The info-to-Mars idea should be taken seriously.
It's not as stupid as it sounds.
Suppose you think you have an idea which is way ahead of its time, and requires maybe a couple of centuries to be useful. And suppose an asteroid wipes out life on Earth in 35 years from now. Then you would really want your idea to be sitting on Mars ready for future life forms to make use of.
In fact, I think that whole encyclopedias and books which explain "How to restart civilisation" should be sent to Mars for safe-keeping.
Even if we don't get hit by an asteroid, future generations will take a look at whatever is written on Mars-mission probes and may finally understand what the great idea is good for, whereas on Earth it could easily be neglected.
There are two obvious applications of this
sort of protocol. One is to a network consisting of a very small set of LEOs. Suppose you are a really poor country with just one LEO in your military comms network. Then to communicate between your command and control centre and your troops, you have to be able to cope with large delays, waiting for the LEO to come overhead etc.
A second application is to a network of submarines which rarely surface, or to network nodes which are often out of communication, e.g. military back-pack radios which are used only once a day for 1 or 10 seconds, to minimize probability of detection.
They should have phrased the protocol more generally so that it takes into account all of
those sorts of nets too.
I don't know if this original, but I worked out
from first principles that gravity is caused
by "shade" from gravitons.
In other words, all objects in the universe emit gravitons, and these exert a force on objects that they weakly itneract with. When you have two objects near each other, they shade each other from the cosmic background graviton flux. As a result, instead of each object having the same force on them from all directions, they now have less force on them from the shaded direction. So the two objects fall towards each other. The force is, coincidentally, proportional to inverse square of distance.
However, a small correction factor is required. The thinning effect of a nearby object is not proportional to the amount of matter in it exactly, because the object shades itself from gravitions. Therefore the correct formula is an integral of an inverse exponential with respect to how deeply the gravitons have passed through the material.
The effect of "self-shading" from gravitons implies that the force law must be corrected so that the gravitional force is smaller than the inverse square of distance for smaller distances.
Conversely, as you get further away, the correction is positive relative to the inverse square law.
This theory also helps to explain so-called missing dark matter, and of course it explains the expansion of the universe. It also has strong implications for black holes and the big bang, because it implies that the force of gravity is bounded by the total mass of the universe multiplied by a weak interaction factor.
It explains lots of other strange things too.
The joke back in 1985/86, when Apple was suing
Atari, Commodore and MS etc. for using windows
(which Apple appropriated fair and square from
Xerox etc.) was:
Q. How many Apple employees does it take to change a light globe?
A. Three. One to change the light globe. One to patent the look-and-feel of the method of changing the light globe. And one to sue anyone who tries to use the same method.
It's sad that after all this time, Apple still
sees such lawyering as a core component of its business.
I don't think it has anything to do with the baby boomer generation.
What's happening is that the Internet poses a real threat to governments. The Internet permits people to communicate and access information without having to go through the government or commercial entities (which can reach an accommodation with the government). The danger is that people are starting to think for themselves, and they're forming social structures independent of the government.
Worst of all, people are finding out from the Internet what the rest of the population of their country and of the world is really like. REal people have much more interest in sex than anyone realised before. Pretty soon, the general population may come to believe that sex is normal, and that looking at other people having sex is normal. This is a very serious threat to governments, who have been telling their people that pleasure is bad and abnormal. Good people work in offices and achieve a good standard living and contribute to the GNP, blah, blah....
For just the same reason that drugs had to be made illegal during the cold war to prevent the western world from losing the will to fight for and defend capitalism, so now it necessary to prevent large numbers of people organising independently of the government. We see the Chinese crack-down on Falun Gong as bad. But the Chinese do this for exactly the same reason that western governments crack down on the Internet. We have nothing to be smug about!!!!
Being only sixteen, you wouldn't have known at first hand that SA used to astonish the rest of Australia with its enlightened outlook. The first state of Australia to give women the vote. The first state in Australia to have a nudist beach. The first state to permit a wide range of behaviours which were illegal at the time in other states. The first to decriminalise marijuana for personal use.
