I am not a Debian developer, but I have examined some of the mailing list stuff on delayed releases over the years.
Having to have the installer, particularly, ready and tested across every single architecture is a major reason for delayed Debian releases. So are release-critical bugs in a particular architecture. As one of the vast majority of Debian users who use x86 (actually now just switched to AMD64, which will become more important over time), it seems silly to wait months for a release because the bloody Motorola 68000 series port (to pick a hypothetical example) can't fix their bloody boot disks.
I've done some peer reviewing of conference papers. You don't get paid for that. You get paid bugger-all to be an editor of a scientific journal. Don Knuth, in a widely-distributed letter about this very topic, reports that journal editors-in-chief receive in the order of 6,000 to 20,000 USD per year - and he thinks this is excessive, when, the real payoff is having "editor of Journal of Foobar" on your CV. That's why people do it, not the meager financial rewards. Oh, and the opportunity to have a sneak preview of what everybody else in your discipline is up to.
And I disagree with your criticism of author-pays. For most academic institutions, a publication at a quality conference or major journal is worth much more than $1500 in research funding - which is what it costs to publish in a Public Library of Science journal. In any case, if you have a paper accepted to a conference, you have to go to present it. If the conference is in another country (and if you're not American, they usually are), it's very likely to cost more than $1500 to pay the conference entry fee, the hotel, the airfare, and so on.
For once, us Aussies saw this film well before you, last year. It was shown subtitled in arthouse theatres in the major cities. If the dubbing is done well, I actually think an English dub would be appropriate considering the film is set in Victorian England and it's a little strange having Englishmen chat away in japanese.
The movie's plot is geek heaven, being based around the age of steam and the engineers who made it happen. A key part of the film is set in the Crystal Palace for the opening of the Great Exhibition, and it's all beautifully drawn. As others have pointed out, the climactic ending sequence is spectacular, but far too drawn out. But, regardless, this movie is a blast.
One point that this article doesn't really come to grips with regards to stochastic testing is the "Oracle Problem". In essence, how do you know that the result of testing is the right answer? This is a particular problem with random-input testing, or any testing method that involves using automatic methods to generate a large number of tests.
#ifdef PLUG
My own research group works on methods to reduce this burden in a number of ways. One, my personal work, is on "semi-random" testing (we call it Adaptive Random Testing) which, we claim, detects more errors with fewer tests and reduces the problem that way. Another is "metamorphic testing" which tackles the oracle problem more directly by a slightly more sophisticated form of sanity checking assertions. You test the program with two (or more) related inputs, and check whether the outputs have the relationship you'd expect based on the inputs.
Unfortunately, the boss has an, um, slightly behind-the-times attitude to putting papers on the web; but if you search the DBLP bibliography server for T.Y. Chen you can get references for most of them.
#endif
However, I'd be the last to claim that we have a complete solution to the oracle problem; there will of course never be one. But it is a problem that will continue to make automated testing a challenge.
This is the problem with the software patent situation. As it's virtually impossible to write a non-trivial program that doesn't arguably infringe, say, IBM's patent portfolio, if you actually produce anything you can't sue IBM for patent infringement because they will countersue you into the dirt. However, if you don't actually produce anything, you can't infringe on their patents, leaving you free to sue them.
So the patent system is creating an incentive for small companies to concentrate on acting as IP toll collectors on ideas reinvented independently by other companies, rather than actually producing products, or for that matter actively selling their IP to companies to produce new products.
That's my explanation for why software patents are bad for people to whom the ideological arguments are lefty blathering.
LaTeX is designed for structural document markup, word processors do visual layout. Yes, I know LaTeX lets you tweak the appearance of documents manually, and word processors support styles to some extent, but they are fundamentally different. Getting layout from structure is easy; it's what LaTeX does whenever you run it. Deducing structure from document layout is much more difficult and in fact "AI-complete" in its full generality.
So, trying to support a more full-featured export than plain text from the OOO word processor might be too much to expect.
