For fun, compare the rate of technological advance in the U.S. with that of the devoutly non-religious Soviet Russia or Communist China throughout the cold war. I think you could make an argument that Russia and China were theocracies for much of the Stalinist period. For example I read that Mao apparently gave a speech which was interpreted as him saying that quarks were the fundamental constituent of matter. After that Chinese physicists were careful not to publish papers that might contradict the great man. In Russia Lysenkoism was famously the officially supported theory of agriculture. And in in Nazi Germany relativity and quantum mechanics were denounced as "Jewish physics" and physicists studying them were fired, which in a rare instance of poetic justice was probably not very helpful to the German atom bomb project. I think the Nazis would have messed up science far more if they had stayed in power longer and created the sort of Dark Ages agricultural slave empire they obviously planned.
Obviously Chinese, German or Russian social scientists were under much more obvious pressure to publish ideologically orthodox papers during their respective theocracies than physicist or biologists. Regardless of whether Nazism as religions, they behaved like intolerant monotheisms socially. In fact they were probably far worse since they existed in an age where orthodoxy could be enforced, rather than mere orthopraxy. This by the way is what Orwell was worried about - the ability of 20th Century totalitarianism to get inside people's heads.
By contrast America has lots of religion, but more importantly it has lots of religions, possibly because the Constitutional prohibition on an established state church allows them to survive. In the China or Russia lots of believers in the official religion ended up being crushed by the State because they were on the wrong side of a doctrinal dispute.
So at the risk of stating the obvious I'd say that a theocracy leads to science being suppressed, not a large number of competing religions. Competition is good, and that something that atheists, Communists and Gaia worshippers should understand as well as the believers in older traditional religions.
It's pretty funny how the "technorati" that keep repeating pretentious Web 2.0 claptrap about "digital lives" seem to be totally ignorant of Usenet 1.0 concepts like sarcasm, irony and trolling and as well as technology and are therefore very vulnerable to being teased. Looks like the Eternal September will continue to bring fresh meat to bitter old veterans like us.
It redirects to a link on nimp.org which is the last measure - a load of shock sites and a loud samples. If you have flash or javascript enabled it will crash the browser with essentially a forkbomb. I opened it in Opera with flash and javascript off and it looks like it's trying a Java exploit too.
It's a bad idea I think to put government agents in a situation where beating technical information out of you is part of guarding National Security. Maybe they are 24 fans.
Can't you guys work out a way to write French without the accents? German substitutes e.g. ü to ue. Anyhow naïve can be correctly written naive in English. So GP could just use that if he can't remember the html character entities. Spelling it with the tréma in an otherwise English post seems a little prétentieux, don't you think?
I wonder if anyone has thought of tagging prison uniforms with a machine readable prisoner ID? I guess prisons have vast numbers of cameras and microphones, you could hook them up to a computers and track people without any bluetooth bug. You could split the communal areas into smaller units and make the prisoners show their machine readable prisoner ID to enter.
It'll be good preparation for the world of work even if you don't get any useful information.
Yeah, I wondered about that too. If you look at the progress of modulation technology the trend is for signals to look like white noise. And spread spectrum allows a bunch of signals in the same band, all beneath each other's noise floor thanks to the magic of despreading. Plus in a cell based system you'd want to minimise the RF power radiated outside the cell because it's wasted.
You could cover the planet in spread spectrum communication cells and have no emissions into space. Even broadcast systems are probably hard to detect from space, let alone light years away.
They are limited by physics (or at least what we understand of it). "Radio waves" are just photons. If a culture is going to communicate wirelessly, they'll need to use photons. They are limited by physics but not by what we understand of it. Maybe there a subspace waves or something which can propagate faster or longer. Certainly photons have significant downsides as an interstellar communication mechanism. They only travel at c and the inverse square law makes them hard to detect.