But during the last 10 years, we have turned into the ``Wowser State''. We're the kind of place that is pitied by our neightbours now. I think that when the economy of a State goes downhill, the creative and enlightened people leave, and only the people without the skills required to emmigrate are left. So you end up with things going further and further downhill. In both Australia and the USA, the most wealthy States are the most tolerant, more or less. SA is becoming poorer and poorer now. So I see no hope in sight.
South Australia is not called the ``Cinderella State'' for nothing. No one ever invites us to anything because we're so embarrassing. And this little piece of hysterical legislation caps off the other stupid legislation provided by the current State government. The guy who put this legislation together is shortly to retire, after a long litany of repressive legislation. He's from another generation that doesn't understand VCRs.
We can't have another election for 6 months or so. Our only hope now is for a bolt of lightning to hit our State Parliament House.
The legislation is serious. The SA police are the most anti-fun, anti-pleasure police in all of Australia. SA residents should take this very seriously indeed!!
I've been listening to this stuff about the
lower-than-expected number of genes for a while now, and it is surprising to me that no one has mentioned the less of chaos theory. Chaos theory is the study of systems which have very simple equations of motion, but which have an extremely compilcated behaviour.
So... even quite a simple creature, such as an insect, can have very complex behaviour, even with simple equations of motion. So it's really the system structure that matters, not the number of parameters in the system specification.
And remember that computers are very simple indeed. They're just interconnected switches and things. But the program loaded into the hardware makes it complex. So the complexity of human beings comes from the ability to load programs and execute them.
In my experience, as soon as an employer has given the employees a free education or training, they immediately find another better, higher-paying job, like within a couple of months.
Since it's difficult to bind employees legally, here's my solution. First you get the employees to take out loans to do the training. Then you pay off their loan for them over, say, 2-3 years. But if they jump ship, they pay their own loan.
When I first got started in comms, I asked to see the specifications of the ISO layering standards etc. etc. I was given ``recommendations''. I asked for the _real_ standards. They told me there weren't any. Just ``recommendations''. That sounded a bit weak to me. But I was told that if the ITU (then called CCITT) called them standards, then some countries would refuse to go along. I.e. the idea was that calling them mere ``recommendations'' was part of diplomacy.
Then later when I started learning the Internet protocols, I wanted to see the ``recommendations''. But all I could find was ``Requests for Comments''. Once again, I asked to see the _real_ recommendations. And once again, it turned out that there were none.
It seems to me that ``standards'' are just not politically/diplomatically accepted. It's all done by subtle diplomacy. ``Raise a flag and see if anyone salutes it'', as you say in America, or ``fly a kite and see anyone shoots it down'', as we say in Australia.
Could we perhaps have pictures of the different generations of the slashdot.org hardware? I imagine the original was a personal PC, and the current generation is a wall of rack-mounts tended by operators in white lab-coats, in an assault-proof windowless building surrounded by barbed wire, angry dogs and security guards.
The CRA handbook of 1988 (1st student edition) says the Earth is 5.9763 e21 tons. That must have been rounded up in the school books, but seems to indicate that the change is less than claimed, and does not increase the precision.
It should be noted that the original Planete des Singes of Pierre Boulle in French featured a huge amount of nudity, and the star character experiences a lot of it at close quarters. Will the remake follow the book accurately? If so, it will not be able to be screened in the USA -- only France!
90% of Australia has already come through fine at this point (UTC 15:02 Fri 31 Dec 1999 = Adelaide time 01:32 Sat 1 Jan 2000). We're just waiting on one last time zone to go through it. But not a single failure of any kind related to y2k has been reported by anyone anywhere in Australia yet, as far as I know.
Considering how similar Australia is to the US in many ways, I think you're all going to be disappointed if you wanted to see things break down.
