I, for one, would very much prefer to have my taxes handled by a program that I can verify directly the security of, and which multiple other people have already looked at who are not connected with the project.
Security by secrecy of algorithm works poorly at best, while security by overwhelming mathematical complexity (as expressed by the time required to solve a given instance by the most effecient method known), and many proofreading eyes tends to work better.
Heck, could even have the access point manufacturers' default configurations demand an email address to send logs to - that way, people might actually notice a computer they don't recognize in the email, and have an idea whether to turn on security or continue providing free internet.
Alternately, it seems reasonable to me to adopt a phenomic alphabet wherein the shape of a letter actually encodes the method of it's production during speech.
As it is adopted, computers will become more capable of handling text (the majority of the features of a letter will be boolean in nature, lending themselves to expression as a five or six-bit word, padded out to eight to allow special characters), and there will be much rejoicing in the camps of the LOTR geeks as the new letters (which happens to be the translation of "tengwar") spread through the world and increase the general level of sanity.
7 C is a good solid bit - 7 celsius degrees - above the freezing point of water - nothing crystalized because they didn't freeze them, just slowed them down to the point we couldn't tell if their tissue was alive or dead, and they weren't moving. The dogs were in a state where their bodies showed no activity for hours, but they certainly weren't frozen solid - again, lightly refrigerated for preservation, not deep-frozen.
...it's more that all cells take damage when frozen - in order to pull the freezer trick, you'd need to get your antifreeze - to keep crystal size down - into every cell in your body, not just the blood.
You'd also need to arrange for the heart and respiratory systems to thaw first, the way that the freezables do. Increased levels in those areas...
I suppose you could consider this something in that vicinity, but... farther away than some of the other options. Having no blood doesn't help with the freezing issues.
...Probably that, given that your body is actually rather thoroughly intact and the only real issue is that you're essentially "shut down" for a bit... nope, you're not dead, you are just difficult to distinguish from dead. Thye vast majority of your cells are still there, in perfectly functional state, just... not doing much functioning right now.
Works fine if you just define "dead" as "dead beyond all current or conceivable possibility of resucitation before the end of time" for theological purposes.
...this isn't cryogenic "freezing people", more like... refrigerating people so they last for a few hours. Think keeping milk cool so it'll keep for a day or two, not putting berries into deep-freeze for three months...
And it's a preservation technique - it requires the patient to be alive at the beginning. There's still not much you can do for a rotting corpse...
Wouldn't help much if you're needing an organ, either - but it could help tremendously with the surgery to put the organ in.
Actually, before the subject is revived - while they're in this state, everything is much easier to handle, no blood gushing out at you, etc. if you make an error, and you've got quite a bit longer to fix the trouble before you have to revive them.
Odd, though, the way this reminds me of the immortality tricks of heinlein's "methluselah's children"...
Quite... now, what would be a much nicer way of handling such is to carry around a nice little liveCD, with just enough to get networking and an X server and SSH... the computer goes down, talks funny on the network for a while, then comes back with it's exact config intact - assuming the network hasn't shut it off for talking funny, and can handle a computer restarting... no effect on the computer. Barely even spin the hard drive up...
Of course, now they've locked the bios on our computers - can't blame them, and I have a laptop now anyways.
But there are certainly things "cool" you can do with a computer that don't leave stupid messes, if you have a clue. And it's most useful if you've got a computer available that is yours and running a sane OS, but hey. Could at least get a browser & ssh up if not.
But then, that doesn't apply as well to apple laptops. Reasonably to x86 laptops, but not quite so easily to apple ones (at least, 'till they become all x86...)
Amen to that. I personally go crazy when I have to wait on a new machine for repaints of all the random crap that I don't want on the screen - which is why I have Gentoo installed here, with fluxbox, links and firefox for a browser, and gaim:)
I do believe that would be the "hidden variable" theory - which has fallen into disfavor with the majority of physicists - in which it is considered that the uncertainties observed in quantum mechanics are just an inability to observe some of the variables, and not pure randonymity. They tend to require very odd things like instantaneous interaction of particles in excess of the speed of light. They also tend to be inelegant.
Most physicists consider the universe to be true random with respect to collapsing states.