It's possible that since we're only a few hundred years from developing science and technology, radio waves are the just the best we can do. In another few hundred years we will understand enough physics to generate some sort of FTL signalling mechanism. I'm thinking of a something on the lines of an Alcubierre warp drive but optimised purely for communication. By definition of course, I can't explain how it would work. The Alcubierre warp drive needs the mass of Jupiter in exotic matter, a hypothetical substance that bends space time the oppositw way. But some of the papers that he inspired can build shortcuts in space time without exotic matter. All of them require vast amounts of energy though, far beyond our current technological capabilities. But if you extrapolate current progress for a few hundred years, it's not impossible that sending enough photons to communicate through such a mechanism might be possible.
All the older alien civilations tried photon based SETI for a while and gave up because they didn't find anything. Then hundreds of years later they discover FTL signalling and use that to communicate. Because it's better suited, once you have it you make first contact pretty much instantly. Even if they still listen for radio waves the radio sphere from Earth is ~50 years wide, and gets very faint at the edges. The odds of it hitting a listening alien civilisation are rather low.
The interesting effect of this would be that there would be a natural prime directive. If you have a civilisation a couple of thousand light years away, radio waves are not really usable to communicate. But once both of you discover FTL signalling, you can chat away.
If you're scrolling though this, don't worry. There are only another two to three pages of posts about "begging the question". Keep scrolling, don't lose heart. It's not that far.
I think the way it will end up working is that YouTube pay for allocated bandwidth to the users rather than the users can request bandwidth from YouTube for exactly that reason.
Remember this is an unreleased game. It's likely that they would use UV EPROMS right up until the final release when they'd commit to a binary to be produced as mask roms. That way they could use the time honoured method of burning a batch of EPROMS, testing them, erasing them under UV and burning a new batch.
Actually back when these things were still used I never worked on a project that was high volume enough to justify a mask prom. The break even point was about ten thousand chips IIRC. I worked on a system where the production run was only a few hundred per firmware revison so we always used EPROM. Then again you could get chips that were physically EPROM but had a plastic package and no window. They could be programmed in the field, but only once.
It's a Intel D2763-4. Apparantly it's 8K*8, available in either windowed or OTP versions. It's not really clear how it differs from the very popular 2764.
But how can jailbreak my iPod touch after I upgrade?
You know it would be good for security if the touch wasn't sold 'jailed'. Then I wouldn't depend on security holes to be able to install third party applications.
At home I have a PC and I can install things since I have local access. But I can still patch the machine so random people on the internet can't install things. This is actually quite useful. Ironically enough for most people an unpatched iPod touch is actually the reverse of this. They can't install applications because they aren't geeky enough to work through the jailbreaking process. But websites they visit could easily put a malformed TIFF somewhere and steal their passwords.
I wonder if you could make a OS X exploit that works on both ARM and x86. You'd need to find a sequence of four bytes that was a NOP or something harmless on one architecture and a jump on the other?
I was thinking of something like this
0x67 0xE9 Lo Hi
Which is a jump rel16 on x86, overriden by the address size prefix. On a little endian ARM this looks like this
0xHiLoE967.
Now if rel16 was negative and between 0 and -256 I could make it Hi=0xFF. Which used to mean NV, i.e. the instruction would be a NOP regardless of the other bits. Unfortunately NV is deprecated and the instruction space is used for new instructions. Which makes this code harder to write. It's probably possible though.
But if the guy watching youtube doesn't get a minimum number of packets the video will stutter and keep buffering. Basically it will be unwatchable.
But a torrent will just take a bit longer to download. On busses like USB streamed media is actually a different class, isochronous from non latency sensitive transfers which use bulk transfers. It seems likely to me that something like this will have to happen on heavily loaded TCP/IP networks. That way streamed, latency sensitive connections will allocate the bandwidth they need and torrents will take up whatever is left. Which is what happens on USB. I think QOS does it to some extent, but I'm not sure how well that is supported by routers, which would seem to be necessary.
I think a non neutral network will work like this. You go to youtube. The youtube server talks to a box that connects youtube to the network and a allocated a multicast channel, or joins you to an existing one. At the point you have an isochronous channel from youtube to you. Whereas if you have a torrent it will just what bandwidth is left. Bittorrent is good at using whatever bandwidth is available.
If USB was designed according to principle of "Network Neutrality" then every time I tried to copy a large file my USB speakers would stutter and my USB mouse would become unusable. Chucking more bandwidth at the problem wouldn't help either. Bulk transfers, like torrents, are designed to use whatever bandwdth they can.
