. Executables with debugging symbols are not likely to be release products. If someone ships code with debugging symbols in it, they're clueless or have no security issues. Probably just clueless. When disassembling for the purpose of hacking, the odds of having debugging symbols available are just about zero. Debugging is not hacking, and hacking is not debugging. Disassembly is the process of creating code from raw executable without benefit of having code or even necessarily a knowledge of what language was used to create the executable. Typically, assembly code is what is created, no matter what language was used to create the executable, though there are exceptions to that.
As for the rest, I think you should be forced to work with a computer in binary. After all, that's the most direct way. No abstraction to mess up your pristine, operator controls every step ideal. Let me know how that works out for you. In the meantime, I'll go with higher level approaches, thanks.
How do we know we have discovered ALL the laws of physics?
We don't. And I never said, or implied, that we had. However, in order to propose a new law of physics, or modify one that already exists, you'll have to find a behavior or system that such a law explains. No such thing has been found in the brain, and so speculating that "unknown laws of physics" apply is an intellectually bankrupt exercise. As long as examination of the brain continues to reveal nothing but mundane systems and materials, there is no call for such a thing, any more than there is to assume that ghosts of your ancestors are really running things for you.
Thoughts and ideas and such find physical expression. Love may express itself as a gentle hug and a warm smile, but these physical manifestations are not love itself.
What you're doing here is holding up an abstraction and trying to say that because you have trouble with the abstraction, the mind must be made of green cheese. All it really means is you've been unable to deconstruct the abstraction. If I say, "here is this number, 2346, it is the sum of two signed whole numbers, what were they?" I have presented you with an unanswerable question, because you do not have enough of the information on the operation that created the number. The number you have is an abstraction of the actual operation that created it, and it is also an equally valid abstraction of all the infinite other operations that could have created it. The question is unsolvable; but the means are entirely mundane. This demonstrates that the existence of an unsolvable abstraction is by no means evidence of non-mundane behavior.
Let's talk about the liver for a moment. We don't understand a lot of what the liver does as yet. It is a very complex organ. Does this mean that we should postulate that there are new laws of physics that apply? If so, why? Should we not wait until, or unless, we encounter something going on in the liver that cannot be explained using the current laws before we go inventing a theory that describes the effects of the radiation of "unobtanium" through the 97th dimension upon urea, or worse, just waving our hands and saying "well, there could be some unexplainable by current phsyics process going on here"? If this is so, why does this approach not also apply to the brain? Aren't you trying to make the brain out as magical?
Just as in a computer there is a distinction between hardware and software, so also is there a distinction between the brain and the mind.
That may be a perfectly apt metaphor. However, while software and hardware are distinct, the existence of software in no way requires new laws of physics, and making this metaphor does not imbue the mind with any such need.
If you can show any example, where software arises purely from the hardware ie. a self programming computer
Actually, that's fairly trivial. Evolutionary software development can easily accommodate such a scenario. You take a problem, randomly throw some functions at it in some order, run the results against the problem, and breed the most successful results. You'll probably start out with terrible results, but after some number of generations, you'll have very good code that arose only as a consequence of solving the problem and the failure of other approaches which led to them being discarded (they don't get to breed.) I wrote one of these in the 1980's, a program called "crits" which had to solve the problem of getting enough food in a hostile environment. Early generations were just decimated by the environment; later generations avoided obstacles, bumping heads with each other, fighting over resources and more, resulting in very good viability and very effective programming. I didn't write a single word of code for them to enhance or seed the process; it was strictly emergent as a consequence
Your laws of physics still don't explain an awful lot. Wouldn't it be a tad presumptuous to claim that intelligence must conform to what we aren't even sure we know yet?
There is no indication of this. We know of no thing or process that does not comply with the laws of physics as we understand them today.
When we really understand, say, gravity
...then what? You expect it won't conform to the laws of physics? What other system has led you to expect such a result? Go on, name one thing that we *do* understand that hasn't precisely followed the rules that apply to the scale of the event (IOW, quantum rules for quantum events, Einsteinian rules for more "macro" events.)
So far, observable system behaviors all across nature have been 100% mundane in the sense that there's been no magical, unknown force or component to them. It is this consistency across the huge spectrum of knowledge that we already have that leads me to have very low confidence in the idea that something else is involved in brain function at the level of system components.
Could there be something else going on? Yes, could be. But is there any reason to make such an assumption today? No; not until or unless we find something in the brain that acts in a manner that we cannot explain using already known processes.
The premise behind "the brain is magic" crowd is that because of this magical character they assign to it, it cannot be replicated; it is hand waving designed to justify the idea that humans are magically delicious members of the animal kingdom, or maybe not members at all. It smacks of religious mumbo jumbo and without some detected anomaly as to function, it is a claim that has no basis underneath it at all.
These ideas are in the same boat as ideas about telepathy; there is no evidence that telepathy exists; postulating an unknown mechanism for telepathy is postulating an unknown mechanism for a function that is not known to exist in the first place. Likewise, postulating unknown laws of physics for functions that have not been discovered and for which we have no reason to assume exist in the first place is an empty exercise in metaphysics. First, find or demonstrate a function we can't explain; then postulate the mechanism for it. That's science. So far, nothing has been found in a brain that isn't made of the same stuff everything else is, doesn't obey the same rules everything else does, or acts in any way unusually. So you should be asking yourself, "Why is it that I want the brain to have something special going on?" Tip: I don't think you're going to find the answer to that question in science.
Except that it's utterly bat**** insane to provide a handy GUI for disabling your own security device to outside users -- especially a handy GUI for authentication or debugging.
What? You think targets provide the interface to hack them? That's not how it works, not even today. Programs are compact bundles of executable code and data. Sometimes encrypted, usually not. Programs are the ultimate models of terseness, because each machine instruction represents an action by the processor. There is no "interface" to the code provided in the program or data itself. Interfaces for hacking, for instance a debugger / disassembler, are separate things, created by people who understand completely that the goal is to get into the code, and therefore they provide the graphic and other UI elements you need to do that in the most efficacious manner the authors of the debugger / disassembler can come up with - it has nothing to do with what the authors of the program being attacked had in mind, planned for, or provided except in that whatever anti-hacking they might have put in, the hacking software needs to have a counter for. If that interface took on a 3D metaphor, that's just a detail, though an interesting one and an efficiency issue for the hacker. You're completely confused about the demarcations between the roles of who is providing what interface, what code, what data, what functionality - that's why you can't understand what is being described. If the target was a corporation's site, the hacking interface wouldn't be provided by them, it'd be provided by your deck, even if the corporation defined the "normal" interface for end users. So a hacking deck, or a deck running hacking software could easily have any interface imaginable, whatever seemed to work. This is why your objections are pointless.