Of course the real y2k as far as unix machines and much other gear is at UTC midnight, which is not for another 9 hours. If something will happen then, then there will be no warning from the East.
By the way, best of luck to all you Americans who have nuclear missiles targetted on your cities.
And just one last point, there was one little rush on the supermarkets here on the last day -- sales of baked beans doubled.
Way back in the olden days in Australia, about 1800 AD, there was not enough money. So people used rum as a currency. This went on for about 10-20 years, until money could be printed in the new colony.
I suggest that you immediately go out and purchase about $2000 worth of rum. It could be a better investment than Internet stocks if things go well.
But seriously though, I'm very afraid that nothing at all is going to fail, and a lot of people are going to verrrry unhappy!
Until I read Tom's comments, I was starting to be persuaded that GPL is the best, because of the ever-present danger of `embrace and extend', which can happen if a big powerful company gets important software, e.g. Perl, and integrates it with commercial software and makes it difficult for others to then go back to the original free item.
The kind of thing I am thinking of is a company like MS grabbing software like Mosaic or Netscape and integrating it into commercial software, then modifiying its interfaces so that people feel obliged to use the closed-source software and abandon the open software because it wilts due to lack of resources to keep up. If Mosaic had been GPLed, presumably IE could not have become dominant as it has. Now linux users have no really first class, comprehensive open-source browser. (Netscape crashes/hangs too often on linux to be called first-class.)
The MS IE situation is the sort of evil which a good licence should prevent. So does the AL prevent this kind of thing? Maybe not. Would it prevent the creation of MS-Perl right now, which could be integrated and `extended' by `innovations' by an evil mega-company? In fact, theoretically not, but in practice it would.
I'm starting to see a point here. If Mosaic and Netscape had been under the AL from their inception, open source developers would not have felt aliented from them -- they would have been able to see the code, and they would have developed very strongly as Perl has. The strength of Perl is not the compulsion placed on developers by the licence, but rather the fact that there is no feeling of alienation, such as the Sun "community" licence causes, or even the Mozilla licence. Both of these latter seem not to have generated much enthusiasm from open source developers, and maybe that's why they don't get very far.
So I think that the AL would have caused Mosaic an/or Netscape to develop into extremely strong free `products'. And then IE would not have happened.
Just one last point: it seems to me that the most important thing I want from software is the right to read it. Seeing the code is the important thing. And corporations should also wnat their users to see the code, because that improves the code, due to the `20,000 eyes looking' effect.
You may use, modify, distribute, and sell this program in any way you wish, provided you do not restrict others from doing the same.
I feel like this should be:
You may use, modify, distribute, sell
and see the source of this program in any way you wish, provided you do not restrict others from doing the same.
Some people think that the operating system is that big bunch of software which comes from the OS vendor on CD-ROMs (nowadays) or floppy disks, tape cartridges or reel-to-reel tapes (in the old days). That is the marketing definition of an operating system.
When the vendor comes to your office with ``the operating system'', or sells it to you in a shop, all the vendor cares about is the fact that there is an OS in all that software which they hand over. They don't care about the fact that there's heaps of other stuff there too.
In the technical sense of an operating system, things like compilers, text editors, image editors, word processors, and so forth, are not part of the operating system. The operating system is quite simply the memory resident software which controls access to system resources such as
CPU
RAM
monitor, keyboard, mouse
disk drives, CD-ROM drives
tape drives, printers and other peripherals and ports
network access.
Most importantly, the operating system has the function of loading software into RAM and running, while giving that software access to the above resources. This has been true for decades. There was a time before operating systems, when each set of punch-cards or roll of punch-tape had to have its own instructions to perform all system functions. But it became obvious after a while that it would be better to first load in some general purpose software which would stay resident during the days jobs. This resident operating software developed into the operating systems of today.
The only real point of ambiguity here is the question of whether a device driver (or kernel module) is part of the operating system. In fact, it is easy to answer this. A kernel module (or device driver) is part of the operating system as long as it is loaded into the kernel.