I said "some future mutated version". I don't think that life was designed by an intelligent being, but maybe some of the research the ID people do might end up being useful for some other, completely unrelated subject. E.g. the Swedish Church records were created by people who were almost certainly creationists but they have been used for twins studies for example.
In some ways the genealogical database the Church of the Latter Day Saints or Mormons could be useful in the future. I'm not sure if they publish them though.
Chinese medicine was based on principles like chi that were, to be blunt, utter nonsense. And yet they found out about that wormwood could treat malaria. Now modern science can leverage that discovery to work out the active ingredient -
It's possible to discover interesting stuff even if you're completely wrong about theory.
In an odd sort of way humans discovered artemisinin using a technique a bit like evolution. Presumably herbalists tested loads of herbs on loads of sick people and made a note of which ones treated which illness. They didn't know enough chemistry to design a drug, but then again neither do we yet. But a brute force test of all herbs on all diseases combined with decent record keeping did solve the problem.
I think that's my point. That people doing research is good, regardless of whether their world view is correct or not. They might stumble on something that is later useful.
But Mac users are oppressed! I went on the chans and posted a picture of my new Macbook Air with the text "My Daddy just bought me a Macbook Air" and was banned for something called "faggotry". Whatever that is. Where ever I go on the Internet it's the same.
Of course it ought to be done in such a way that doesn't prevent people from jailbreaking their units if they want to. How will that work? The iPhone was supposed to be locked down like a cellphone and the Touch inherited that. If you can jailbreak a machine you can also run arbitrary code on it by definition. Which means it is insecure.
Look at it from their point of view. A few percent of their users probably use 50% or more of their resources. The rest of them probably use their internet connection to pick up email, look at YouTube videos and surf the web. Even worse the fact that the network is loaded down with bittorrent makes things like Youtube and web access slow down for the majority. From a business perspective it's actually better to lose a bandwidth heavy customer and replace him with ten non bandwidth heavy ones.
So you're saying that if you're downloading something over a torrent your packets should have the same priority as someone who's watching a YouTube video? That probably explains why YouTube playback is so crappy during peak hours.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously Chinese, German or Russian social scientists were under much more obvious pressure to publish ideologically orthodox papers during their respective theocracies than physicist or biologists. Regardless of whether Nazism as religions, they behaved like intolerant monotheisms socially. In fact they were probably far worse since they existed in an age where orthodoxy could be enforced, rather than mere orthopraxy. This by the way is what Orwell was worried about - the ability of 20th Century totalitarianism to get inside people's heads.
By contrast America has lots of religion, but more importantly it has lots of religions, possibly because the Constitutional prohibition on an established state church allows them to survive. In the China or Russia lots of believers in the official religion ended up being crushed by the State because they were on the wrong side of a doctrinal dispute.
So at the risk of stating the obvious I'd say that a theocracy leads to science being suppressed, not a large number of competing religions. Competition is good, and that something that atheists, Communists and Gaia worshippers should understand as well as the believers in older traditional religions.
It's pretty funny how the "technorati" that keep repeating pretentious Web 2.0 claptrap about "digital lives" seem to be totally ignorant of Usenet 1.0 concepts like sarcasm, irony and trolling and as well as technology and are therefore very vulnerable to being teased. Looks like the Eternal September will continue to bring fresh meat to bitter old veterans like us.
Another slice of flame grilled newbie anyone?
It redirects to a link on nimp.org which is the last measure - a load of shock sites and a loud samples. If you have flash or javascript enabled it will crash the browser with essentially a forkbomb. I opened it in Opera with flash and javascript off and it looks like it's trying a Java exploit too.
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Last-Measure
It's a bad idea I think to put government agents in a situation where beating technical information out of you is part of guarding National Security. Maybe they are 24 fans.
Can't you guys work out a way to write French without the accents? German substitutes e.g. ü to ue. Anyhow naïve can be correctly written naive in English. So GP could just use that if he can't remember the html character entities. Spelling it with the tréma in an otherwise English post seems a little prétentieux, don't you think?