Yeah... Lazarus does kinda hit that part. Except it's his mother, not his grandmother...
although he's not his own ancestor, he was already born at that point. And making it difficult for him to get any with this young woman who happened to be his mother.
To those who took the time to actually build our interface, it is nearly impossible to effectively accomplish day-to-day tasks on either Windows or MacOS...
There actually is a fairly massive difference there - Linux is macrokernel, OS X is microkernel, and not very well arranged microkernel at that. They both can run POSIX programs, and have some other things in common, but how well they run them is very different.
See, the tricky part here is, you're counting the up-front time of setting the system up, learning how to configure it properly, and getting accustomed to the environment - and making the environment accustomed to you.
What you aren't counting are all of the problems you'll run into and have to deal with after the system is set up, where your typical windows user will bang their head against something they don't understand for a while, then spend money to get someone to fix it, where someone accustomed to their Linux system will often fairly quickly figure out what is wrong and fix it - or, you know, tell their system to update all packages and have a new, custom-compiled version of every updated package on their system.
There's also just plain work effeciency. On a Linux system that I've become accustomed to and have configured, I can generally do everything I need to do in a day with at most a couple keystrokes. I feel painfully crippled any time I touch a windows machine now - it feels like slogging through mud just to check email.
Mounting:"documents and settings" to local "documents and settings", for example, so you can finally have your configuration follow you on Windows networks the way it can on UNIX ones...
....So, (rather than just telling the computer not to allow certain sites), you go out and work for an hour or two, then buy a package from somewhere, probably reading some of the reviews of the package to make sure it's not idiotic, go through your software install procedure, then use it's GUI to tell it to block all sites under.XXX.
Alternately, you put one line in a text file, and the computer doesn't go to anything under.XXX........just who is doing this the hard way?
And that's perfectly fine for doing aluminum casting; now let's see you get aluminum from clay with it. Nobody was saying that you can't work aluminum with normal heats; it's quite a bit easier to heat than steel is, and that's perfectly doable with a little bit of air and some chunk charcoal. BTW, the whole setup would function better if you had something like a brake drum from a car (or just about any other sort of fire-resistant pot with a hole in the bottom) and some piping to get the air coming up through the hole in the bottom. It's actually fairly easy to soften, melt, and burn steel in such an arrangement, using either chunk charcoal or coal. (real charcoal burns quite noticeably hotter, albeit faster, than briquettes.)
But anyways, enough of me ranting about the forge in my backyard.
Or, you know, using a proper file server to serve data to windows machines... where your backups consist of the occasional 'tar -c ' to a tape drive, and if you catch the problem early enough you just tell it to roll back to a snapshot. And if they are... 'tar -x'. And then the restore on the windows machines goes something like "insert Knoppix CD, boot" then "dd/dev/hda". Or perhaps setup a new windows machine. Windows machines seem to not make as much sense in general when dealing with them.
You know, if they actually managed to fake those images I'll honestly be more impressed than if they did do the job of building a big pile of contained explosives with a few people on top. There are things like moving images of dust moving in parabolic low-G arcs - that requires either filming in a vacuum in a plane decending on a parabolic trajectory or CGI the likes of which I've still yet to see, and certianly wasn't available to fake the moon landing.
Building a rocket to the moon is easy, just expensive; pile explosives and put a person on top. faking good images of things on the moon without uber CGI and a set of supercomputers - that's what's massively difficult.
Oh, I'm sure that IBM is operating out of some percieved self-interest. I wouldn't trust them if I didn't think that's exactly what they are doing - it's just that at the moment, it happens to fit very nicely with how the patent system was supposed to work (actually very similar to the Open Source idea, just with a governmentally enforced incentive), and with our own interests.
Acting out of enlightened self-interest is nothing to be ashamed of. "If tempted by something that feels "altruistic," examine your motives and root out the self-deception. Then, if you still want to do it, wallow in it!" - Robert A. Heinlein.
I do find it sad that the article doesn't contain those origins of Firefox. I find it pleasantly amusing that Netscape could be seen as pulling an Atreides move when they threw themselves to open source, and now here we have it, this decendent of Netscape, coming back and challenging Internet Explorer's grip on the 'web. But then, I suppose I just like the comparison of open source developers to fremen and microsoft to house harkonnen...
