Never understood why Payola was such a dirty word, myself. Singles plays on the radio (and nowadays music television) are ADVERTS for products the record companies sell. Yet the companies expect to be paid money by radio stations for the privelege of having their ads played...
> Still, outlawing something that even 20% of the population does is pretty insane.
What proportion of the population do you think exceeds the speed limit from time to time?
So 20% acceptance is enough to change the law, now? Where do you draw the line? I mean, according to this article 2.7% of adult americans have spent time in prison. So surely, making some bunch of things illegal that means 2.7% of the population are criminals is just crazy, right?
> How do you ensure it in any project, open source or closed sourced? You ask the author. You assume they tell the truth. How else could you do it? There's no magic marker on code that says "this is owned by foo". There's no central code repository where you can check ownership of a fragment.
Would it be crazy of me to suggest that there might be a benefit to pervasive DRM? If rights information was attached to every document in a computer system, then there actually would be magic markers on code that say 'this is owned by foo'...
I appreciate that a lot of people's objections to DRM are derived from fundamental objections to the idea of 'ownership' of information - but assuming that copyright is going to continue to exist, and licensing regimes such as GPL and BSD continue to be necessary, perhaps DRM could actually benefit software development by making it easier to trace and prove ownership?
You seem to be under the impression that decrypting a one time pad is just a case of trying different keys and watching the results for output that makes sense. That is laughably incorrect.
Brute forcing is a method you use to decrypt a known ciphertext using a known algorithm. It involves trying every possible key in the algorithm, and examining what plaintext would result. Given, say, 1024 bits of ciphertext, and a simple symmetric algorithm with a little 56 bit key, you could run the decryption with each of the 2^56 possible keys, giving you 2^56 possible different plaintext renderings of that 1024 bit message. Out of all the possible messages that 1024 bits could communicate (2^1024 of them), we've narrowed down the field to just 2^56 - in other words, we've reduced the field by a factor of 2^968 (that's about a googol cubed). Assuming the message was originally written in in a natural human language, like English, there is a lot of redundancy built in to the message. On average, one character of English communicates 1.4 bits of information - encoded in ASCII, that means you've only got 1.4 bits of actual data encoded in every byte of the original message. So, of the 2^1024 possible messages the ciphertext could encode, only 2^(1024/8*1.4) of them - about 2^179 - contain the right proportions of characters to make any kind of sense in English. But remember, we eliminated 1-(1/googol^3) of the possible messages by examining which messages could possibly be generated by a valid key. So, the odds of more than one of those 2^179 messages making any kind of sense are somewhat less than one in a googol squared.
But with a one-time-pad as your algorithm, the key is exactly the same length as the message. So, to bruteforce it, your 2^1024 bits of ciphertext has to be decrypted using 2^1024 different one time pads. Again, only 2^179 of the possible decrypts will actually make any kind of sense. But because we've tried 2^1024 different keys, we obtained 2^1024 different candidate plaintexts - which means that 2^179 of them look like they might make sense. In other words, we've got almost a googol different English language plaintexts - all of which could have been encrypted to make the same ciphertext, depending on the one time pad used. It's a little like saying 'A CD is just a stream of numbers. If we burned every possible CD, starting from 0000000..(50 odd million bits)...000001 up to 11111....11111, one of them will contain the next album Hendrix would have made if he'd lived'. It's true, but somewhat useless.
So, one time pads are, indeed, completely non-brute-forceable.
They can be cracked if they aren't used correctly or if they aren't generated correctly. Take two messages accidentally encrypted with the same one time pad, and the game's up - both messages will be revealed. If the pad isn't truly random, then the keyfield gets reduced. You only need to reduce the keyfield by a factor of, oo, about 2^179 (well, it'll vary depending on the length of the ciphertext), to start getting to the point where the number of plausible plaintexts generatable from any valid key is small enough to be interesting. If you generate your random numbers with a pseudorandom generator, the key size is effectively reduced to the size of the key used to seed the generator.