Haven't you heard about the Slashdot macro preprocessor and standard comment library? Amongst the standard comments there's:
libertarian_space_rant(EVENT): This EVENT shows that NASA is redundant and scrapped immediately. Space should be explored by private hands.
in_my_day_we_had_8_bits(NEW_PROC, OLD_PROC): I can't really see the point of the NEW_PROC. My first computer had an OLD_PROC, and it was perfectly adequate for random_app() then and would be perfectly adequate now. I'd prefer maker(NEW_PROC) concentrated on reducing costs and power consumption.
the_sky_is_falling(PROJECT): While PROJECT might have been feasible before September 11, the unprecedented threat of terrorism, which as all y'all know never existed before 2001, needs to be taken into consideration. How would we prevent terrorists attacking PROJECT and kiling people_involved(PROJECT)?
and most relevantly, i_made_my_excuses_and_left(SMARTPHONE_MODEL, DODGY_SEXUAL_PRACTICE)Hmmm. The SMARTPHONE_MODEL is a Symbian. That sounds just like Sybian. I never you you could use SMARTPHONE_MODEL for DODGY_SEXUAL_PRACTICE...tee he he.
Yes, Symbian sounds like Sybian. Yes, the idiot marketroids that chose that name should be reassigned to do PR for the Japanese whaling industry or something similarly rewarding. But we've all heard that joke every time a Symbian-related story appears on Slashdot and it's getting damned old.
Europeans don't as a rule take trains for a 1000-mile trip either. Where they *do* take trains is for trips of up to about 300 miles, where high-speed rail is faster and more convenient (no BS security screening, for instance). Nobody's expecting you to go coast-to-coast by rail.
What I can't understand is the fact you don't have high-speed rail in the densely populated northeast (and, no, the Acela doesn't count) which could easily support it - not to mention the shitty public transport in most of your larger cities.
By that argument, we'd never fund the arts at all. Entertainment doesn't stop in tough times, y'know - and, at least in the United States, the present is anything but a tough time by historical standards.
Essentially, what these people are doing is spending some of their cash to purchase the entertainment they want - more Enterprise. Unless the show has radically improved since the first series (that's the only one I've seen any of) I dunno why you'd bother, but I don't see anything wrong with it.
Have any of you guys ever met Zubrin? He's a monomaniac about Mars in the same way that Stallman is a monomaniac about free software (though Zubrin's political and diplomatic skills are considerably better than Stallman's).
This is not a criticism of either person; to achieve great things, you often need an obsessive, forceful advocate for them. I think his advocacy has contributed significantly to keeping a manned Mars mission on the long-term agenda for the space program. But, as you say, he does come across as a little strange.
I wonder, to take perhaps the most famous historical parallel, whether Spanish aristocrats who funded Columbus regarded him as a bit of a nutter?
If you actually read all of your computational theory text rather than just the powerpointy lecture notes your professor gave you, you might be aware of the actual nature of the proof. The proof says that no Turing machine (or equivalently powerful system) is capable of deciding the halting problem.
Now, the Church-Turing thesis says (roughly) that any computational system can be emulated by a Turing machine - in other words, if it's computable, it's computable on a Turing machine. This is not a mathematical statement; it can't be proven. However, nobody has been able to figure out a remotely plausible way to build a machine that is more powerful than a Turing machine over the past 60 years, so the thesis is pretty much universally accepted, and so the undecidability of the halting problem has been regarded as absolute.
Kieu argues that the quantum effects discussed in his paper can be used to "compute" useful functions that are not classically computable. If true, this would invalidate the Church-Turing thesis, not the proof for the halting problem.
I'm not saying the guy is correct; I'll believe it can be done when I see it. But your objection is based on an incomplete understanding of Turing's work. You can read Turing's original paper online if you do a Google search for it.
The halting problem cannot be solved for arbitrary Turing machines. Period. No algorithm, as we think of them, using quantum computers or not, will get around the fact that such a solution would create a logical inconsistency (a program could determine whether or not it itself would halt, and then do the opposite, but then it would have been wrong, which it can't be by assumption, and so reality bursts into flames). The only possible catch is that a technique that cannot be encoded in a Turing machine would not cause this particular logical inconsistency to arise.
You've got it in one. According to Kieu, his system is a non-computable process; you can't simulate what it does on a Turing machine. Hence your objection doesn't apply to his claims.
However, there are apparently lots of other objections.
Why merely crack RSA and radically speed up quantum physics simulations? That's aiming far too low.