Hacking doesn't work that way.
Wrong. Hacking works any way that it works, from the utmost simplistic approach (futzing with a URL or entering data and/or command strings not specified as valid) to actually hacking the binary of the software with complete control over what machine instructions are changing, and how, and taking into account any self-validation / checksum type protection as you work. UI, again, is a matter of approach, not a matter of results. Any tool that increases the speed of visualization of the task at hand and your ability to get in there and make changes is feasible, presuming you have the computer power to pull it off. What do you think a progress bar is? It's an abstraction of a lot of things going on, letting you know things are running, how much has been done, and giving you a quick visual estimate of how much there is yet to go. This is an extreme abstraction of, for instance, how far through a dictionary attack one may have progressed. Other abstractions that could work rather than a bar might be size, shape, color, words, animations of other processes that go from start to finish (eating a sandwich, filling a bucket, hammering a nail) and so on. A 16-sided ball could be a tool for hex digit input. A 20 sided ball might be useful in due-decimal work. Etc.
Well, yes, but that's not how hacking in cyberspace works in the cyberpunk genre. It's always presented as being more like lock-picking than being a script kiddie.
If the full solution to a problem is known to be available in canned form, the smart thing is to use it. You may have been the "canner", or you may not. That doesn't make you a script kiddie; that makes you competent. If the lock needs picking, then you pick. If picking doesn't work, you may want to get out the C4 or simply abscond with the entire dataset in unbroken form so as to approach it at your leisure. Every time you presume that things work "just this way" you miss the entire point of hacking. I write a program, I create X to attempt to make it secure; the hacker approaches, and comes up with Y to defeat my X. Hac
You don't seem to get the point:
Deadly force is for protecting people, not property.
You don't seem to understand that property can be anything from the line between people and threats to the mechanism that saves them in an emergency. For instance, I live with a diabetic. I can't afford to have my means of transport stolen. Diabetes aside, any accident may require transport at any time. Next, I have a family. I am not inclined to let people enter my home via forced entry, because the next thing they do may very likely be harmful to my family. And you know what? Your life as a home invader isn't worth a plugged nickel next to the security of my family.
You don't want to experience deadly force? Then knock on the door like a civilized human being. There is no other way to get in my home that won't require you to defeat iron bars and alarm systems anyway; What's your problem with that? Do you make a habit of forced entry?
Yes, you did. There was plenty of technology in there, from nuclear power plants to space stations to tools used to what technologies should be saved and how they might re-appear. It was very nicely done. No fantastic elements, hence hard SF - the science was good.
Well, the downside is that applications like midnight commander become extremely difficult to use; you go to open the menus or fire off a command, and some OS function happens instead.
Switch on right-click support in the System Preferences or use the Ctrl key.
I'm familiar with the double tap and various prefs options for the trackpad, as well as the ctrl key. You still can't get the same functionality you can out of a proper two-button system. For instance, you can't click left... left+right... left while dragging; that's an often-used operation for repositioning area selections in my work, so there's no option but to hook up a two-button mouse when I'm doing graphics.
Yeah. I have a Macbook pro, almost a $3000 computer; and the keyboard is terrible. As is the one-button trackpad. I love OSX, but I'm afraid the physical design of the Mac keyboards is just pitiful, totally focused on looks and not usability. I've got a full-size Mac keyboard at my desktop on my Mac Mini, that's a much better keyboard — full numeric keypad, better key travel — but it still isn't even close to the best keyboards out there which have positive tactile feedback, illumination (though my MBP has KB illumination, which I appreciate), and ergonomic curves. Hey, but my Mac keyboard is white. [cough].
This is compounded by the OS's taking over all the function keys. For a *nix-based OS, this is a pretty inconvenient and poorly thought-out choice. And it isn't all that easy to get the FKeys to behave properly in a terminal; I'm not sure why, but some keys just don't want to come "unstuck" from the OS.
Oh well. There are some third-party Mac keyboards out there already; hopefully this latest back-to-the-chiclet-past effort from Apple will encourage others to make some really good Mac keyboards.
I say that it does. The social sciences are important too.
Not to hackers; not to technologists; not to users. It's an abstract, and an expensive one (look how crappy the Windows UI is trying to be everything to everyone; look how crippled linux is by being unwilling to create a standard GUI; look how crippled OSX was by pretending mice only needed one button. Complexity and abstraction aren't bad things and can be done very well.
If you have magical hacking tools that let you visualize hacking as manipulating a physical object, then you're wasting time with an interface that spends time interpreting data in a human-recognizable way that could've been spent just handling the intrusion. It's a waste of cycles that could be used to do something useful.
Nonsense. The more dimensions you can manipulate at once, the more complex a user input you can provide. Up to the limits of your ability to handle complex motions. As a musician and a programmer for over four decades, I didn't perceive Gibson's ideas as unlikely or overwhelming or impossible at all. Raising the level of art required? Plausible. The next generation would simply rise to meet the challenge. Watch them learn video games if you don't know what I mean.
For instance, the Mac gives you one mouse button. You can, while doing graphics, move the mouse XY and press the button, -a, +a. A better mouse gives you two buttons. Now you can move the mouse and provide four different modifiers: -a-b, -a+b, +a-b, +a+b. Take a tablet with a couple buttons. now we have motion, -a-b, -a+b, +a-b, +a+b, and pressure. Now take an interface that gives you visual objects to manipulate in the air a'la Gibson's speculation: You can move your left hand XYZ, going from a square space to a cubic one, you can move your right hand XYZ, doubling your cubed space, and because you now have Z, the number of "buttons" you can create with stabbing motions, not to mention the sweeps and other motions you can make, have multiplied hugely. Create graphics metaphors for things to manipulate that use models of geometrics or anything else you like, and you are way into interface excellence. You can't seem to see this; but that doesn't degrade the idea at all.
And who in their right minds wouldn't put safety locks on mind-machine interfaces to prevent any sort of direct damage? Doesn't the military specialize in built-in deadly force from claymores to infrared sighting technologies and stand off weapons? Aren't they using radar to backtrack incoming mortar rounds? Why would you NOT want these things if you have something to protect? And if the world is on the net, from the military to the governments to the corporations, then you DO have something to protect. Sure, there will be the same mommy-madness to protect you from yourself, force you to wear seat belts, take away your right to use a full power deck, but that doesn't mean there wouldn't or couldn't be such things. It is science fiction, not social fiction.
