He is not seeing real people, of course. This is all a part of the moving illustration drawn by his computer according to specifications coming down the fiber-optic cable. The people are pieces of software called avatars. They are the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other in the Metaverse. Hiro's avatar is now on the Street, too, and if the couples coming off the monorail look over in his direction, they can see him, just as he's seeing them. They could strike up a conversation: Hiro in the U-Stor-It in L.A. and the four teenagers probably on a couch in a suburb of Chicago, each with their own laptop. But they probably won't talk to each other, any more than they would in Reality. These are nice kids, and they don't want to talk to a solitary crossbreed with a slick custom avatar who's packing a couple of swords.
So this is it. The metaverse end-game, except instead of The Street we just get 'the street you are standing on' with your retinas being sprayed with lurid depictions of pedestrians who've configured themselves to show up as their desired sex, weight, hair color, dick size, fursonas, or favorite Naruto outfit.
That's totally valid. It still is nice we have the freedom to choose the tools in your toolbox though. I worked on Gnome for a few years and was a Gnome foundation member: I fully appreciate the position of not wanting to deal with democratic messiness and just consuming the output of such.
How many consumers do you know of who give two shits about the OS that runs on their system? They use what comes with the computer. When they buy Steamboxen it'll come with SteamOS and they'll use it as endusers use anything. If you honestly think the vast majority of people are going to weigh the pros and cons of various linux distros AT ALL much less down to the level of detail of their INIT SYSTEMS I honestly don't think we can have much of a conversation.
Some super windows-fied linux systemd based distro would most likely be a net positive for the whole 'linux on the desktop' bugbear. That doesn't mean I shouldn't have the freedom to chose differently for myself however.
Oh day of days! Now it needs to statically link in gconf and we'll all have a registry too!
Is anyone really concerned about this? Let me put on my prophetic wizard hat and predict how this is going to go from here:
Systemd isn't going anywhere. The distros that use it will largely continue to use it.
Enough people hate Systemd enough the motivation to create some distros that absolutely do not use it will be very high.
Such distros will be created (Maybe use nixos/nix/guix as the base for extra change-it-up-ability.).
Much like Mate/Cinnamon vs Gnome 3: people will use both the systemd distros and the systemd-less distros.
Much gnashing of teeth will ensue for years to come. A la emacs vs vim, kde vs gnome, gnome 3 vs gnome 2, etc ad nausem
I'm really not trying to be flip but this is just the FOSS process at work here. It's messy sometimes but so is anything that involves people. Embrace the ecosystem that makes this whole argument possible! If Apple or Microsoft decided they want some polorizing system like Systemd to be the new hotness in their OS offerings there's literally fuck all we could do about it. At least with the FOSS environment we have the freedom to make our own decisions
Kind of a weird example but RpgMaker is a tool that lets non-programmers create their own RPG games. While there is a 'text based code' (ruby) layer a non-programmer can simply ignore it and either use modules other people have written or confine their implementation to the built in functionality.
Now look at the complexity involved in the application itself to enable the non-programmer to create their game. Dialog boxes galore, hundreds of options, great gobs of text fields, select lists, radio buttons. It's just overflowing with UI. And making an RPG game, while certainly complex, is a domain limited activity. You can't use RpgMaker to make a RDBMS system, or a web framework, or a FPS game.
The explosion of UI complexity to solve the general case -- enable the non-programmer to write any sort of program visually-- is stupendously high. WIth visual tools you'll always be limited by your UI, and what the UI allows you to do. Also think of scale, we can manage software projects with text code up to very high volumes (it's not super easy, but it's doable and proven). Chromium has something like 7.25 million lines of code. I shudder to think how that would translate into some visual programming tool.
"If it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?”
Exit nodes weren't involved in this since it's an attack against hidden services whose traffic by definition remains within the TOR network. It's not really an attack on TOR, it was an attack on the server software Freedom Hosting was running and clueless/idiot TOR users with javascript enabled and other unsafe TOR habits.
Totally agree with you on people thing that TOR is some anonymity panacea is shortsighted.
Probably not but the analysis of the malware is still on-going. Hence 'potentially'. Regardless I think it's safe to assume any thing traced back to FBI lab computers are probably not high on the list of actionable items.
You're forgetting that our immune system blocks the vast, vast majority of bacteria, viruses, etc from doing anything at all. The ones that can have found explicit "hacks" that leverage vulnerabilities in the immune system. I suspect we'll have to agree to disagree on this one but if you can make a case about what the 'something completely different' would be that a) is compatible enough with our biology to infect us, and b) able to bypass our immune system entirely I would love to hear it.
You know, our immune system as a whole is, to paraphrase Stephenson, stupendously badass. The reason pathogens still get us sick is because they too have had billions of years to adapt to combat our immune system. The chances of scientists (or some panspermic disaster scenario) introducing a pathogen that bypasses our immune system completely by accident are pretty infinitesimal.
If you want to create a bioweapon you don't start with something unknown and then try to hack around our immune system. You go find something that nature has brought 99% of the way to where you want it and tweak.