I wonder if anyone has thought of tagging prison uniforms with a machine readable prisoner ID? I guess prisons have vast numbers of cameras and microphones, you could hook them up to a computers and track people without any bluetooth bug. You could split the communal areas into smaller units and make the prisoners show their machine readable prisoner ID to enter.
It'll be good preparation for the world of work even if you don't get any useful information.
Don't click notlong.com link in parent. Nasty stuff.
Yeah, I wondered about that too. If you look at the progress of modulation technology the trend is for signals to look like white noise. And spread spectrum allows a bunch of signals in the same band, all beneath each other's noise floor thanks to the magic of despreading. Plus in a cell based system you'd want to minimise the RF power radiated outside the cell because it's wasted.
You could cover the planet in spread spectrum communication cells and have no emissions into space. Even broadcast systems are probably hard to detect from space, let alone light years away.
I guess they would spend it trying to pick holes in evolutionary theory in a variety of ways. Assuming they really believe in what they say.
It's possible that since we're only a few hundred years from developing science and technology, radio waves are the just the best we can do. In another few hundred years we will understand enough physics to generate some sort of FTL signalling mechanism. I'm thinking of a something on the lines of an Alcubierre warp drive but optimised purely for communication. By definition of course, I can't explain how it would work. The Alcubierre warp drive needs the mass of Jupiter in exotic matter, a hypothetical substance that bends space time the oppositw way. But some of the papers that he inspired can build shortcuts in space time without exotic matter. All of them require vast amounts of energy though, far beyond our current technological capabilities. But if you extrapolate current progress for a few hundred years, it's not impossible that sending enough photons to communicate through such a mechanism might be possible.
All the older alien civilations tried photon based SETI for a while and gave up because they didn't find anything. Then hundreds of years later they discover FTL signalling and use that to communicate. Because it's better suited, once you have it you make first contact pretty much instantly. Even if they still listen for radio waves the radio sphere from Earth is ~50 years wide, and gets very faint at the edges. The odds of it hitting a listening alien civilisation are rather low.
The interesting effect of this would be that there would be a natural prime directive. If you have a civilisation a couple of thousand light years away, radio waves are not really usable to communicate. But once both of you discover FTL signalling, you can chat away.
If you're scrolling though this, don't worry. There are only another two to three pages of posts about "begging the question". Keep scrolling, don't lose heart. It's not that far.
I think the way it will end up working is that YouTube pay for allocated bandwidth to the users rather than the users can request bandwidth from YouTube for exactly that reason.
Some of these chips are clearly EPROMS, you can see the quartz window peeking out from under a label
http://www.flickr.com/photos/vonguard/2429248669/
Remember this is an unreleased game. It's likely that they would use UV EPROMS right up until the final release when they'd commit to a binary to be produced as mask roms. That way they could use the time honoured method of burning a batch of EPROMS, testing them, erasing them under UV and burning a new batch.
Actually back when these things were still used I never worked on a project that was high volume enough to justify a mask prom. The break even point was about ten thousand chips IIRC. I worked on a system where the production run was only a few hundred per firmware revison so we always used EPROM. Then again you could get chips that were physically EPROM but had a plastic package and no window. They could be programmed in the field, but only once.
Here's a picture of the chip
http://www.flickr.com/photos/vonguard/2429242881/in/set-72157604647023310/
It's a Intel D2763-4. Apparantly it's 8K*8, available in either windowed or OTP versions. It's not really clear how it differs from the very popular 2764.
http://www.cpushack.net/chippics/EPROM/2763/
Hmm so many people have told me.
But how can jailbreak my iPod touch after I upgrade?
You know it would be good for security if the touch wasn't sold 'jailed'. Then I wouldn't depend on security holes to be able to install third party applications.
At home I have a PC and I can install things since I have local access. But I can still patch the machine so random people on the internet can't install things. This is actually quite useful. Ironically enough for most people an unpatched iPod touch is actually the reverse of this. They can't install applications because they aren't geeky enough to work through the jailbreaking process. But websites they visit could easily put a malformed TIFF somewhere and steal their passwords.