Reminds me of a paving slab in the corner of the Domplatz (cathedral square) in Koeln (Cologne - damn Slashdot's hatred of HTML entities), Germany. When I was there in the early nineties, there was the big Friedenmauer (peace-wall) - generally a post unification, end-of-history, anti-Gulf-War kind of thing - and the square was a really busy centre of demonstrators, artists and so on. Over in one corner, one of the slabs had, engraved into it, "This could be a place of historical importance". At the time, when everybody was kind of filled with a sense of capital-H history going on all around them, what with the end of the cold war, and atlases going out of date left right and centre, this seemed like a fairly profound statement - and probably encouraged the Friedenmauer builders to think that maybe they could make a difference.
Seeing this story finally inspired me to Google this phrase, and it turns out to have been the work of one Braco Dimitrijevic, and apparently other similar slabs can be found around St Martin's College in London.
Obviously no Kubrick reference, so not so geeky, but still a pretty cool bit of public-space art.
It's got some whacky units in there too. Want to know what the speed of light is in knots? or how many cubits in a parsec? Google will tell you.
And, I'm pleased to see its constants database includes the value for one googol. Check out how many light years there are in one googol attometres...
Re:This sort of thing makes me puke
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New Heinlein Novel
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If Douglas Adams' publishers had waited until Douglas was happy with anything before publishing it, we'd still be waiting for the first hitch-hiker novel.
An artist's own opinion is not always the best one to decide whether something is worth publishing.
How does speed of result reporting affect business confidence? Businesses know there's going to be an election years in advance. The country doesn't enter an anarchic state of limbo the moment polls close, that is only resolved when the result is announced. The only reason a delay between the time the citizenry cast their ballots to the moment when the result is announced could possibly cause any uncertainty is if the length of the delay is unknown. But provided your investors and industry bigwigs know, within a reasonable margin, when the result of the election will be finally announced, then that's fine - they can go about their business.
Florida caused so much trouble simply because it wasn't entirely clear whether there was actually going to be a president to take office in January. That kind of uncertainty is obviously bad for business confidence.
But if you built in a three week delay after election day to when the results came out, and guaranteed to have the result at 9am on a particular morning, I'm sure the markets would take it in their stride, because there's no additional uncertainty.
Most importantly, this asteroid has a palermo scale rating of -1.25 This roughly translates to effectively say that we are 17 times more likely to get hit by a different asteroid the same size or larger than this one before this one hits us.
It's potential impacts down the line that have palermo values above zero that we need to be most concerned about. Look here to see the current highest risk known NEOs. Notice that this asteroid, QQ47 is the highest rated known threat (these asteroids are sorted by their cumulative palermo scale ratings).
In other words, at the moment, if we do get hit by anything, it's most likely not going to be one of the asteroids on that list.
Your 'chance that it won't hit' value is wrong - the only zero on that chart is referring to the distance between the anticipated line the asteroidll be travelling on (about which there is some uncertainty, of course), and the edge of the earth's atmosphere. The zero indicates that the anticipated course of the asteroid takes it through the earth. however, the error margins are such that they still reckon there's a nice high chance of it missing.
I'm guessing that Michael Crichton had a really bad theme park experience as a child. Westworld, Jurassic Park, and Timeline ALL deal with the unintended consequences of the naivety or downright ruthlessness of theme park developers. I'm betting that Congo was originally going to be about some theme park magnate trying to build Gorilla-World until the editor suggested maybe Mikey should consider a mineral company as his naive capitalist entity brought down by nature.
Take a look at Neal Stephenson's In the beginning was the command line for an interesting take on this - he argues that WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointers) interfaces were only ever meant to serve as a metaphor for controlling virtual objects on a computer screen as if they were physical objects (windows~=documents, etc.), but have been used as so much more that the metaphor (never that well defined in the first place) has got lost. So much so that devices like phones and video recorders have introduced interfaces which use a WIMP metaphor - an interface which is supposed to remind you of a computer windowing GUI. at that point, all metaphor is gone, and your left with very insubstantial user interfaces.