Two men being immature at a conference and they lose their livelihood because someone quasi-famous tweeted about it? I'm sure many people would disagree but the tons of triumph in the reporting that they lost their jobs is very distasteful to me especially in this job market. I don't want to live in a society where everyone is so uptight that they don't say anything without 5 levels of mental filtering because other some random stranger can completely screw them over.
Except we don't really want to bomb them back to the stone age. What do you do after you take out the Kims and their government? We'd have to do something about the millions of poorly fed, uneducated people who live there. In a war blasted country they will flood to the south or west to China and the mechanisms for coping with such a thing just aren't there. It would be an absolute crises socially and economically and it gives the nation-states involved in the Korean peninsula a reason to want to maintain the status quo. Which is one of the reasons North Korea gets so much slack diplomatically speaking.
This is a strange statement to make when the Standard Model is known to be incomplete since it does not factor in gravity. It clearly is not the final theory if any such thing can exist. I guess it may not meet your criteria for 'exotic' but to say physics is done is comically short sighted.
My favorite part of this thought experiment is that Schrödinger constructed it to point out the ridiculousness of quantum theory and how it couldn't possibly be correct if it allowed for such a thing. Reality sure is strange, maybe the strangest thing is that we can understand it at all.
One of them is some sort of television feed. This plays right along with the ad videos! I feel like Ozymandias in Watchmen with my wall of a hundreds of video screens on that page.
If the primary motivation is getting a job I'd probably stick to Java and C#/.NET. Not the sexiest technologies but ubiquitous. Neither is going to be replaced anytime soon and even if they are they'll turn into what COBOL was with people working on legacy systems well past the host languages shelf-life. Given what you've said I'd probably focus on Java since you already have experience there. Another plus with Java is that you can still focus on mobile development with the Android platform if that's what's exciting you.
Or you can take the badass Paul Graham approach and create the next big thing in Common Lisp and ride that wave to YCombinator-esque superstardom! This is the more exciting/perilous route.
It seems like a lot of these systems we are discovering are "abnormal" (e.g.; Jupiter sized planets orbiting where mercury is in our system, this recent example, etc). Is our solar system the weird one or are there characteristics about these 'abnormal' systems that simply make them easier for us to detect (thus explaining why we seem to find alot of them!)
"Installing updates while the session is running causes havoc with some apps like Firefox that have file resources that have not been locked (just try updating xulrunner when Firefox or Thunderbird is open)," blogged Fedora developer Richard Hughes.
Seems to me adding features to the package system that can determine and possibly correct such things (ie, closing Firefox or Thunderbird) would be the better way to go rather than force me to have to reboot. Hopefully it will retain the capability to install new software while updates are pending. I'd hate to have to reboot to install some tiny dependency. (A restart is required before you can install libfoo. Ugh!)
Slashdot Mirror
So this is it. The metaverse end-game, except instead of The Street we just get 'the street you are standing on' with your retinas being sprayed with lurid depictions of pedestrians who've configured themselves to show up as their desired sex, weight, hair color, dick size, fursonas, or favorite Naruto outfit.
That's totally valid. It still is nice we have the freedom to choose the tools in your toolbox though. I worked on Gnome for a few years and was a Gnome foundation member: I fully appreciate the position of not wanting to deal with democratic messiness and just consuming the output of such.
How many consumers do you know of who give two shits about the OS that runs on their system? They use what comes with the computer. When they buy Steamboxen it'll come with SteamOS and they'll use it as endusers use anything. If you honestly think the vast majority of people are going to weigh the pros and cons of various linux distros AT ALL much less down to the level of detail of their INIT SYSTEMS I honestly don't think we can have much of a conversation.
Some super windows-fied linux systemd based distro would most likely be a net positive for the whole 'linux on the desktop' bugbear. That doesn't mean I shouldn't have the freedom to chose differently for myself however.
Oh day of days! Now it needs to statically link in gconf and we'll all have a registry too!
Is anyone really concerned about this? Let me put on my prophetic wizard hat and predict how this is going to go from here:
I'm really not trying to be flip but this is just the FOSS process at work here. It's messy sometimes but so is anything that involves people. Embrace the ecosystem that makes this whole argument possible! If Apple or Microsoft decided they want some polorizing system like Systemd to be the new hotness in their OS offerings there's literally fuck all we could do about it. At least with the FOSS environment we have the freedom to make our own decisions
Would never have been an error in the past sadly.
Kind of a weird example but RpgMaker is a tool that lets non-programmers create their own RPG games. While there is a 'text based code' (ruby) layer a non-programmer can simply ignore it and either use modules other people have written or confine their implementation to the built in functionality.
Now look at the complexity involved in the application itself to enable the non-programmer to create their game. Dialog boxes galore, hundreds of options, great gobs of text fields, select lists, radio buttons. It's just overflowing with UI. And making an RPG game, while certainly complex, is a domain limited activity. You can't use RpgMaker to make a RDBMS system, or a web framework, or a FPS game.