Instead, Tien Kieu from my university wants to solve arbitrary Diophantine equations using quantum effects. If he's a) correct, and b) it becomes possible to create the required quantum behaviours for arbitrary equation, the following problems become solvable:
The halting problem for arbitrary Turing machines, with all that that would imply.
The Riemann hypothesis.
Goldbach's conjecture
Needless to say, to say people are sceptical of Kieu's ideas is an understatement, but it's fun to speculate about the "what if"...
You're probably thinking of the Nth country experiment. One point you may have missed is that the project designed a plutonium-based implosion weapon, not the uranium-based gun-type design discussed in the pop science article. Despite this, a couple of "undistinguished" new physics PhDs, who came from other sub-branches of the discipline rather than nuclear physics, came up with the design in about two years.
Vint Cerf's not getting the award for his current activities, he's getting it for what he did years ago when, amongst other things, he was jointly responsible for devising TCP/IP.
To draw a comparison, in later life Isaac Newton spent his time exploring rather idiosyncratic Bible interpretations, not to mention alchemy. That doesn't alter the fact that Newton's earlier scientific work ranks as one of the greatest achievements in science of all time.
Couldn't you also use an RC plane with explosives and videocam attached as an assissination method?
Yes. It's called a RQ-1 Predator, and the US military has a bunch of 'em. Your question was probably "could a modestly resourced group of people build something big enough to carry an assassination bomb?" The answer to this is also "yes" - check out this 1/8th scale B-52, and weep at the crash pictures.
Note that this thing was designed specifically as a B-52 replica and not as a utilitarian aircraft; if you were designing something like this for real you'd use fewer, bigger engines and a fuselage and wings designed for the purpose.
Similarly, you could build a UAV to carry drugs across the Mexican border, but that would be a much more difficult task, because of the required payload and range (you'd start to get into things bigger than the biggest commercial RC aircraft). The size required might be to the point where the gadget is quite visible and detectable on radar, which kind of negates the point. I'm not sure about the economics of such a scheme, either; conventional smuggling seems to work reasonably well.
As for "goodboy" uses, there are plenty. They'd be terribly useful for cops, for instance; imagine if the surveillance capabilities of a police helicopter were available at a tenth the price.
I am aware that the ISS is very far from an optimal design for a space station designed to support beyond-LEO exploration. However, it's not clear that such a station is a necessary or even desirable step in further space exploration.
Given that there's not a huge amount of interest for people at LEO anyway, we should be working on the best plan to explore the Moon (arguably), Mars, and the asteroids (the next logical destination for manned exploration, given the resources available in convenient low gravity) and only then build the infrastructure to do so.
The trouble with super-duper omnidirectional antennas is that the horizontal beam is extremely narrow, particularly at short ranges. That makes them very flaky.
From what I've heard, the best policy is to stick to lower-gain omnis for local base stations and use dishes for any long range links.
Could you provide more details on spam coming from Telstra?
Telstra is the majority government-owned telco in Australia. Let's just say if Telstra is one of the world's biggest spam sources, it might be a story that could interest the mainstream media.
Is it just that Telstra isn't blocking mailouts from zombiefied customer DSL machines, or is Telstra taking money from spammers themselves?
To summarise, some bacteria survived inside an unmanned probe NASA sent to the moon, which was then retrieved by the Apollo over two years later. It should be noted that the bacteria remained dormant through this period.
Colour me unconvinced at the quality of Cantopop. From my (admittedly fairly limited) experience with Hong Kong radio, it's still dominated by sappy love ballads - the kind of utterly predictable tripe that American Idol winners put together in a few minutes for their first single, but with inferior production.
My new Centrino notebook has one of the random Intel video chipsets. I assume that means that it won't run Longhorn.
Not that I care - it runs Linux like a charm - but it seems likely to generate a lot of pissed-off users if they try to update their laptops and discover that their near-new laptop isn't capable of running the new Windows...
I dunno, but it seems more likely the fact that genetics and pharmacology are getting funded up the yin-yang at the moment, while physics research isn't, might have something more to do with the declining enrolments than "coolness" factors.
While Asimov's writings have undoubtedly influenced a great deal of thinking by real scientists about the ethics of robotics and artificial intelligence, the fact remains that they were promulgated in a work of fiction. To my knowledge, go government or professional body has adopted them in real life, nor are they likely to.