And what military or government or corporation would not want serious deterrents to entry when the world is virtual? The only reason my own home's entries are not actual man-traps is the law that says I can't protect my own property with deadly force. Otherwise, as a programmer and an engineer, I'd have something quite clever — and quite deadly. After having had a couple of vehicles stolen, I'm all for deadly force there, too. Scientifically, it's all good. Socially - yes, mommies rule. For now.
If an invention requires a complete suspension of disbelief about human nature to be plausible, then it's fundamentally illogical and thus bad science.
Yeah, but if something requires YOU to suspend, but not ME to suspend, then it's just you with the problem.:-)
Methinks you would read better literature if you didn't discount the human element entirely in your favored stories.
Could it be that intelligence is more or even something entirely different than any arrangement of matter and energy, could ever produce, no matter how many components are used and how complex their arrangement?
There is no science that indicates that this is even slightly likely. We have every reason to think that the brain obeys the physics that everything else has turned out to obey, and no reason to think otherwise at this point in time.
I'll consider your brain-as-uber-thang ideas when you get some evidence to support them. So far, everything points to electrical, chemical, physical architecture, and possibly quantum structures and activities as the brain's underlying base "technologies", as it were. So until or unless you can produce said evidence, you get to enjoy the status of "crackpot", pretty much right along the lines of astrologers, religionists, and crystal gazers.:-)
I would like to point out that cyberpunk's vision of cyberspace with its entirely abstract-GUI hacking and its death by security program is just as magically unscientific as warp drives and funny-foreheaded aliens.
And in turn, I would point out that you appear to know very little science, as your entire assertion here is wrong. GUI abstraction is the basis for GUI's in general. Further abstraction is not unreasonable; I have had demos on my desktop that did quite a few things, including 3D abstractions of various types. Impractical? Possibly. Unscientific? Not even a little bit.
Death by security program? Today on slashdot there's a story about a LED device that makes you puke. We know that electricity can kill you. Stuttering flashes can put humans into an epileptic seizure. Disjoint feeds to your eyes can disturb your orientation. Would you *really* care to say there's no way to shut you down via an interface that is connected to not just your eyes, but your ears, senses of touch, heat, and so forth, electrically, pressure-wise, heat-wise, visually, aurally? What if it can induce visions right into your nervous system, bypassing your eyes? What if it can dispense drugs? Unscientific? Hardly. Socially unlikely? Perhaps, but that doesn't make it bad scientific speculation. That just means there is an onus upon the author to create a story where we can believe such things would have come about so the work will be readable and engaging.
These ideas are far more plausible in hard SF terms than (for instance) Trek's warp drive at this moment in science. That makes Trek lean a lot harder towards fantasy than Gibson's Neuromancer, which is what I presume you're kvetching about here. Even the AIs that Gibson postulates are still viable hard SF elements. At this point in time, we have no reason to believe, scientifically speaking, that computer AI will prove intractable in any of the forms he postulated. And it has been some years since he wrote the novel.
Methinks you would enjoy SF more (hard or not) if your imagination was a little more informed around the edges.
The premise here is wrong. Hard SF is not limited to technology that *will* come, it is about technology that *could* come because the science, at the time is is written (and that is a very important issue) is plausible as far as is known. It has nothing to do with the ideas "coming true", though that's not to say they could not.
Suspension of disbelief is easier in stories written this way; and contrary to the above assertion, in good hard SF, the technology doesn't serve the role of the main story, carrying the characters as an incidental; the technology can almost fade away, leaving the story to be the main theme because the technology isn't so crazy.
Can there be good, accurate ideas in hard SF? Sure. We have seen them over and over. Frederick Pohl predicted today's convergence of cell phone, PDA, browser and so on with a great deal of accuracy in "The Age of the Pussyfoot." Niven and Pournelle did a great "asteroid hits earth" novel; Gibson himself did some very intriguing speculation along the lines of interfaces, scientifically plausible but requiring considerably more horsepower than was available at the time of his writing (but not now.) Gregory Benford, James P Hogan, Asimov, Blish, Clarke, and a host of others have all dipped their hand into the "hard" SF bowl and pulled out shining fruits no one had ever thought of before, all while writing great, engaging stories about a huge variety of things.
I read both types with equal, but different, pleasure. I enjoy the flight of fancy that comes with the idea of FTL drive; I also enjoy the tweak I get from a lesser technology that I actually might live to see if things go that way. But if the story doesn't bring interesting plot lines, significant character development, thought-provoking social comment, reasons for the major technological developments being posited... odds are I'll put it down and never pick it up again.
The idea that an SF story would be devalued if the predicted technology didn't materialize or if later science narrows the hard SF window such that it could not materialize is ludicrous; on the contrary, an honest window into what people really thought was possible at any point in time has its own magnificent charm.
Don't worry, that's a cyclic effect that primarily appears when posting AC. In your case, it's probably just your sinuses. No need to go off on a tangent. Have a slice of pie and call me in the morning. I'm sure you're feel radiant by then.
What about the signals we sent to communicate with the Apollo crew (since the apollo 8 orbit of the moon and the other landings) we had to comunicate with the astronauts and that did make us send radio signals into space right?
Right. But they aren't likely to get very far; they were fairly low power and very directional. To reach others, a much better strategy is to broadcast in a wide beam unless you can locate a specific target (like a spacecraft or a planet) and then use a tighter, more directional beam so that the energy you send is focused like a flashlight and therefore easier to pick up at the target.
What about the signals we're sending to the rovers on Mars? They're powerfull. Are they directed at Mars only or are they traveling until the depths of space?
They're pretty tightly focused on Mars. As tightly as is practical.
Are these signals encrypted in such a way that would look just like noise if anyone else picked them up by accident?
No. They wouldn't anyway; a digital signal doesn't look like noise in the sense that it appears natural; the modulation is consistent in character and very precise, and that identifies as the product of a mechanism, even if completely undecipherable.
Though they also would be intelligent enough to assume other lifeforms who could take them over had developed a reasonably good understanding of intelligent lifeforms.
While I will agree that this is a possibility, we need to stay aware that the only highly intelligent race we have an example of (that'd be humans) has used that "understanding", such as it is, to develop a fairly consistent treatment protocol for less intelligent races; we breed them for food. Sure, in the US, we love our dogs and cats, but in China, they eat them. Sure, in India they love cows, but here in the USA, we eat them. Here in the USA, we protect whales and various other cetaceans, but in Japan, they eat them. And so it goes for insects, tigers, bears, pigs and so forth.