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I, for one, would very much prefer to have my taxes handled by a program that I can verify directly the security of, and which multiple other people have already looked at who are not connected with the project.
Security by secrecy of algorithm works poorly at best, while security by overwhelming mathematical complexity (as expressed by the time required to solve a given instance by the most effecient method known), and many proofreading eyes tends to work better.
Heck, could even have the access point manufacturers' default configurations demand an email address to send logs to - that way, people might actually notice a computer they don't recognize in the email, and have an idea whether to turn on security or continue providing free internet.
Alternately, it seems reasonable to me to adopt a phenomic alphabet wherein the shape of a letter actually encodes the method of it's production during speech. As it is adopted, computers will become more capable of handling text (the majority of the features of a letter will be boolean in nature, lending themselves to expression as a five or six-bit word, padded out to eight to allow special characters), and there will be much rejoicing in the camps of the LOTR geeks as the new letters (which happens to be the translation of "tengwar") spread through the world and increase the general level of sanity.
7 C is a good solid bit - 7 celsius degrees - above the freezing point of water - nothing crystalized because they didn't freeze them, just slowed them down to the point we couldn't tell if their tissue was alive or dead, and they weren't moving. The dogs were in a state where their bodies showed no activity for hours, but they certainly weren't frozen solid - again, lightly refrigerated for preservation, not deep-frozen.
LOL! masterful application :) ...But essentially, yes. At least, that's how a sane religious person would handle it.
You'd also need to arrange for the heart and respiratory systems to thaw first, the way that the freezables do. Increased levels in those areas...
I suppose you could consider this something in that vicinity, but... farther away than some of the other options. Having no blood doesn't help with the freezing issues.
...Probably that, given that your body is actually rather thoroughly intact and the only real issue is that you're essentially "shut down" for a bit... nope, you're not dead, you are just difficult to distinguish from dead. Thye vast majority of your cells are still there, in perfectly functional state, just... not doing much functioning right now.
Works fine if you just define "dead" as "dead beyond all current or conceivable possibility of resucitation before the end of time" for theological purposes.
...this isn't cryogenic "freezing people", more like... refrigerating people so they last for a few hours. Think keeping milk cool so it'll keep for a day or two, not putting berries into deep-freeze for three months...
And it's a preservation technique - it requires the patient to be alive at the beginning. There's still not much you can do for a rotting corpse...
Wouldn't help much if you're needing an organ, either - but it could help tremendously with the surgery to put the organ in.
Actually, before the subject is revived - while they're in this state, everything is much easier to handle, no blood gushing out at you, etc. if you make an error, and you've got quite a bit longer to fix the trouble before you have to revive them.
Odd, though, the way this reminds me of the immortality tricks of heinlein's "methluselah's children"...
Quite... now, what would be a much nicer way of handling such is to carry around a nice little liveCD, with just enough to get networking and an X server and SSH... the computer goes down, talks funny on the network for a while, then comes back with it's exact config intact - assuming the network hasn't shut it off for talking funny, and can handle a computer restarting... no effect on the computer. Barely even spin the hard drive up...
Of course, now they've locked the bios on our computers - can't blame them, and I have a laptop now anyways.
But there are certainly things "cool" you can do with a computer that don't leave stupid messes, if you have a clue. And it's most useful if you've got a computer available that is yours and running a sane OS, but hey. Could at least get a browser & ssh up if not.
But then, that doesn't apply as well to apple laptops. Reasonably to x86 laptops, but not quite so easily to apple ones (at least, 'till they become all x86...)
Amen to that. I personally go crazy when I have to wait on a new machine for repaints of all the random crap that I don't want on the screen - which is why I have Gentoo installed here, with fluxbox, links and firefox for a browser, and gaim :)
I do believe that would be the "hidden variable" theory - which has fallen into disfavor with the majority of physicists - in which it is considered that the uncertainties observed in quantum mechanics are just an inability to observe some of the variables, and not pure randonymity. They tend to require very odd things like instantaneous interaction of particles in excess of the speed of light. They also tend to be inelegant.
Most physicists consider the universe to be true random with respect to collapsing states.
But then, I'm not a physicist.
Yeah... Lazarus does kinda hit that part. Except it's his mother, not his grandmother... although he's not his own ancestor, he was already born at that point. And making it difficult for him to get any with this young woman who happened to be his mother.