A consequence of this is that linux is not GNU/linux. You can only argue that if you use the marketing definition of an OS.
Since XFree86 is effectiely the device driver for the monitor, it could be argued that XFree86 is part of the operating system. And I think personally that it is. But only while you're actually using it.
What a coincidence. MS did the same thing in Australia, for the same price -- $6 million (but only Australian dollars = US$4 million) for unlimited MS software for Queensland schools for 5 years. (The state of Qld has about 2 million people.)
Obviously this will get kids hooked. The suit-wearers who cut these deals with MS don't know what harm they're doing. It reminds me of the girls who are paid to walk around SE Asian discos giving out free cigarettes.
It's dangerous, but also a sign of desperation. Linux is overtaking MS so fast now that MS simply doesn't have a chance.
As sure as night follows day, 80% of the way into the article, the discussion of excessive violence has to just append sex to violence: "drawing a line governing violent, sexual and degrading material". There seems to be some special neuron in the US mind which equates harmful activity with pleasurable, beneficial activity. Similarly, the V-chip was generalised to cover sex. There is a difference, in many parts of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not as stupid as it sounds.
Suppose you think you have an idea which is way ahead of its time, and requires maybe a couple of centuries to be useful. And suppose an asteroid wipes out life on Earth in 35 years from now. Then you would really want your idea to be sitting on Mars ready for future life forms to make use of. In fact, I think that whole encyclopedias and books which explain "How to restart civilisation" should be sent to Mars for safe-keeping.
Even if we don't get hit by an asteroid, future generations will take a look at whatever is written on Mars-mission probes and may finally understand what the great idea is good for, whereas on Earth it could easily be neglected.
city: Adelaide, South Australia
A second application is to a network of submarines which rarely surface, or to network nodes which are often out of communication, e.g. military back-pack radios which are used only once a day for 1 or 10 seconds, to minimize probability of detection.
They should have phrased the protocol more generally so that it takes into account all of those sorts of nets too.
In other words, all objects in the universe emit gravitons, and these exert a force on objects that they weakly itneract with. When you have two objects near each other, they shade each other from the cosmic background graviton flux. As a result, instead of each object having the same force on them from all directions, they now have less force on them from the shaded direction. So the two objects fall towards each other. The force is, coincidentally, proportional to inverse square of distance.
However, a small correction factor is required. The thinning effect of a nearby object is not proportional to the amount of matter in it exactly, because the object shades itself from gravitions. Therefore the correct formula is an integral of an inverse exponential with respect to how deeply the gravitons have passed through the material.
The effect of "self-shading" from gravitons implies that the force law must be corrected so that the gravitional force is smaller than the inverse square of distance for smaller distances. Conversely, as you get further away, the correction is positive relative to the inverse square law.
This theory also helps to explain so-called missing dark matter, and of course it explains the expansion of the universe. It also has strong implications for black holes and the big bang, because it implies that the force of gravity is bounded by the total mass of the universe multiplied by a weak interaction factor. It explains lots of other strange things too.
Could someone pass this on the NASA please?
Q. How many Apple employees does it take to change a light globe?
A. Three. One to change the light globe. One to patent the look-and-feel of the method of changing the light globe. And one to sue anyone who tries to use the same method.
It's sad that after all this time, Apple still sees such lawyering as a core component of its business.
What's happening is that the Internet poses a real threat to governments. The Internet permits people to communicate and access information without having to go through the government or commercial entities (which can reach an accommodation with the government). The danger is that people are starting to think for themselves, and they're forming social structures independent of the government.
Worst of all, people are finding out from the Internet what the rest of the population of their country and of the world is really like. REal people have much more interest in sex than anyone realised before. Pretty soon, the general population may come to believe that sex is normal, and that looking at other people having sex is normal. This is a very serious threat to governments, who have been telling their people that pleasure is bad and abnormal. Good people work in offices and achieve a good standard living and contribute to the GNP, blah, blah....