The explosion of UI complexity to solve the general case -- enable the non-programmer to write any sort of program visually-- is stupendously high. WIth visual tools you'll always be limited by your UI, and what the UI allows you to do. Also think of scale, we can manage software projects with text code up to very high volumes (it's not super easy, but it's doable and proven). Chromium has something like 7.25 million lines of code. I shudder to think how that would translate into some visual programming tool.
I'm not sure how well it would scale
"If it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?”
Plastic asshole.”
If we go by Arthur C Clarke (and really, why shouldn't we?) it would be Europan which has a nice ring to it.
In other news leaked internal NSA documents show that they only begin to have trouble cracking AES at 256-bit key sizes and higher.
It's almost like they're modulating a signal and then demodulating it. I wonder if there's a name for this sort of thing.
Exit nodes weren't involved in this since it's an attack against hidden services whose traffic by definition remains within the TOR network. It's not really an attack on TOR, it was an attack on the server software Freedom Hosting was running and clueless/idiot TOR users with javascript enabled and other unsafe TOR habits.
Totally agree with you on people thing that TOR is some anonymity panacea is shortsighted.
My fault, at least August 2nd. Potentially longer.
Probably not but the analysis of the malware is still on-going. Hence 'potentially'. Regardless I think it's safe to assume any thing traced back to FBI lab computers are probably not high on the list of actionable items.
You're forgetting that our immune system blocks the vast, vast majority of bacteria, viruses, etc from doing anything at all. The ones that can have found explicit "hacks" that leverage vulnerabilities in the immune system. I suspect we'll have to agree to disagree on this one but if you can make a case about what the 'something completely different' would be that a) is compatible enough with our biology to infect us, and b) able to bypass our immune system entirely I would love to hear it.
You know, our immune system as a whole is, to paraphrase Stephenson, stupendously badass. The reason pathogens still get us sick is because they too have had billions of years to adapt to combat our immune system. The chances of scientists (or some panspermic disaster scenario) introducing a pathogen that bypasses our immune system completely by accident are pretty infinitesimal.
If you want to create a bioweapon you don't start with something unknown and then try to hack around our immune system. You go find something that nature has brought 99% of the way to where you want it and tweak.
eVIL mode is better. Any vivivi users should check that out instead.
Two men being immature at a conference and they lose their livelihood because someone quasi-famous tweeted about it? I'm sure many people would disagree but the tons of triumph in the reporting that they lost their jobs is very distasteful to me especially in this job market. I don't want to live in a society where everyone is so uptight that they don't say anything without 5 levels of mental filtering because other some random stranger can completely screw them over.
Except we don't really want to bomb them back to the stone age. What do you do after you take out the Kims and their government? We'd have to do something about the millions of poorly fed, uneducated people who live there. In a war blasted country they will flood to the south or west to China and the mechanisms for coping with such a thing just aren't there. It would be an absolute crises socially and economically and it gives the nation-states involved in the Korean peninsula a reason to want to maintain the status quo. Which is one of the reasons North Korea gets so much slack diplomatically speaking.
This is a strange statement to make when the Standard Model is known to be incomplete since it does not factor in gravity. It clearly is not the final theory if any such thing can exist. I guess it may not meet your criteria for 'exotic' but to say physics is done is comically short sighted.
My favorite part of this thought experiment is that Schrödinger constructed it to point out the ridiculousness of quantum theory and how it couldn't possibly be correct if it allowed for such a thing. Reality sure is strange, maybe the strangest thing is that we can understand it at all.
One of them is some sort of television feed. This plays right along with the ad videos! I feel like Ozymandias in Watchmen with my wall of a hundreds of video screens on that page.
M-x evil-mode you mean.
If the primary motivation is getting a job I'd probably stick to Java and C#/.NET. Not the sexiest technologies but ubiquitous. Neither is going to be replaced anytime soon and even if they are they'll turn into what COBOL was with people working on legacy systems well past the host languages shelf-life. Given what you've said I'd probably focus on Java since you already have experience there. Another plus with Java is that you can still focus on mobile development with the Android platform if that's what's exciting you.
Or you can take the badass Paul Graham approach and create the next big thing in Common Lisp and ride that wave to YCombinator-esque superstardom! This is the more exciting/perilous route.
It seems like a lot of these systems we are discovering are "abnormal" (e.g.; Jupiter sized planets orbiting where mercury is in our system, this recent example, etc). Is our solar system the weird one or are there characteristics about these 'abnormal' systems that simply make them easier for us to detect (thus explaining why we seem to find alot of them!)
"Installing updates while the session is running causes havoc with some apps like Firefox that have file resources that have not been locked (just try updating xulrunner when Firefox or Thunderbird is open)," blogged Fedora developer Richard Hughes.
Seems to me adding features to the package system that can determine and possibly correct such things (ie, closing Firefox or Thunderbird) would be the better way to go rather than force me to have to reboot. Hopefully it will retain the capability to install new software while updates are pending. I'd hate to have to reboot to install some tiny dependency. (A restart is required before you can install libfoo. Ugh!)