An even worse trend now is towards 'web-like' interfaces. This crops up in applications like MS Money which uses the incredibly misguided metaphor of presenting you with what seems to be a web site devoted to your finances. And because web interfaces are even less standardised than WIMP GUIs, this is an excuse for creating truly appalling interfaces. With 'web-like' interfaces cropping up on cashpoints, personal video recorders, and the like, we're well due for a user interface revolution, because frankly most systems I use these days are really just a flashy mask over a crappy hierarchical menu system (look at digital cameras, MP3 players, in-car computers, and DVD players). Personally, I want more physical dials, switches and buttons on these devices, not just a sleekly styled 'up-down-left-right-select' control.
Experience is useless without the ability to draw on it by analogy. That's the real challenge in these systems - the conceptual frameworks they draw up to say 'this situation is a bit like that situation, only this thing has changed'. That's tricky, though. After all, crashing a plane is a bit like landing a plane, only the impact speed is different. Some analogies make sense. Landing planes in a blizzard is a bit like landing planes in fog. Lining planes up on runway 1 is a bit like lining planes up on runway 14. Others don't: directing a plane is not like directing a helicopter. Landing planes with the radar out is not like landing planes with the runway lights out.
If these systems are left to figure out the boundaries on their own, there's real danger of them coming up with faulty analogies, probably because the input data is limited in scope. The 'experience' database may not have had a way of storing 'a man in a lounge chair with a weather balloon tied to each corner drifted across the flightpath', or 'at this time of year, we always adjust the flightpath away from the lake because of migratory geese' - so behavior it learns from these scenarios is learned by rote, not by reason, and the machine can't use this information in its analogy-building.
The translation example's a great one. No matter how extensive its database, it'll always encounter new words it's never seen before. It might be translating technical texts, or childrens fantasy literature. Whatever, it'll come up against a situation where its database has no experience of dealing with a particular word. In order to translate it, it's going to need a lot more context than just a bunch of translated texts, and a really powerful analogy engine. Human translators, on the other hand, can usually take this sort of situation in their stride.
So quickly people forget, in a world where the main application for computers is email and web browsing, that the biggest driver behind Apple's original Mac GUI, one which I still think is valid today, was WYSIWYG. Remember that one of the key functions of business computers used to be document editing and printing. Macs were created to let you produce nice, well laid out documents, preview them on screen, then print them out on your laserwriter.
That's what drove people away from the text based interfaces of WordPerfect and, yes, TeX. And it was a good reason to switch to high res display. Graphics was another obvious driver - the first time I used MacPaint with a mouse, I was convinced this was how computers were meant to be. Look at the original mac application suite - programs like MacPaint, MacWrite and MacDraw - and you've got a basic reason for almost every feature of standard GUIs ever since (buttons, dialog boxes, toolbars, menus...).
What you're saying is a reproduction of all the glory of a modern GUI in text form is just a reproduction of those bits - buttons, dialog boxes, menus. You're losing the ability to have high res WYSIWYG documents - which was the whole point.
Of course, if you're a programmer, you probably do most of you work in a fixed width font anyway, so WYSIWYG doesn't really affect you. Personally, though, I like the way text looks rendered on screen with a little anti-aliasing, so I tend to prefer my terminals and text editors the way they look in a windowed GUI with a bit of eye candy, rather than raw and sharp on a pure text terminal.
Depends what you want the statistics for. Yes, you're right, there are more women than there are kids in the world, so even though women are less likely to be gamers than kids are, there's more of them, so they catch up in raw numbers. Question is, does that make the argument that women should be given more attention by the game industry any less valid?
Let's say (totally made up statistics but the point is the same) right now 2% of adult women play computer games, and 20% of high school boys do. Because there are 10 times as many women, though, you get the fact that there are as many women as there are teenage boys playing games.