In other words, where humans have the upper hand, they are often exploitive in the most aggressive and unfriendly manner possible. That's 100% of our example set. So while again, I can see what you're saying, I don't find that I naturally come to the same conclusion as you have.
I think to get to this sort of stage a lot of the social breakthroughs we have made would be just as important as the scientific ones.
Personally, I don't think we're very far along socially. We repress each other's rights and liberties even after we've taken the time to lay them out in no uncertain terms, while eliminating the individual's ability to control how far they wish to enter into participation in the rights others would impose upon them; we proactively murder and consume our co-resident beings, not to mention each other; we (speaking of the USA) manage our country based upon corporate and moneyed interests' needs and drives; the population fears the depiction of sexuality while simultaneously holding the depiction of violence up as socially acceptable; a huge proportion of the population is superstitious and couldn't describe the scientific method to you if their life depended on being able to do so... I'm not at all certain we'd qualify as folks who have made significant social breakthroughs. But hey, that's just me.
Could you imagine a race being a 1000 years more advanced than us an still having no understanding of it's psychology or democracy or just general lifeform interactions.
Yes, I certainly can. We've been facing the problem for 50,000 years and we're not all that far along. We're a little behind where the Greeks and Romans were 2,000 years ago on some subjects, in fact.
...arrogant groups destroy themselves.
Well, or they destroy their enemies. Depends on who has the more effective military, actually. More accurately, groups tend to destroy each other, arrogant or not. The more different they are, the more likely they are to come into destructive conflict.
The ones who had the ability to destroy us would be as interested that life existed elsewhere as we are.
Yes. We certainly are interested in other life. Mmmmmm. Steak! Crab legs! Draft animals! Hosts and subjects for medical experiments! Food and drug safety testing! Slaves! Increase the taxable headcount! Extract rare hormones! Spread religion! You can't deny our deep, committed interest in other lifeforms, no sir, I completely agree.
Look at the value humans place on Apes. The higher up the social chain the more it feels like us and the more it feels wrong to attack it in cold blood.
Well, people are kind of the top of your list, right? So, what about the Balkans? Iraq? Afghanistan? Somalia? Germany? Japan? The KKK? And of course, as to apes, we cage them and use them for medical experiments. Some people — notably, the apes closest neighbors — eat them. I know it is cynical, but it seems to me that the "wrongness" you allude to is a matter of convenience; not social advancement. Had
They probably have other concepts of communication
This is one of the most likely reasons we've not "seen" anything as yet. As far as we know, interstellar travel is annoyingly slow and energy intensive; that alone could account for no visitors, no matter how well populated the universe is with intelligent beings. That leaves communications; but our experience here indicates that catching the communications of others is very unlikely. Why? Well, we've been hanging about for 50,000 years or so in the form we like to consider actually "us." Of that 50,000 years, we've been using radio and television for about 100 years now. But in the last 25 years, more and more of our radio and television signals have been finding their way into satellite to ground signals, which do not radiate away from the planet and are very, very low power; other signals are now traveling inside cables instead of the through the air; and finally, newer communications are moving to optical methods, and we're talking optical in cables for the most part, meaning again, less and less high powered "accidental" signal radiation (effectively zero in terms of interstellar distances.) The reasons are higher bandwidth, vastly more communications channels, more energy efficient, better control over where the signal goes - and doesn't go. These are reasons that transcend our civilization; there is every reason to think that other beings would find the same benefits.
Next, look at our development: We're paranoid. We have been prey for a lot of living things ranging from other people to lions to snakes to spiders to bacteria, consequently we're not of the mind that the universe is likely to be a friendly playground. You can find reactions to that notion everywhere from science fiction to the unwillingness of today's moms to let their kids play outdoors unsupervised. Looking at our SETI program, the first thing you probably notice is that we're listening (poorly), which seems prudent; but we are not intentionally transmitting a signal to the stars, which has been a political decision. That leaves the accidental radiation, the strongest of which has been radar transmissions, which are mostly information free... but even if they're enough to get us noticed, we've only been at this for a 100 years, so our signals are only 100 light-years out so far. That severely reduces the number of potential listeners, and of course it presumes they, like us, are listening for anything, not just signals modulated with complex information.
Also, as an earlier poster observed with a quote from Douglas Adams, the universe is gi-flipping-normous.
All of this contributes to why Fermi's Paradox should be considered Fermi's Blunder by anyone who really thinks this through.
I see no reason to doubt there are plenty of other life-bearing planets out there, and that a fairly significant number of those in turn have intelligent life of one form or another. The fact that we've not "heard" any of them doesn't surprise me one little bit, Fermi's naive reasoning aside. In another 100 years, the odds of us radiating anything at all from our little corner of the universe are probably very low indeed. If that's typical (and it may be longer than typical), then in order to "catch" someone else transmitting by accident, we'll have to be listening at the same time + distance in light years that they go through the RF development process, and we'll have to have sensitive enough equipment to hear them. That last point is interesting, because although technically speaking, we are listening for "them", we're presuming they're sending at the low-noise point of the spectrum with the intent of us hearing them. If it was accidental radiation like radio and TV we were looking for, we couldn't hear that with our current gear at all. In order to get to that level of sensitivity, we'll need outer space "ears", and pretty big ones. Nothing like that is even on the drawing boards. So again, the odds of us hearing anyo
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For crying out loud; focus, will you?
phlinn said that the node would provide the interface for legitimate matters. Not me. You attributed it to me a couple of posts back and I naively accepted that, but since then I went back and looked, and it wasn't me.
Aside from that, I don't disagree at all with what phlinn said, I certainly don't think that hacker interfaces would be provided by the node being attacked, nor have I ever implied that, and furthermore I have specifically gone into detail as to why the interface is going to be provided by the tool you use to do the hacking.
You have failed to demonstrate why (a) attacking tools would provide an interface and (b) why abstraction into (for instance) an environment that can be manipulated with VR gloves is inherently unlikely, dysfunctional, or otherwise an invalid SF element. We've already established that it is a perfectly good element in scientific terms, and Gibson asserts that this has become the hacking interface (or if you like, movies in that universe asserted it, such as Johnny Mnemonic); While you say that such an interface does not appear to be convenient to you, I would simply observe that in such an environment, the things being manipulated are not the things we manipulate today. The environment postulated is one of AI's, both very smart ones and very dumb ones, as well as dangerous self-defense mechanisms. Neither you nor I are in any position to say "oh, that can't happen, and that's the basis for my objection to your attempt to do so.
You also need to learn the difference between an ad homonym attack, and an accurate attribution of failure or incompetence. The one is a debating tactic; the other is simply an observation, one you should probably learn to take a hint from.
