Don't read too much into the name "Liberal Party". The Australian Liberal Party lines up fairly well with the British Conservative Party on most issues. It retains a small group of those termed "small-l liberals", but they are mostly overruled by the wowser element.
Americans should also realise that the overall political spectrum in Australia is considerably to the left of the US.
They're not *really* interested in censoring the net. In fact, I'm sure Richard Alston (the Minister responsible) wishes this stupid legislation would go away. It was rushed through the Senate in a (failed) attempt to impress a whacko Bible-basher independent Senator from Tasmania whose vote the government wanted at the time, and to a lesser extent to impress some of the government's more wowserish backbench and junior ministers.
However, when the government actually looked at implementing the legislation, they realised that all they could practically do was require ISPs to *offer* commercial filtering software, and for those commercial filtering providers to filter stuff that the classification board deemed offensive. It's not like the Great Firewall of China, people.
In practice, everyone's happy. The government is seen to be doing stuff (thus keeping the wowsers happy), the Bloggs family installs the filtering package on their PC, young Joeseph Bloggs gets around the filtering package, and the rest of us keep downloading porn and bomb recipes totally unencumbered by any filtering software at all:)
I agree that an unenforced bad law is still a bad thing, but it's a hell of a lot nicer than an enforced bad law.
Some of Nintendo's early products were, well, not quite in keeping with its current family-friendly image. Do some more searching around the web and you'll get the idea:)
When the new Chinese embassy was built in Canberra, Australia, the Australian intelligence agencies attempted to riddle the building with bugs. Unfortunately, they got caught and it made the national papers. However, the Chinese barely made a squeak about it in public. I think we can safely assume they try to do the same things to us.
Don't astronauts wear several layers of protection so that they don't turn into bacon?
Yes, but humans aren't exactly the most radiation-tolerant creatures out there. Cockroaches are hundreds of times more radiation-tolerant than humans. Some bacteria are apparently considerably more radiation-tolerant again.
First of all, its not IMPOSSIBLE to get software right. No more difficult than it is to build a car or a housse correctly, and while on occasion they break down, generally speaking they function as they're supposed to with minimal failures.
Hmmm, we've been building permanent dwellings for thousands of years. We've been building software for fifty, and doing so on a large scale for about thirty.
Not to mention that the complexity and novelty of the average piece of software dwarfs that of all but the most unique and large-scale building projects.
You've heard the joke about the first woodpecker destroying civilization if buildings were built the way that software was written. There's a fundamental truth here. Coders, for the most part, are sloppy. Why? Because they CAN be. However, there are examples of cases where software was done correctly the first time. It takes careful planning and controls and peer review, and in most cases the end result is clean code in less time than it would have taken to do it sloppy and spend lots of time cleaning up bugs.
And you think that planning, control, and peer review comes free, and without a lot of pain getting it wrong first?
Software is still relatively new, and the most complex design task humanity undertakes. It's no wonder we haven't perfected the engineering of it.
At least from my end, it seems like things have gone the other way. I'm now on the advisory board on the "college" (somewhere between the dorm room and a frat house) where I used to stay, and so I have to keep an eye on things. It's not that long (only 3 years since I left), but the kids these days take things so seriously! They don't drink much, they turn up to lectures (even the unnecessary ones), they read their textbooks before swotvac . . . utterly disasterous, if you ask me:)
Sure, you might have felt that Windows ran fine on a 286 at the time, but try using it now. You'll be making coffees during the screen redraws. As our computers have gotten faster, our perception of acceptable response time has changed greatly.
I know I recently had to use a 386DX40 running Windows 3.1, and I couldn't believe just how slow it felt.
In principle, I agree with you, however I think you've chosen a bad example. With cars, if you drive an unsafe car, you make it too easy for other people (or other factors like bad roads, built by the government) to accidentally kill you. In that case, I believe governments are justified in restricting the cars that can be driven on their roads.
Secondly, where people are incapable of making their own evaluation of the safety of a product, the government is entitled to step in. Drugs are perhaps the most obvious example.
Finally, where a product can impact third parties, governments are entitled to step in.
I wasn't trying to pick on Iceland specifically, I just used them as a convenient example of a small country with limited industrial capacity (even if, as you say, they've got substantial geothermal energy resources).
Most of us assume that the human race will be a) around for thousands of years to come, and b) will have at least the same capabilities to monitor interstellar radio transmissions as we have now, and that c) further technical development will increase our chances of picking up an extra-terrestrial signal if they are out there.
Given that, the odds seem reasonable that any civilization that spots us has likely got more advanced technology (at least in terms of radio astronomy) than us, and has probably been around for a lot longer.