But in absolute terms, that means that both groups are equally important communities of customers for computer games companies and magazine publishers. They should be spending as much effort addressing the needs of women gamers as they do on teenage boys. In fact, look at those numbers again. Tasked with the job of doubling the number of computer game players (ignoring the other two market groups for a moment), where would you go looking for them? To double the total number of players by just targetting teenage boys, you need to move the proportion of boys playing games to 60%. To double the numbers by just recruiting women, you only need to move their figure to 6%. Given that virtually no effort at all has been made to sell games to women by games marketers so far - and they've already got as many customers in that market as they have in a heavily marketed market like teenage kids - they've got to be taking those numbers seriously...
Now, I'm not saying this research is necessarily valid. I'm just saying that you can't dismiss the stats as meaningless because the two groups they're comparing aren't the same size.
I think this is a product of the fact that, in spite of the best intentions of computer scientists and hardware engineers over the years, the massive commercialsation of the industry means that computing really lacks a scientific underpinning. Electronic engineering, on which all computing depends, of course, is applied physics, with all the laws and theories that implies. And computing brings in a branch of mathematics - information theory - which has its own laws and theorems (not theories, because it's maths, not empirical science), and that's what most computer scientists are interested in.
What computing, as a scientific discipline, should do is combine these to derive its own laws and theories for how these two worlds interact.
Communications engineering has done a great job of being a proper engineering discipline, and there's a ton of laws and theories about the maximum information you can transmit through a medium, and so on, and is full of formulae which mix up amounts of information (measured in bits) with amounts of physical stuff, like distances, energy, and time. But computer engineering seems not to have the same interest in things like 'what's the maximum amount of information you can process using x Joules of energy?'. The kind of scientific units used in computing are laughable, like MIPS and Megaflops... they're meaningless. The processor speed indicator is pointless since it only tells you that a processor does something x times per second - not what that thing that it does is. One processor might perform an eighty bit floating point operation in a clock cycle. Another might just add two eight bit numbers together. The relationship between the clock speeds of these machines doesn't tell us much about their relative information processing capacity.
There almost certainly are some laws to be found in computing if we looked for them. And they might (when combined with observations of economic development and growth of the IT industry) go some way to explain why Moore's law (which measures the increasing ability of humans to extract information processing capacity from materials over time) has held for so long...
I'm ranting, but I think the point is that if Moore's law is what passes for a law in computing, we need to get some more laws.
Yeah, cos heaven know I'm always buying my CRT monitors, flat screens, video recorders and CD players from cheap American brands that knocked off Sony or Matsushita's R&D...
> This is one reason why we should be keeping more of the research money on terra firma.
You appear to be under the impression that when money is spent on space exploration, we actually ship the money itself into space, losing it from the economy forever. So, presumably, the 25 billion dollars spent on the ISS is all up there in space right now, circling the earth...
twice in the last year I've had to phone up to make insurance claims. I'm sure on both occasions my voice stress levels would have been through the roof. On one occasion I'd just come downstairs to find my house had been burgled in the night. On the other, I was calling my travel insurer because all flights out of the airport I was in had been cancelled due to a strike and it was looking like I was going to be stuck abroad for another day. In either situation, I guess it was conceivable I might have been lying, but it would seem slightly more likely that any stress detected would be down to the cause of the claim in the first place...
> First of all, the birthrate would have to be chopped. Deathrate would have to be equal to the birthrate.
Hmm... birthrate's more complex than you think.
In general, you get population stability (in a monogamous society with stable marriage) when each couple - on average - gives birth to two children during their lifetime who reproduce. If you toss out monogamy (allowing serial monogamy, i.e. divorce and remarriage, or even other more exotic relationship structures) then you still have population stability if each person is, on average, a parent to two kids - whether they're by different partners is irrelevant.
So, regardless of how long people live for, if people choose to only have a couple of kids in their lifetime, the population will be stable. Question is, at what level will it stabilise?
The problem is that when you have a period of expanding lifespans, you get change in generational overlap. It's complicated by the age when people choose to have children, which is also increasing in line with expanding lifespans. At the moment (in western societies), typically three generations are alive at the same time (grandparents generally die a few years before or after their grandkids start reproducing - although since the baby boomers' kids started having their own kids, it's actually becoming more common for kids to be born after their grandparents have died, because people are having kids later, and often they can't afford to until they inherit the money from their parents' house).