I wonder if you could make a OS X exploit that works on both ARM and x86. You'd need to find a sequence of four bytes that was a NOP or something harmless on one architecture and a jump on the other?
I was thinking of something like this
0x67 0xE9 Lo Hi
Which is a jump rel16 on x86, overriden by the address size prefix. On a little endian ARM this looks like this
0xHiLoE967.
Now if rel16 was negative and between 0 and -256 I could make it Hi=0xFF. Which used to mean NV, i.e. the instruction would be a NOP regardless of the other bits. Unfortunately NV is deprecated and the instruction space is used for new instructions. Which makes this code harder to write. It's probably possible though.
Yeah, but you can digg him down!
I heard Scientific American has dropped Bjorn Lomberg from its Friends List and made all future issues Friends Only too.
God help us all. I used to love reading my Dad's collection of back issues of SciAm from the 60's when I was a kid.
But if the guy watching youtube doesn't get a minimum number of packets the video will stutter and keep buffering. Basically it will be unwatchable.
But a torrent will just take a bit longer to download. On busses like USB streamed media is actually a different class, isochronous from non latency sensitive transfers which use bulk transfers. It seems likely to me that something like this will have to happen on heavily loaded TCP/IP networks. That way streamed, latency sensitive connections will allocate the bandwidth they need and torrents will take up whatever is left. Which is what happens on USB. I think QOS does it to some extent, but I'm not sure how well that is supported by routers, which would seem to be necessary.
I think a non neutral network will work like this. You go to youtube. The youtube server talks to a box that connects youtube to the network and a allocated a multicast channel, or joins you to an existing one. At the point you have an isochronous channel from youtube to you. Whereas if you have a torrent it will just what bandwidth is left. Bittorrent is good at using whatever bandwidth is available.
If USB was designed according to principle of "Network Neutrality" then every time I tried to copy a large file my USB speakers would stutter and my USB mouse would become unusable. Chucking more bandwidth at the problem wouldn't help either. Bulk transfers, like torrents, are designed to use whatever bandwdth they can.
I said "some future mutated version". I don't think that life was designed by an intelligent being, but maybe some of the research the ID people do might end up being useful for some other, completely unrelated subject. E.g. the Swedish Church records were created by people who were almost certainly creationists but they have been used for twins studies for example.
http://www.genline.com/databasen/
In some ways the genealogical database the Church of the Latter Day Saints or Mormons could be useful in the future. I'm not sure if they publish them though.
Chinese medicine was based on principles like chi that were, to be blunt, utter nonsense. And yet they found out about that wormwood could treat malaria. Now modern science can leverage that discovery to work out the active ingredient -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisinin
It's possible to discover interesting stuff even if you're completely wrong about theory.
In an odd sort of way humans discovered artemisinin using a technique a bit like evolution. Presumably herbalists tested loads of herbs on loads of sick people and made a note of which ones treated which illness. They didn't know enough chemistry to design a drug, but then again neither do we yet. But a brute force test of all herbs on all diseases combined with decent record keeping did solve the problem.
I think that's my point. That people doing research is good, regardless of whether their world view is correct or not. They might stumble on something that is later useful.
But Mac users are oppressed! I went on the chans and posted a picture of my new Macbook Air with the text "My Daddy just bought me a Macbook Air" and was banned for something called "faggotry". Whatever that is. Where ever I go on the Internet it's the same.
Look at it from their point of view. A few percent of their users probably use 50% or more of their resources. The rest of them probably use their internet connection to pick up email, look at YouTube videos and surf the web. Even worse the fact that the network is loaded down with bittorrent makes things like Youtube and web access slow down for the majority. From a business perspective it's actually better to lose a bandwidth heavy customer and replace him with ten non bandwidth heavy ones.
Actually they are all evil megalomaniacs who used ideology to gain absolute power.
So you're saying that if you're downloading something over a torrent your packets should have the same priority as someone who's watching a YouTube video? That probably explains why YouTube playback is so crappy during peak hours.
Yeah, Safari is great on the iPod touch. I can browse to a web page to jailbreak the machine.
I can't imagine why anyone would think it was insecure.