You might well be able to write a decent shell script, and that might even be typical for your classmates, but it wasn't the case amongst the IS department at my old university. As always, nothing beats a good look at the course and the syllabus to see whether it's what you want to do, rather than just relying on generalisations:)
Sorry to reply to my own post, but I should also add that you don't necessarily *have* to do an IT degree. Interested in, say, philosophy, or a language, psychology perhaps? Studying these at university would teach you as many skills, many of which will help you in your future career, as an IT degree. Don't cut off other options.
At my alma mater, there is Computer Science, Software Engineering (another degree you might consider), and Information Systems.
CS is a math-heavy, theory-heavy degree that teaches you how to program *and* gives you a background in the mathematical foundations in computing. Whilst you might not use all of directly as a programmer, it's a) a lot of fun for some people, and b) gives you a much greater understanding of what computers can and can't do.
Software Engineering contained a pretty high overlap with CS, but they skipped some of the theoretical stuff to do more on building large software projects in teams using engineering methodologies. I remain skeptical of some of the value of this stuff, but, however, the *practical* experience, whilst rather stressful (trying to play a real software engineer when you've still got other subjects to complete imposes nasty workloads), is useful. It may be less useful for you, as you sound like you've already got a substantial amount of practical experience.
Information Systems was very light on programming. Talking to instructors in the department, it seems like most of the people who come out of it with a degree in IS can barely write a shell script. However, what they do learn is a lot of stuff about business processes and the like. In fact, from both the syllabus and the students, I got the impression that much of the course was basically a commerce degree for people interested (but not necessarily particularly gifted in) IT.
Look, I'm not knocking knowing business processes and the like, but if you like to code, it's a lot easier to learn about business later on (perhaps in an MBA) than it is to learn heavy-duty maths later in life. But then again, you might take the view that you can already code and learning about the business side of IT might be more useful to you.
I'd just like to know how people filling in that form, many of whom will have less-than-perfect English, are supposed to interpret what a "crime of moral turpitude" is.
Not to mention the form layout and typography, which appear to be straight out of Noah's ark, and, more to the point, impede the comprehension and speedy completion of the form when compared to more modern document layouts.
Whomever designed that form needs to be taken out and beaten over the head with a design guide.
Sure, I find it extremely difficult to accept most of Singer's conclusions, but I've heard the man speak and read a small amount of his work and it's very difficult to argue with his reasoning.
Princeton doesn't tend to appoint crackpots to its faculty, and they haven't in this case.
The Liberal and National parties, which currently form a coalition federal government, receive much of their funding from mining companies.
The Labor Party, which is the major opposition party and controls most of the state governments around the nation right now, is an offshoot of the union movement. Guess in which industries the union movement is strong, and thus which unions exert considerable clout in the ALP? Yep, that's right, mining and electricity.
Interesting you mention the WRX. In Australia, modifying these little beauties is *very* big business. There are kits available to take the stock version to approximately 320HP, and they're still street-legal and even semi-practical as a daily driver. Tweaking them to about 270HP can be done for about 1500USD, apparently.
I own a (stock) example, and driving it on a twisty mountain road is about the most fun you can have with your clothes on:)
It may guarantee what you need, but it doesn't guarantee what Debian, for instance, need to make use of it. It means that people like the Ogg Tarkin guys can't use it as a core part of their system (though maybe in a plugin might be OK). It means that you can't grab bits of their program and use them for other purposes, which happens all the time with true open source program development.
As to the point with the open source definition, that clause has traditionally been interpreted to mean "to qualify under this criterion, the licence must allow anyone to modify this code to make it do anything they want, and still distribute the changes". However, this could be made more explicit.
Your better bet is to work out how to solve NP hard problems (or any one) and map it back to the crypto algorithm. But of course you'll be able to do that easily once IBM releases it's first quantum computer....
Not with present theoretical work on quantum computing, as it's been reported. Yes, they can find factors very quickly, but factorisation is not NP-hard, and nor are any of the other (very few) problems that quantum computers have been demonstrated to be useful for.
If I recall correctly from my computer security subject at uni, one of the other things that quantum computers can do is help brute-forcing cyphers, but not by nearly as much as you think. I was told it makes the problem equivalent to brute-forcing a key half the length , so brute-forcing a 256-bit key with a quantum computer would take round about the same amount of work as cracking a 128-bit key with a conventional computer. Brute-forcing 128-bit keys is computationally infeasible and will remain so for decades, at least.
Because their goals for their new installer are different to the above distros. My understanding is that they want something as flexible and portable as possible, with ease of use an important but secondary consideration.
I think it would be a much better use of our money if we sent more probes to Mars.