For just the same reason that drugs had to be made illegal during the cold war to prevent the western world from losing the will to fight for and defend capitalism, so now it necessary to prevent large numbers of people organising independently of the government. We see the Chinese crack-down on Falun Gong as bad. But the Chinese do this for exactly the same reason that western governments crack down on the Internet. We have nothing to be smug about!!!!
But during the last 10 years, we have turned into the ``Wowser State''. We're the kind of place that is pitied by our neightbours now. I think that when the economy of a State goes downhill, the creative and enlightened people leave, and only the people without the skills required to emmigrate are left. So you end up with things going further and further downhill. In both Australia and the USA, the most wealthy States are the most tolerant, more or less. SA is becoming poorer and poorer now. So I see no hope in sight.
South Australia is not called the ``Cinderella State'' for nothing. No one ever invites us to anything because we're so embarrassing. And this little piece of hysterical legislation caps off the other stupid legislation provided by the current State government. The guy who put this legislation together is shortly to retire, after a long litany of repressive legislation. He's from another generation that doesn't understand VCRs.
We can't have another election for 6 months or so. Our only hope now is for a bolt of lightning to hit our State Parliament House.
The legislation is serious. The SA police are the most anti-fun, anti-pleasure police in all of Australia. SA residents should take this very seriously indeed!!
I've been listening to this stuff about the lower-than-expected number of genes for a while now, and it is surprising to me that no one has mentioned the less of chaos theory. Chaos theory is the study of systems which have very simple equations of motion, but which have an extremely compilcated behaviour.
So... even quite a simple creature, such as an insect, can have very complex behaviour, even with simple equations of motion. So it's really the system structure that matters, not the number of parameters in the system specification.
And remember that computers are very simple indeed. They're just interconnected switches and things. But the program loaded into the hardware makes it complex. So the complexity of human beings comes from the ability to load programs and execute them.
Since it's difficult to bind employees legally, here's my solution. First you get the employees to take out loans to do the training. Then you pay off their loan for them over, say, 2-3 years. But if they jump ship, they pay their own loan.
And I think that this means that the net is not ready to abandon IP-based hosting.
Then later when I started learning the Internet protocols, I wanted to see the ``recommendations''. But all I could find was ``Requests for Comments''. Once again, I asked to see the _real_ recommendations. And once again, it turned out that there were none.
It seems to me that ``standards'' are just not politically/diplomatically accepted. It's all done by subtle diplomacy. ``Raise a flag and see if anyone salutes it'', as you say in America, or ``fly a kite and see anyone shoots it down'', as we say in Australia.
Here's a very worrying thing about the interactive key generation.
Whenever I use PGP 5.0i on linux to generate a key, it says immediately ``Thanks, that's enough'' after it requests random key input.
Question:
Does this mean that the interactive key generation is not taking any randomness from my input?
If so, then my keys are in big trouble.
When do we get pictures?
It should be noted that the original Planete des Singes of Pierre Boulle in French featured a huge amount of nudity, and the star character experiences a lot of it at close quarters. Will the remake follow the book accurately? If so, it will not be able to be screened in the USA -- only France!
Considering how similar Australia is to the US in many ways, I think you're all going to be disappointed if you wanted to see things break down.
Of course the real y2k as far as unix machines and much other gear is at UTC midnight, which is not for another 9 hours. If something will happen then, then there will be no warning from the East.
By the way, best of luck to all you Americans who have nuclear missiles targetted on your cities.
And just one last point, there was one little rush on the supermarkets here on the last day -- sales of baked beans doubled.
I suggest that you immediately go out and purchase about $2000 worth of rum. It could be a better investment than Internet stocks if things go well.
But seriously though, I'm very afraid that nothing at all is going to fail, and a lot of people are going to verrrry unhappy!