As a story, however, Dune depended upon FTL travel; the society was an interconnected web of planets and planetary sub-societies. Ixians, Bene Gesserit, Harkonnen, Atreides, etc. In addition, Dune depends upon the ability to see the future. These are, so far at least, elements of fantasy. That makes Dune soft SF if you lean that way, or simple fantasy if you consider SF that isn't hard to simply be fantasy.
Either way, the Dune stories would be something else entirely, or non-existent, without FTL travel and precognition. You might be able to fold the story into a single planet by putting those societies into different nations and/or regions and thus eliminate the FTL element without a huge change in the overall storylines, but the precognition is kind of a show-stopper.
So would I. In a heartbeat.
Well, it could be if you accept the premise that the committee is made up of 14-year old fanbois who can't think their way out of a paper bag.
Look: JPEG is patent encumbered; nonetheless, it is the standard. GIF was encumbered; nonetheless, it was the standard. Likewise MP3. It flat out isn't the place of a committee to define things out of public use because there is a commercial tie; the fact is, MP3 is the standard, and if audio is to be a browser feature, then a browser that can't play MP3 is utter crap. A standards body isn't there to be your your mother; it is there to promote interoperability, usability, commonality, is it not? So WTF are these people doing ignoring MP3 in favor of WAV?
Look at it this way: The first question a person is going to ask when they pick up an audio package or hardware audio player (you'll note the usual term is "MP3 player") — editor, player, recorder — is not going to be: "Does it support WAV?" No, it's almost certain, statistically speaking, to be "Does it support MP3?" And that is why WAV is a stupid choice.
I am no fonder of patents than any of the rest of you. But if you're going to rule out every technology that is patent encumbered, your sorry, optimistic, blindered butt will be in a cave before you even know what hit you.
Not very well, though. For instance, with regard to the audio tag, "Browsers must support the WAV format. Browsers can also support other formats such as MP3 if they like."
Talk about getting something backwards. MP3 is the defacto standard. WAV? OMG WTF. Way to waste bandwidth.
Well, that's the insurance company's goal. The consumer's goal is to distribute cost across a large number of people, not risk.
The insurance company benefits when risk is minimized; the consumer benefits when cost is minimized. What the insurance companies are doing here is trying to further minimize risk at the expense of some of the consumers, which is not compatible with the goal of the insurance consumers because it will increase costs for them.
There are several issues here. One is when a consumer increases risk themselves; for instance, if they choose not to wear a seatbelt, or if their diet consists of fatburgers and coke and nothing else. In this case, the consumer is increasing risk, and one could understand the reluctance of the insurance company towards treating this person the same as one who has a less pathological diet.
But a second, quite different issue is that a person with diabetes or leukemia or breast cancer probably isn't responsible for these things in the sense that their behavior is a key element. So in this case, the tendency of the insurance company to lock them into higher costs (or out of the pool entirely) is less easily excused.
Third, the insurance company wants to make money; as a public company, it actually has an obligation to make money. This can so easily come into conflict with the need of the consumer for the best possible coverage that it may be a defining line where we can use ethics to say that pooling health care costs with an idea of profiting may be inherently unethical.
Fourth, there are people who abuse free-ish health care; I know of some of these myself. I suspect that this is one of the extremes - like people who are quite sick in multiple ways - that a pool just has to accept, just as it accepts people who are inordinately healthy and rarely, if ever, call upon the pool to pay for medical care.
The bottom line, it seems to me, is that we do know that medical care is expensive, we can reduce the citizen's overall need for care into statistical likelihoods that are really pretty well nailed down, and we should probably do exactly that because if we do, everyone will have the care they need and that is a very noble and reasonable goal.
Insurance companies would lose out, but there is no guarantee of any particular job or service niche existing; progress and change are constantly creating and eliminating opportunities. Nothing says that because today, you have a successful corporation selling beanie babies, that everyone is forced from now until the end of time to buy beanie babies. Likewise, the insurance companies have built a great gig for themselves, but if tomorrow, we as a society decide that a not-for-profit national pool that includes everyone who can pay whatever it costs is appropriate, then it is time for them to go find a new business to pursue.
There will always be a group of unemployed / insufficient income people who cannot access such a pool in its most basic form, but then again, our society has a strong tradition of caring for those people. Given that they're a rather small percentage of the overall population, probably the best solution is simply to bite the bullet and fold them in. After all, you never know when you might lose your job, eh?
Reading skills not so hot? You quoted me correctly: "Assuming it's meant to be used in a legitimate matter"
Now, in what software producer's or corporate data universe is third-party hacking a "legitimate matter"?
Oh, please, give it a rest. I have been programming since the 1970's, and I've written and debugged more code in more languages than your average bear, including one heck of a lot of assembly languages. Executables with debugging symbols are not likely to be release products. If someone ships code with debugging symbols in it, they're clueless or have no security issues. Probably just clueless. When disassembling for the purpose of hacking, the odds of having debugging symbols available are just about zero. Debugging is not hacking, and hacking is not debugging. Disassembly is the process of creating code from raw executable without benefit of having code or even necessarily a knowledge of what language was used to create the executable. Typically, assembly code is what is created, no matter what language was used to create the executable, though there are exceptions to that.
As for the rest, I think you should be forced to work with a computer in binary. After all, that's the most direct way. No abstraction to mess up your pristine, operator controls every step ideal. Let me know how that works out for you. In the meantime, I'll go with higher level approaches, thanks.
We don't. And I never said, or implied, that we had. However, in order to propose a new law of physics, or modify one that already exists, you'll have to find a behavior or system that such a law explains. No such thing has been found in the brain, and so speculating that "unknown laws of physics" apply is an intellectually bankrupt exercise. As long as examination of the brain continues to reveal nothing but mundane systems and materials, there is no call for such a thing, any more than there is to assume that ghosts of your ancestors are really running things for you.
What you're doing here is holding up an abstraction and trying to say that because you have trouble with the abstraction, the mind must be made of green cheese. All it really means is you've been unable to deconstruct the abstraction. If I say, "here is this number, 2346, it is the sum of two signed whole numbers, what were they?" I have presented you with an unanswerable question, because you do not have enough of the information on the operation that created the number. The number you have is an abstraction of the actual operation that created it, and it is also an equally valid abstraction of all the infinite other operations that could have created it. The question is unsolvable; but the means are entirely mundane. This demonstrates that the existence of an unsolvable abstraction is by no means evidence of non-mundane behavior.