To those who took the time to actually build our interface, it is nearly impossible to effectively accomplish day-to-day tasks on either Windows or MacOS...
There actually is a fairly massive difference there - Linux is macrokernel, OS X is microkernel, and not very well arranged microkernel at that. They both can run POSIX programs, and have some other things in common, but how well they run them is very different.
See, the tricky part here is, you're counting the up-front time of setting the system up, learning how to configure it properly, and getting accustomed to the environment - and making the environment accustomed to you. What you aren't counting are all of the problems you'll run into and have to deal with after the system is set up, where your typical windows user will bang their head against something they don't understand for a while, then spend money to get someone to fix it, where someone accustomed to their Linux system will often fairly quickly figure out what is wrong and fix it - or, you know, tell their system to update all packages and have a new, custom-compiled version of every updated package on their system. There's also just plain work effeciency. On a Linux system that I've become accustomed to and have configured, I can generally do everything I need to do in a day with at most a couple keystrokes. I feel painfully crippled any time I touch a windows machine now - it feels like slogging through mud just to check email.
(although admittedly, there's stupidity in the way windows handles configuration, so it's not quite that easy.)
Mounting :"documents and settings" to local "documents and settings", for example, so you can finally have your configuration follow you on Windows networks the way it can on UNIX ones...
....So, (rather than just telling the computer not to allow certain sites), you go out and work for an hour or two, then buy a package from somewhere, probably reading some of the reviews of the package to make sure it's not idiotic, go through your software install procedure, then use it's GUI to tell it to block all sites under .XXX.
.XXX ........just who is doing this the hard way?
Alternately, you put one line in a text file, and the computer doesn't go to anything under
And that's perfectly fine for doing aluminum casting; now let's see you get aluminum from clay with it. Nobody was saying that you can't work aluminum with normal heats; it's quite a bit easier to heat than steel is, and that's perfectly doable with a little bit of air and some chunk charcoal.
BTW, the whole setup would function better if you had something like a brake drum from a car (or just about any other sort of fire-resistant pot with a hole in the bottom) and some piping to get the air coming up through the hole in the bottom. It's actually fairly easy to soften, melt, and burn steel in such an arrangement, using either chunk charcoal or coal. (real charcoal burns quite noticeably hotter, albeit faster, than briquettes.)
But anyways, enough of me ranting about the forge in my backyard.
dd, tar, etc. on a *nix platform - and Apache has something like 66% market share.
Or, you know, using a proper file server to serve data to windows machines... where your backups consist of the occasional 'tar -c ' to a tape drive, and if you catch the problem early enough you just tell it to roll back to a snapshot. /dev/hda". Or perhaps setup a new windows machine. Windows machines seem to not make as much sense in general when dealing with them.
And if they are... 'tar -x'.
And then the restore on the windows machines goes something like "insert Knoppix CD, boot" then "dd
You know, if they actually managed to fake those images I'll honestly be more impressed than if they did do the job of building a big pile of contained explosives with a few people on top.
There are things like moving images of dust moving in parabolic low-G arcs - that requires either filming in a vacuum in a plane decending on a parabolic trajectory or CGI the likes of which I've still yet to see, and certianly wasn't available to fake the moon landing.
Building a rocket to the moon is easy, just expensive; pile explosives and put a person on top. faking good images of things on the moon without uber CGI and a set of supercomputers - that's what's massively difficult.
Oh, I'm sure that IBM is operating out of some percieved self-interest. I wouldn't trust them if I didn't think that's exactly what they are doing - it's just that at the moment, it happens to fit very nicely with how the patent system was supposed to work (actually very similar to the Open Source idea, just with a governmentally enforced incentive), and with our own interests.
Acting out of enlightened self-interest is nothing to be ashamed of.
"If tempted by something that feels "altruistic," examine your motives and root out the self-deception. Then, if you still want to do it, wallow in it!" - Robert A. Heinlein.
I do find it sad that the article doesn't contain those origins of Firefox. I find it pleasantly amusing that Netscape could be seen as pulling an Atreides move when they threw themselves to open source, and now here we have it, this decendent of Netscape, coming back and challenging Internet Explorer's grip on the 'web. But then, I suppose I just like the comparison of open source developers to fremen and microsoft to house harkonnen...