But we've already had half a dozen or so successful Mars probes. We know quite a lot about it. We know nothing, by comparison, about Pluto. Isn't it worth just one little probe to go have a look?
Additionally, if I understand the problem, is that Pluto is near its closest approach to the Sun (and thus the Earth) at the moment. If we don't do the mission now, it'll be much more difficult when Pluto has moved further away in 2030 or so.
I'll be honest, you sound right, but I'll have to reread the book to make sure I'm quoting the concept correctly. It's more likely my own error in reproducing the way it would than a fundamental flaw in the system
Crazy as it sounds, I've read (in Robert Zubrin's Entering Space - a highly entertaining and thought-provoking read even if you don't agree with all of it) it might one day be possible to use black holes (though probably not ones this size), to turn supergiant planets (Jupiter size and bigger) into stars, and then inhabit the moons surrounding the planet.
Basically, it might one day be possible to move a black hole with the aid of its own gravity field and its radiation emissions. In essence stick a very large mirror in orbit round the black hole, and when the mirror is in the right position, dump some matter into the hole. When the matter gets swallowed, you get a burst of radiation which pushes the mirror in the desired direction. As the mirror is in orbit round the black hole, the hole gets pushed along as well.
Anyway, when it gets to your supergiant planet, you dump it straight in. You might assume that the planet gets swallowed straight away, but apparently the push of the radiation generated in the process limits the inflow of material to a surprisingly slow rate. Hence, the core of the planet is a lot denser and hotter, and you get fusion starting up. Instant sun, just add planets/moons/whatever, which should last for many millions of years before it gets swallowed up.
Of course, the engineering of such a mirror would be a truly astounding feat, and there's lots of other issues (not least, any convenient moons would probably have their orbits thrown in to chaos) but who knows what our distant descendants might be capable of?
Slashdot Mirror
Americans should also realise that the overall political spectrum in Australia is considerably to the left of the US.
However, when the government actually looked at implementing the legislation, they realised that all they could practically do was require ISPs to *offer* commercial filtering software, and for those commercial filtering providers to filter stuff that the classification board deemed offensive. It's not like the Great Firewall of China, people.
In practice, everyone's happy. The government is seen to be doing stuff (thus keeping the wowsers happy), the Bloggs family installs the filtering package on their PC, young Joeseph Bloggs gets around the filtering package, and the rest of us keep downloading porn and bomb recipes totally unencumbered by any filtering software at all :)
I agree that an unenforced bad law is still a bad thing, but it's a hell of a lot nicer than an enforced bad law.
Some of Nintendo's early products were, well, not quite in keeping with its current family-friendly image. Do some more searching around the web and you'll get the idea :)
When the new Chinese embassy was built in Canberra, Australia, the Australian intelligence agencies attempted to riddle the building with bugs. Unfortunately, they got caught and it made the national papers. However, the Chinese barely made a squeak about it in public. I think we can safely assume they try to do the same things to us.
Yes, but humans aren't exactly the most radiation-tolerant creatures out there. Cockroaches are hundreds of times more radiation-tolerant than humans. Some bacteria are apparently considerably more radiation-tolerant again.
Hmmm, we've been building permanent dwellings for thousands of years. We've been building software for fifty, and doing so on a large scale for about thirty.
Not to mention that the complexity and novelty of the average piece of software dwarfs that of all but the most unique and large-scale building projects.
And you think that planning, control, and peer review comes free, and without a lot of pain getting it wrong first?
Software is still relatively new, and the most complex design task humanity undertakes. It's no wonder we haven't perfected the engineering of it.
At least from my end, it seems like things have gone the other way. I'm now on the advisory board on the "college" (somewhere between the dorm room and a frat house) where I used to stay, and so I have to keep an eye on things. It's not that long (only 3 years since I left), but the kids these days take things so seriously! They don't drink much, they turn up to lectures (even the unnecessary ones), they read their textbooks before swotvac . . . utterly disasterous, if you ask me :)
I know I recently had to use a 386DX40 running Windows 3.1, and I couldn't believe just how slow it felt.
Secondly, where people are incapable of making their own evaluation of the safety of a product, the government is entitled to step in. Drugs are perhaps the most obvious example.
Finally, where a product can impact third parties, governments are entitled to step in.
I wasn't trying to pick on Iceland specifically, I just used them as a convenient example of a small country with limited industrial capacity (even if, as you say, they've got substantial geothermal energy resources).
Additionally, at the time they had most of the resources of continental Europe at their disposal if they wished.
Given that, the odds seem reasonable that any civilization that spots us has likely got more advanced technology (at least in terms of radio astronomy) than us, and has probably been around for a lot longer.