Let's talk about the liver for a moment. We don't understand a lot of what the liver does as yet. It is a very complex organ. Does this mean that we should postulate that there are new laws of physics that apply? If so, why? Should we not wait until, or unless, we encounter something going on in the liver that cannot be explained using the current laws before we go inventing a theory that describes the effects of the radiation of "unobtanium" through the 97th dimension upon urea, or worse, just waving our hands and saying "well, there could be some unexplainable by current phsyics process going on here"? If this is so, why does this approach not also apply to the brain? Aren't you trying to make the brain out as magical?
That may be a perfectly apt metaphor. However, while software and hardware are distinct, the existence of software in no way requires new laws of physics, and making this metaphor does not imbue the mind with any such need.
Actually, that's fairly trivial. Evolutionary software development can easily accommodate such a scenario. You take a problem, randomly throw some functions at it in some order, run the results against the problem, and breed the most successful results. You'll probably start out with terrible results, but after some number of generations, you'll have very good code that arose only as a consequence of solving the problem and the failure of other approaches which led to them being discarded (they don't get to breed.) I wrote one of these in the 1980's, a program called "crits" which had to solve the problem of getting enough food in a hostile environment. Early generations were just decimated by the environment; later generations avoided obstacles, bumping heads with each other, fighting over resources and more, resulting in very good viability and very effective programming. I didn't write a single word of code for them to enhance or seed the process; it was strictly emergent as a consequence
There is no indication of this. We know of no thing or process that does not comply with the laws of physics as we understand them today.
So far, observable system behaviors all across nature have been 100% mundane in the sense that there's been no magical, unknown force or component to them. It is this consistency across the huge spectrum of knowledge that we already have that leads me to have very low confidence in the idea that something else is involved in brain function at the level of system components.
Could there be something else going on? Yes, could be. But is there any reason to make such an assumption today? No; not until or unless we find something in the brain that acts in a manner that we cannot explain using already known processes.
The premise behind "the brain is magic" crowd is that because of this magical character they assign to it, it cannot be replicated; it is hand waving designed to justify the idea that humans are magically delicious members of the animal kingdom, or maybe not members at all. It smacks of religious mumbo jumbo and without some detected anomaly as to function, it is a claim that has no basis underneath it at all.
These ideas are in the same boat as ideas about telepathy; there is no evidence that telepathy exists; postulating an unknown mechanism for telepathy is postulating an unknown mechanism for a function that is not known to exist in the first place. Likewise, postulating unknown laws of physics for functions that have not been discovered and for which we have no reason to assume exist in the first place is an empty exercise in metaphysics. First, find or demonstrate a function we can't explain; then postulate the mechanism for it. That's science. So far, nothing has been found in a brain that isn't made of the same stuff everything else is, doesn't obey the same rules everything else does, or acts in any way unusually. So you should be asking yourself, "Why is it that I want the brain to have something special going on?" Tip: I don't think you're going to find the answer to that question in science.
What? You think targets provide the interface to hack them? That's not how it works, not even today. Programs are compact bundles of executable code and data. Sometimes encrypted, usually not. Programs are the ultimate models of terseness, because each machine instruction represents an action by the processor. There is no "interface" to the code provided in the program or data itself. Interfaces for hacking, for instance a debugger / disassembler, are separate things, created by people who understand completely that the goal is to get into the code, and therefore they provide the graphic and other UI elements you need to do that in the most efficacious manner the authors of the debugger / disassembler can come up with - it has nothing to do with what the authors of the program being attacked had in mind, planned for, or provided except in that whatever anti-hacking they might have put in, the hacking software needs to have a counter for. If that interface took on a 3D metaphor, that's just a detail, though an interesting one and an efficiency issue for the hacker. You're completely confused about the demarcations between the roles of who is providing what interface, what code, what data, what functionality - that's why you can't understand what is being described. If the target was a corporation's site, the hacking interface wouldn't be provided by them, it'd be provided by your deck, even if the corporation defined the "normal" interface for end users. So a hacking deck, or a deck running hacking software could easily have any interface imaginable, whatever seemed to work. This is why your objections are pointless.
Wrong. Hacking works any way that it works, from the utmost simplistic approach (futzing with a URL or entering data and/or command strings not specified as valid) to actually hacking the binary of the software with complete control over what machine instructions are changing, and how, and taking into account any self-validation / checksum type protection as you work. UI, again, is a matter of approach, not a matter of results. Any tool that increases the speed of visualization of the task at hand and your ability to get in there and make changes is feasible, presuming you have the computer power to pull it off. What do you think a progress bar is? It's an abstraction of a lot of things going on, letting you know things are running, how much has been done, and giving you a quick visual estimate of how much there is yet to go. This is an extreme abstraction of, for instance, how far through a dictionary attack one may have progressed. Other abstractions that could work rather than a bar might be size, shape, color, words, animations of other processes that go from start to finish (eating a sandwich, filling a bucket, hammering a nail) and so on. A 16-sided ball could be a tool for hex digit input. A 20 sided ball might be useful in due-decimal work. Etc.
If the full solution to a problem is known to be available in canned form, the smart thing is to use it. You may have been the "canner", or you may not. That doesn't make you a script kiddie; that makes you competent. If the lock needs picking, then you pick. If picking doesn't work, you may want to get out the C4 or simply abscond with the entire dataset in unbroken form so as to approach it at your leisure. Every time you presume that things work "just this way" you miss the entire point of hacking. I write a program, I create X to attempt to make it secure; the hacker approaches, and comes up with Y to defeat my X. Hac
You don't seem to understand that property can be anything from the line between people and threats to the mechanism that saves them in an emergency. For instance, I live with a diabetic. I can't afford to have my means of transport stolen. Diabetes aside, any accident may require transport at any time. Next, I have a family. I am not inclined to let people enter my home via forced entry, because the next thing they do may very likely be harmful to my family. And you know what? Your life as a home invader isn't worth a plugged nickel next to the security of my family.
You don't want to experience deadly force? Then knock on the door like a civilized human being. There is no other way to get in my home that won't require you to defeat iron bars and alarm systems anyway; What's your problem with that? Do you make a habit of forced entry?
Yes, you did. There was plenty of technology in there, from nuclear power plants to space stations to tools used to what technologies should be saved and how they might re-appear. It was very nicely done. No fantastic elements, hence hard SF - the science was good.
Well, the downside is that applications like midnight commander become extremely difficult to use; you go to open the menus or fire off a command, and some OS function happens instead.
I'm familiar with the double tap and various prefs options for the trackpad, as well as the ctrl key. You still can't get the same functionality you can out of a proper two-button system. For instance, you can't click left... left+right... left while dragging; that's an often-used operation for repositioning area selections in my work, so there's no option but to hook up a two-button mouse when I'm doing graphics.