Until I read Tom's comments, I was starting to be persuaded that GPL is the best, because of the ever-present danger of `embrace and extend', which can happen if a big powerful company gets important software, e.g. Perl, and integrates it with commercial software and makes it difficult for others to then go back to the original free item.
The kind of thing I am thinking of is a company like MS grabbing software like Mosaic or Netscape and integrating it into commercial software, then modifiying its interfaces so that people feel obliged to use the closed-source software and abandon the open software because it wilts due to lack of resources to keep up. If Mosaic had been GPLed, presumably IE could not have become dominant as it has. Now linux users have no really first class, comprehensive open-source browser. (Netscape crashes/hangs too often on linux to be called first-class.)
The MS IE situation is the sort of evil which a good licence should prevent. So does the AL prevent this kind of thing? Maybe not. Would it prevent the creation of MS-Perl right now, which could be integrated and `extended' by `innovations' by an evil mega-company? In fact, theoretically not, but in practice it would.
I'm starting to see a point here. If Mosaic and Netscape had been under the AL from their inception, open source developers would not have felt aliented from them -- they would have been able to see the code, and they would have developed very strongly as Perl has. The strength of Perl is not the compulsion placed on developers by the licence, but rather the fact that there is no feeling of alienation, such as the Sun "community" licence causes, or even the Mozilla licence. Both of these latter seem not to have generated much enthusiasm from open source developers, and maybe that's why they don't get very far.
So I think that the AL would have caused Mosaic an/or Netscape to develop into extremely strong free `products'. And then IE would not have happened.
Just one last point: it seems to me that the most important thing I want from software is the right to read it. Seeing the code is the important thing. And corporations should also wnat their users to see the code, because that improves the code, due to the `20,000 eyes looking' effect.
I feel like this should be:When the vendor comes to your office with ``the operating system'', or sells it to you in a shop, all the vendor cares about is the fact that there is an OS in all that software which they hand over. They don't care about the fact that there's heaps of other stuff there too.
In the technical sense of an operating system, things like compilers, text editors, image editors, word processors, and so forth, are not part of the operating system. The operating system is quite simply the memory resident software which controls access to system resources such as
- CPU
- RAM
- monitor, keyboard, mouse
- disk drives, CD-ROM drives
- tape drives, printers and other peripherals and ports
- network access.
Most importantly, the operating system has the function of loading software into RAM and running, while giving that software access to the above resources. This has been true for decades. There was a time before operating systems, when each set of punch-cards or roll of punch-tape had to have its own instructions to perform all system functions. But it became obvious after a while that it would be better to first load in some general purpose software which would stay resident during the days jobs. This resident operating software developed into the operating systems of today.The only real point of ambiguity here is the question of whether a device driver (or kernel module) is part of the operating system. In fact, it is easy to answer this. A kernel module (or device driver) is part of the operating system as long as it is loaded into the kernel.
A consequence of this is that linux is not GNU/linux. You can only argue that if you use the marketing definition of an OS.
Since XFree86 is effectiely the device driver for the monitor, it could be argued that XFree86 is part of the operating system. And I think personally that it is. But only while you're actually using it.
What a coincidence.
MS did the same thing in Australia, for
the same price -- $6 million (but only
Australian dollars = US$4 million) for
unlimited MS software for Queensland schools
for 5 years.
(The state of Qld has about 2 million people.)
Obviously this will get kids hooked. The suit-wearers who cut these deals with MS don't know what harm they're doing.
It reminds me of the girls who are paid to walk around SE Asian discos giving out free cigarettes.
It's dangerous, but also a sign of desperation.
Linux is overtaking MS so fast now that MS simply doesn't have a chance.
As sure as night follows day, 80% of the way
into the article, the discussion of excessive
violence has to just append sex to violence:
"drawing a line governing violent, sexual and degrading material".
There seems to be some special neuron in the
US mind which equates harmful activity with
pleasurable, beneficial activity. Similarly,
the V-chip was generalised to cover sex.
There is a difference, in many parts of the world.