If I recall correctly, Asimov was writing in the context of sentient (or at least the Turing-test-passing approximation of such) robots, which we do not have and aren't likely to any time soon. Secondly, the US military "violates" these laws just about every time it goes to war, if you count Tomahawk cruise missiles and armed Predator drones as robots, and, given their sponsorship of the DARPA autonomous vehicle challenge, they'll violate it left, right, and center if they ever get their hands on more truly autonomous devices. Whether this is morally correct or not is worthy of debate, but Asimov's laws are hardly the last word on the matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Having to have the installer, particularly, ready and tested across every single architecture is a major reason for delayed Debian releases. So are release-critical bugs in a particular architecture. As one of the vast majority of Debian users who use x86 (actually now just switched to AMD64, which will become more important over time), it seems silly to wait months for a release because the bloody Motorola 68000 series port (to pick a hypothetical example) can't fix their bloody boot disks.
And I disagree with your criticism of author-pays. For most academic institutions, a publication at a quality conference or major journal is worth much more than $1500 in research funding - which is what it costs to publish in a Public Library of Science journal. In any case, if you have a paper accepted to a conference, you have to go to present it. If the conference is in another country (and if you're not American, they usually are), it's very likely to cost more than $1500 to pay the conference entry fee, the hotel, the airfare, and so on.
The movie's plot is geek heaven, being based around the age of steam and the engineers who made it happen. A key part of the film is set in the Crystal Palace for the opening of the Great Exhibition, and it's all beautifully drawn. As others have pointed out, the climactic ending sequence is spectacular, but far too drawn out. But, regardless, this movie is a blast.
Could you possibly contact me privately about this? I'd be most interested in discussing this with you further.
My own research group works on methods to reduce this burden in a number of ways. One, my personal work, is on "semi-random" testing (we call it Adaptive Random Testing) which, we claim, detects more errors with fewer tests and reduces the problem that way. Another is "metamorphic testing" which tackles the oracle problem more directly by a slightly more sophisticated form of sanity checking assertions. You test the program with two (or more) related inputs, and check whether the outputs have the relationship you'd expect based on the inputs.
Unfortunately, the boss has an, um, slightly behind-the-times attitude to putting papers on the web; but if you search the DBLP bibliography server for T.Y. Chen you can get references for most of them.
However, I'd be the last to claim that we have a complete solution to the oracle problem; there will of course never be one. But it is a problem that will continue to make automated testing a challenge.
So the patent system is creating an incentive for small companies to concentrate on acting as IP toll collectors on ideas reinvented independently by other companies, rather than actually producing products, or for that matter actively selling their IP to companies to produce new products.
That's my explanation for why software patents are bad for people to whom the ideological arguments are lefty blathering.
So, trying to support a more full-featured export than plain text from the OOO word processor might be too much to expect.
Yes, Symbian sounds like Sybian. Yes, the idiot marketroids that chose that name should be reassigned to do PR for the Japanese whaling industry or something similarly rewarding. But we've all heard that joke every time a Symbian-related story appears on Slashdot and it's getting damned old.
What I can't understand is the fact you don't have high-speed rail in the densely populated northeast (and, no, the Acela doesn't count) which could easily support it - not to mention the shitty public transport in most of your larger cities.
Essentially, what these people are doing is spending some of their cash to purchase the entertainment they want - more Enterprise. Unless the show has radically improved since the first series (that's the only one I've seen any of) I dunno why you'd bother, but I don't see anything wrong with it.
This is not a criticism of either person; to achieve great things, you often need an obsessive, forceful advocate for them. I think his advocacy has contributed significantly to keeping a manned Mars mission on the long-term agenda for the space program. But, as you say, he does come across as a little strange.
I wonder, to take perhaps the most famous historical parallel, whether Spanish aristocrats who funded Columbus regarded him as a bit of a nutter?
Now, the Church-Turing thesis says (roughly) that any computational system can be emulated by a Turing machine - in other words, if it's computable, it's computable on a Turing machine. This is not a mathematical statement; it can't be proven. However, nobody has been able to figure out a remotely plausible way to build a machine that is more powerful than a Turing machine over the past 60 years, so the thesis is pretty much universally accepted, and so the undecidability of the halting problem has been regarded as absolute.