Yeah. I have a Macbook pro, almost a $3000 computer; and the keyboard is terrible. As is the one-button trackpad. I love OSX, but I'm afraid the physical design of the Mac keyboards is just pitiful, totally focused on looks and not usability. I've got a full-size Mac keyboard at my desktop on my Mac Mini, that's a much better keyboard — full numeric keypad, better key travel — but it still isn't even close to the best keyboards out there which have positive tactile feedback, illumination (though my MBP has KB illumination, which I appreciate), and ergonomic curves. Hey, but my Mac keyboard is white. [cough].
This is compounded by the OS's taking over all the function keys. For a *nix-based OS, this is a pretty inconvenient and poorly thought-out choice. And it isn't all that easy to get the FKeys to behave properly in a terminal; I'm not sure why, but some keys just don't want to come "unstuck" from the OS.
Oh well. There are some third-party Mac keyboards out there already; hopefully this latest back-to-the-chiclet-past effort from Apple will encourage others to make some really good Mac keyboards.
No. And I'm quite familiar with the whole thing, thanks.
Not to hackers; not to technologists; not to users. It's an abstract, and an expensive one (look how crappy the Windows UI is trying to be everything to everyone; look how crippled linux is by being unwilling to create a standard GUI; look how crippled OSX was by pretending mice only needed one button. Complexity and abstraction aren't bad things and can be done very well.
Nonsense. The more dimensions you can manipulate at once, the more complex a user input you can provide. Up to the limits of your ability to handle complex motions. As a musician and a programmer for over four decades, I didn't perceive Gibson's ideas as unlikely or overwhelming or impossible at all. Raising the level of art required? Plausible. The next generation would simply rise to meet the challenge. Watch them learn video games if you don't know what I mean.
For instance, the Mac gives you one mouse button. You can, while doing graphics, move the mouse XY and press the button, -a, +a. A better mouse gives you two buttons. Now you can move the mouse and provide four different modifiers: -a-b, -a+b, +a-b, +a+b. Take a tablet with a couple buttons. now we have motion, -a-b, -a+b, +a-b, +a+b, and pressure. Now take an interface that gives you visual objects to manipulate in the air a'la Gibson's speculation: You can move your left hand XYZ, going from a square space to a cubic one, you can move your right hand XYZ, doubling your cubed space, and because you now have Z, the number of "buttons" you can create with stabbing motions, not to mention the sweeps and other motions you can make, have multiplied hugely. Create graphics metaphors for things to manipulate that use models of geometrics or anything else you like, and you are way into interface excellence. You can't seem to see this; but that doesn't degrade the idea at all.
And what military or government or corporation would not want serious deterrents to entry when the world is virtual? The only reason my own home's entries are not actual man-traps is the law that says I can't protect my own property with deadly force. Otherwise, as a programmer and an engineer, I'd have something quite clever — and quite deadly. After having had a couple of vehicles stolen, I'm all for deadly force there, too. Scientifically, it's all good. Socially - yes, mommies rule. For now.
Yeah, but if something requires YOU to suspend, but not ME to suspend, then it's just you with the problem. :-)
Right, right. :-)
There is no science that indicates that this is even slightly likely. We have every reason to think that the brain obeys the physics that everything else has turned out to obey, and no reason to think otherwise at this point in time.
I'll consider your brain-as-uber-thang ideas when you get some evidence to support them. So far, everything points to electrical, chemical, physical architecture, and possibly quantum structures and activities as the brain's underlying base "technologies", as it were. So until or unless you can produce said evidence, you get to enjoy the status of "crackpot", pretty much right along the lines of astrologers, religionists, and crystal gazers. :-)
And in turn, I would point out that you appear to know very little science, as your entire assertion here is wrong. GUI abstraction is the basis for GUI's in general. Further abstraction is not unreasonable; I have had demos on my desktop that did quite a few things, including 3D abstractions of various types. Impractical? Possibly. Unscientific? Not even a little bit.
Death by security program? Today on slashdot there's a story about a LED device that makes you puke. We know that electricity can kill you. Stuttering flashes can put humans into an epileptic seizure. Disjoint feeds to your eyes can disturb your orientation. Would you *really* care to say there's no way to shut you down via an interface that is connected to not just your eyes, but your ears, senses of touch, heat, and so forth, electrically, pressure-wise, heat-wise, visually, aurally? What if it can induce visions right into your nervous system, bypassing your eyes? What if it can dispense drugs? Unscientific? Hardly. Socially unlikely? Perhaps, but that doesn't make it bad scientific speculation. That just means there is an onus upon the author to create a story where we can believe such things would have come about so the work will be readable and engaging.
These ideas are far more plausible in hard SF terms than (for instance) Trek's warp drive at this moment in science. That makes Trek lean a lot harder towards fantasy than Gibson's Neuromancer, which is what I presume you're kvetching about here. Even the AIs that Gibson postulates are still viable hard SF elements. At this point in time, we have no reason to believe, scientifically speaking, that computer AI will prove intractable in any of the forms he postulated. And it has been some years since he wrote the novel.
Methinks you would enjoy SF more (hard or not) if your imagination was a little more informed around the edges.
The premise here is wrong. Hard SF is not limited to technology that *will* come, it is about technology that *could* come because the science, at the time is is written (and that is a very important issue) is plausible as far as is known. It has nothing to do with the ideas "coming true", though that's not to say they could not.
Suspension of disbelief is easier in stories written this way; and contrary to the above assertion, in good hard SF, the technology doesn't serve the role of the main story, carrying the characters as an incidental; the technology can almost fade away, leaving the story to be the main theme because the technology isn't so crazy.
Can there be good, accurate ideas in hard SF? Sure. We have seen them over and over. Frederick Pohl predicted today's convergence of cell phone, PDA, browser and so on with a great deal of accuracy in "The Age of the Pussyfoot." Niven and Pournelle did a great "asteroid hits earth" novel; Gibson himself did some very intriguing speculation along the lines of interfaces, scientifically plausible but requiring considerably more horsepower than was available at the time of his writing (but not now.) Gregory Benford, James P Hogan, Asimov, Blish, Clarke, and a host of others have all dipped their hand into the "hard" SF bowl and pulled out shining fruits no one had ever thought of before, all while writing great, engaging stories about a huge variety of things.
I read both types with equal, but different, pleasure. I enjoy the flight of fancy that comes with the idea of FTL drive; I also enjoy the tweak I get from a lesser technology that I actually might live to see if things go that way. But if the story doesn't bring interesting plot lines, significant character development, thought-provoking social comment, reasons for the major technological developments being posited... odds are I'll put it down and never pick it up again.