You might well be able to write a decent shell script, and that might even be typical for your classmates, but it wasn't the case amongst the IS department at my old university. As always, nothing beats a good look at the course and the syllabus to see whether it's what you want to do, rather than just relying on generalisations :)
Sorry to reply to my own post, but I should also add that you don't necessarily *have* to do an IT degree. Interested in, say, philosophy, or a language, psychology perhaps? Studying these at university would teach you as many skills, many of which will help you in your future career, as an IT degree. Don't cut off other options.
CS is a math-heavy, theory-heavy degree that teaches you how to program *and* gives you a background in the mathematical foundations in computing. Whilst you might not use all of directly as a programmer, it's a) a lot of fun for some people, and b) gives you a much greater understanding of what computers can and can't do.
Software Engineering contained a pretty high overlap with CS, but they skipped some of the theoretical stuff to do more on building large software projects in teams using engineering methodologies. I remain skeptical of some of the value of this stuff, but, however, the *practical* experience, whilst rather stressful (trying to play a real software engineer when you've still got other subjects to complete imposes nasty workloads), is useful. It may be less useful for you, as you sound like you've already got a substantial amount of practical experience.
Information Systems was very light on programming. Talking to instructors in the department, it seems like most of the people who come out of it with a degree in IS can barely write a shell script. However, what they do learn is a lot of stuff about business processes and the like. In fact, from both the syllabus and the students, I got the impression that much of the course was basically a commerce degree for people interested (but not necessarily particularly gifted in) IT.
Look, I'm not knocking knowing business processes and the like, but if you like to code, it's a lot easier to learn about business later on (perhaps in an MBA) than it is to learn heavy-duty maths later in life. But then again, you might take the view that you can already code and learning about the business side of IT might be more useful to you.
Not to mention the form layout and typography, which appear to be straight out of Noah's ark, and, more to the point, impede the comprehension and speedy completion of the form when compared to more modern document layouts.
Whomever designed that form needs to be taken out and beaten over the head with a design guide.
Princeton doesn't tend to appoint crackpots to its faculty, and they haven't in this case.
I own a (stock) example, and driving it on a twisty mountain road is about the most fun you can have with your clothes on :)
As to the point with the open source definition, that clause has traditionally been interpreted to mean "to qualify under this criterion, the licence must allow anyone to modify this code to make it do anything they want, and still distribute the changes". However, this could be made more explicit.
Not with present theoretical work on quantum computing, as it's been reported. Yes, they can find factors very quickly, but factorisation is not NP-hard, and nor are any of the other (very few) problems that quantum computers have been demonstrated to be useful for.
If I recall correctly from my computer security subject at uni, one of the other things that quantum computers can do is help brute-forcing cyphers, but not by nearly as much as you think. I was told it makes the problem equivalent to brute-forcing a key half the length , so brute-forcing a 256-bit key with a quantum computer would take round about the same amount of work as cracking a 128-bit key with a conventional computer. Brute-forcing 128-bit keys is computationally infeasible and will remain so for decades, at least.
Because their goals for their new installer are different to the above distros. My understanding is that they want something as flexible and portable as possible, with ease of use an important but secondary consideration.
But we've already had half a dozen or so successful Mars probes. We know quite a lot about it. We know nothing, by comparison, about Pluto. Isn't it worth just one little probe to go have a look?
Additionally, if I understand the problem, is that Pluto is near its closest approach to the Sun (and thus the Earth) at the moment. If we don't do the mission now, it'll be much more difficult when Pluto has moved further away in 2030 or so.
I'll be honest, you sound right, but I'll have to reread the book to make sure I'm quoting the concept correctly. It's more likely my own error in reproducing the way it would than a fundamental flaw in the system
Basically, it might one day be possible to move a black hole with the aid of its own gravity field and its radiation emissions. In essence stick a very large mirror in orbit round the black hole, and when the mirror is in the right position, dump some matter into the hole. When the matter gets swallowed, you get a burst of radiation which pushes the mirror in the desired direction. As the mirror is in orbit round the black hole, the hole gets pushed along as well.
Anyway, when it gets to your supergiant planet, you dump it straight in. You might assume that the planet gets swallowed straight away, but apparently the push of the radiation generated in the process limits the inflow of material to a surprisingly slow rate. Hence, the core of the planet is a lot denser and hotter, and you get fusion starting up. Instant sun, just add planets/moons/whatever, which should last for many millions of years before it gets swallowed up.
Of course, the engineering of such a mirror would be a truly astounding feat, and there's lots of other issues (not least, any convenient moons would probably have their orbits thrown in to chaos) but who knows what our distant descendants might be capable of?