Kieu argues that the quantum effects discussed in his paper can be used to "compute" useful functions that are not classically computable. If true, this would invalidate the Church-Turing thesis, not the proof for the halting problem.
I'm not saying the guy is correct; I'll believe it can be done when I see it. But your objection is based on an incomplete understanding of Turing's work. You can read Turing's original paper online if you do a Google search for it.
You've got it in one. According to Kieu, his system is a non-computable process; you can't simulate what it does on a Turing machine. Hence your objection doesn't apply to his claims.
However, there are apparently lots of other objections.
Instead, Tien Kieu from my university wants to solve arbitrary Diophantine equations using quantum effects. If he's a) correct, and b) it becomes possible to create the required quantum behaviours for arbitrary equation, the following problems become solvable:
Needless to say, to say people are sceptical of Kieu's ideas is an understatement, but it's fun to speculate about the "what if"...
You're probably thinking of the Nth country experiment. One point you may have missed is that the project designed a plutonium-based implosion weapon, not the uranium-based gun-type design discussed in the pop science article. Despite this, a couple of "undistinguished" new physics PhDs, who came from other sub-branches of the discipline rather than nuclear physics, came up with the design in about two years.
To draw a comparison, in later life Isaac Newton spent his time exploring rather idiosyncratic Bible interpretations, not to mention alchemy. That doesn't alter the fact that Newton's earlier scientific work ranks as one of the greatest achievements in science of all time.
Yes. It's called a RQ-1 Predator, and the US military has a bunch of 'em. Your question was probably "could a modestly resourced group of people build something big enough to carry an assassination bomb?" The answer to this is also "yes" - check out this 1/8th scale B-52, and weep at the crash pictures. Note that this thing was designed specifically as a B-52 replica and not as a utilitarian aircraft; if you were designing something like this for real you'd use fewer, bigger engines and a fuselage and wings designed for the purpose.
Similarly, you could build a UAV to carry drugs across the Mexican border, but that would be a much more difficult task, because of the required payload and range (you'd start to get into things bigger than the biggest commercial RC aircraft). The size required might be to the point where the gadget is quite visible and detectable on radar, which kind of negates the point. I'm not sure about the economics of such a scheme, either; conventional smuggling seems to work reasonably well.
As for "goodboy" uses, there are plenty. They'd be terribly useful for cops, for instance; imagine if the surveillance capabilities of a police helicopter were available at a tenth the price.
Given that there's not a huge amount of interest for people at LEO anyway, we should be working on the best plan to explore the Moon (arguably), Mars, and the asteroids (the next logical destination for manned exploration, given the resources available in convenient low gravity) and only then build the infrastructure to do so.
From what I've heard, the best policy is to stick to lower-gain omnis for local base stations and use dishes for any long range links.
Telstra is the majority government-owned telco in Australia. Let's just say if Telstra is one of the world's biggest spam sources, it might be a story that could interest the mainstream media.
Is it just that Telstra isn't blocking mailouts from zombiefied customer DSL machines, or is Telstra taking money from spammers themselves?
To summarise, some bacteria survived inside an unmanned probe NASA sent to the moon, which was then retrieved by the Apollo over two years later. It should be noted that the bacteria remained dormant through this period.
Colour me unconvinced at the quality of Cantopop. From my (admittedly fairly limited) experience with Hong Kong radio, it's still dominated by sappy love ballads - the kind of utterly predictable tripe that American Idol winners put together in a few minutes for their first single, but with inferior production.
Not that I care - it runs Linux like a charm - but it seems likely to generate a lot of pissed-off users if they try to update their laptops and discover that their near-new laptop isn't capable of running the new Windows...
I dunno, but it seems more likely the fact that genetics and pharmacology are getting funded up the yin-yang at the moment, while physics research isn't, might have something more to do with the declining enrolments than "coolness" factors.
If I recall correctly, Asimov was writing in the context of sentient (or at least the Turing-test-passing approximation of such) robots, which we do not have and aren't likely to any time soon. Secondly, the US military "violates" these laws just about every time it goes to war, if you count Tomahawk cruise missiles and armed Predator drones as robots, and, given their sponsorship of the DARPA autonomous vehicle challenge, they'll violate it left, right, and center if they ever get their hands on more truly autonomous devices. Whether this is morally correct or not is worthy of debate, but Asimov's laws are hardly the last word on the matter.