The idea that an SF story would be devalued if the predicted technology didn't materialize or if later science narrows the hard SF window such that it could not materialize is ludicrous; on the contrary, an honest window into what people really thought was possible at any point in time has its own magnificent charm.
Oh, it's an understandable mistake. The "Kashmir effect" is what keeps Led Zeppelin up. Physics is full of these similarities.
By the way, there's gonna be a quiz next period...
Don't worry, that's a cyclic effect that primarily appears when posting AC. In your case, it's probably just your sinuses. No need to go off on a tangent. Have a slice of pie and call me in the morning. I'm sure you're feel radiant by then.
Right. But they aren't likely to get very far; they were fairly low power and very directional. To reach others, a much better strategy is to broadcast in a wide beam unless you can locate a specific target (like a spacecraft or a planet) and then use a tighter, more directional beam so that the energy you send is focused like a flashlight and therefore easier to pick up at the target.
They're pretty tightly focused on Mars. As tightly as is practical.
No. They wouldn't anyway; a digital signal doesn't look like noise in the sense that it appears natural; the modulation is consistent in character and very precise, and that identifies as the product of a mechanism, even if completely undecipherable.
While I will agree that this is a possibility, we need to stay aware that the only highly intelligent race we have an example of (that'd be humans) has used that "understanding", such as it is, to develop a fairly consistent treatment protocol for less intelligent races; we breed them for food. Sure, in the US, we love our dogs and cats, but in China, they eat them. Sure, in India they love cows, but here in the USA, we eat them. Here in the USA, we protect whales and various other cetaceans, but in Japan, they eat them. And so it goes for insects, tigers, bears, pigs and so forth.
In other words, where humans have the upper hand, they are often exploitive in the most aggressive and unfriendly manner possible. That's 100% of our example set. So while again, I can see what you're saying, I don't find that I naturally come to the same conclusion as you have.
Personally, I don't think we're very far along socially. We repress each other's rights and liberties even after we've taken the time to lay them out in no uncertain terms, while eliminating the individual's ability to control how far they wish to enter into participation in the rights others would impose upon them; we proactively murder and consume our co-resident beings, not to mention each other; we (speaking of the USA) manage our country based upon corporate and moneyed interests' needs and drives; the population fears the depiction of sexuality while simultaneously holding the depiction of violence up as socially acceptable; a huge proportion of the population is superstitious and couldn't describe the scientific method to you if their life depended on being able to do so... I'm not at all certain we'd qualify as folks who have made significant social breakthroughs. But hey, that's just me.
Yes, I certainly can. We've been facing the problem for 50,000 years and we're not all that far along. We're a little behind where the Greeks and Romans were 2,000 years ago on some subjects, in fact.
Well, or they destroy their enemies. Depends on who has the more effective military, actually. More accurately, groups tend to destroy each other, arrogant or not. The more different they are, the more likely they are to come into destructive conflict.
Yes. We certainly are interested in other life. Mmmmmm. Steak! Crab legs! Draft animals! Hosts and subjects for medical experiments! Food and drug safety testing! Slaves! Increase the taxable headcount! Extract rare hormones! Spread religion! You can't deny our deep, committed interest in other lifeforms, no sir, I completely agree.
Well, people are kind of the top of your list, right? So, what about the Balkans? Iraq? Afghanistan? Somalia? Germany? Japan? The KKK? And of course, as to apes, we cage them and use them for medical experiments. Some people — notably, the apes closest neighbors — eat them. I know it is cynical, but it seems to me that the "wrongness" you allude to is a matter of convenience; not social advancement. Had
This is one of the most likely reasons we've not "seen" anything as yet. As far as we know, interstellar travel is annoyingly slow and energy intensive; that alone could account for no visitors, no matter how well populated the universe is with intelligent beings. That leaves communications; but our experience here indicates that catching the communications of others is very unlikely. Why? Well, we've been hanging about for 50,000 years or so in the form we like to consider actually "us." Of that 50,000 years, we've been using radio and television for about 100 years now. But in the last 25 years, more and more of our radio and television signals have been finding their way into satellite to ground signals, which do not radiate away from the planet and are very, very low power; other signals are now traveling inside cables instead of the through the air; and finally, newer communications are moving to optical methods, and we're talking optical in cables for the most part, meaning again, less and less high powered "accidental" signal radiation (effectively zero in terms of interstellar distances.) The reasons are higher bandwidth, vastly more communications channels, more energy efficient, better control over where the signal goes - and doesn't go. These are reasons that transcend our civilization; there is every reason to think that other beings would find the same benefits.
Next, look at our development: We're paranoid. We have been prey for a lot of living things ranging from other people to lions to snakes to spiders to bacteria, consequently we're not of the mind that the universe is likely to be a friendly playground. You can find reactions to that notion everywhere from science fiction to the unwillingness of today's moms to let their kids play outdoors unsupervised. Looking at our SETI program, the first thing you probably notice is that we're listening (poorly), which seems prudent; but we are not intentionally transmitting a signal to the stars, which has been a political decision. That leaves the accidental radiation, the strongest of which has been radar transmissions, which are mostly information free... but even if they're enough to get us noticed, we've only been at this for a 100 years, so our signals are only 100 light-years out so far. That severely reduces the number of potential listeners, and of course it presumes they, like us, are listening for anything, not just signals modulated with complex information.
Also, as an earlier poster observed with a quote from Douglas Adams, the universe is gi-flipping-normous.
All of this contributes to why Fermi's Paradox should be considered Fermi's Blunder by anyone who really thinks this through.
I see no reason to doubt there are plenty of other life-bearing planets out there, and that a fairly significant number of those in turn have intelligent life of one form or another. The fact that we've not "heard" any of them doesn't surprise me one little bit, Fermi's naive reasoning aside. In another 100 years, the odds of us radiating anything at all from our little corner of the universe are probably very low indeed. If that's typical (and it may be longer than typical), then in order to "catch" someone else transmitting by accident, we'll have to be listening at the same time + distance in light years that they go through the RF development process, and we'll have to have sensitive enough equipment to hear them. That last point is interesting, because although technically speaking, we are listening for "them", we're presuming they're sending at the low-noise point of the spectrum with the intent of us hearing them. If it was accidental radiation like radio and TV we were looking for, we couldn't hear that with our current gear at all. In order to get to that level of sensitivity, we'll need outer space "ears", and pretty big ones. Nothing like that is even on the drawing boards. So again, the odds of us hearing anyo