For the population to increase, you need there to be an increasing overlap between generations - that is, you need people to have kids while their grandparents are still alive. But as I hinted above, the need for wealth to trickle down the generations and enable that might mitigate against people choosing to have kids so early. If you're going to live to 300, what's the rush with having kids when you're thirty? in fact, there's every chance that the generational overlap will decrease, driving down the number of generations who coexist within one family.
It may be that society just continually adapts so that in general, people give birth to an average of two children, and do so around the time when their grandparents are reaching the end of their natural life. In that case, you don't get any overall increase in population.
Of course, this is all predicated on the assumption that these lifespan benefits will only occur in wealthy societies that already have stable populations, thanks to female equality and family planning.
Yeah, in the UK banks rely on asking you questions nobody else could possibly know the nswer to - like your mother's maiden name, or the name of your pet. Obviously identity theft by people's own mothers is near epidemic proportions, but otherwise, this system has proven flawless.
Still, to be on the safe side, you should never play that game where you find out your pornstar name (by taking your pet's name and your mother's maiden name) with people you don't trust...
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Never understood why Payola was such a dirty word, myself. Singles plays on the radio (and nowadays music television) are ADVERTS for products the record companies sell. Yet the companies expect to be paid money by radio stations for the privelege of having their ads played...
According to recent statistics that indicate 1 in 37 US adults have done jail time, a large minority of Americans are criminals.
Or is that not a large enough minority to count?
> Still, outlawing something that even 20% of the population does is pretty insane.
What proportion of the population do you think exceeds the speed limit from time to time?
So 20% acceptance is enough to change the law, now? Where do you draw the line? I mean, according to this article 2.7% of adult americans have spent time in prison. So surely, making some bunch of things illegal that means 2.7% of the population are criminals is just crazy, right?
> How do you ensure it in any project, open source or closed sourced? You ask the author. You assume they tell the truth. How else could you do it? There's no magic marker on code that says "this is owned by foo". There's no central code repository where you can check ownership of a fragment.
Would it be crazy of me to suggest that there might be a benefit to pervasive DRM? If rights information was attached to every document in a computer system, then there actually would be magic markers on code that say 'this is owned by foo'...
I appreciate that a lot of people's objections to DRM are derived from fundamental objections to the idea of 'ownership' of information - but assuming that copyright is going to continue to exist, and licensing regimes such as GPL and BSD continue to be necessary, perhaps DRM could actually benefit software development by making it easier to trace and prove ownership?
You seem to be under the impression that decrypting a one time pad is just a case of trying different keys and watching the results for output that makes sense. That is laughably incorrect.
Brute forcing is a method you use to decrypt a known ciphertext using a known algorithm. It involves trying every possible key in the algorithm, and examining what plaintext would result. Given, say, 1024 bits of ciphertext, and a simple symmetric algorithm with a little 56 bit key, you could run the decryption with each of the 2^56 possible keys, giving you 2^56 possible different plaintext renderings of that 1024 bit message. Out of all the possible messages that 1024 bits could communicate (2^1024 of them), we've narrowed down the field to just 2^56 - in other words, we've reduced the field by a factor of 2^968 (that's about a googol cubed). Assuming the message was originally written in in a natural human language, like English, there is a lot of redundancy built in to the message. On average, one character of English communicates 1.4 bits of information - encoded in ASCII, that means you've only got 1.4 bits of actual data encoded in every byte of the original message. So, of the 2^1024 possible messages the ciphertext could encode, only 2^(1024/8*1.4) of them - about 2^179 - contain the right proportions of characters to make any kind of sense in English. But remember, we eliminated 1-(1/googol^3) of the possible messages by examining which messages could possibly be generated by a valid key. So, the odds of more than one of those 2^179 messages making any kind of sense are somewhat less than one in a googol squared.
But with a one-time-pad as your algorithm, the key is exactly the same length as the message. So, to bruteforce it, your 2^1024 bits of ciphertext has to be decrypted using 2^1024 different one time pads. Again, only 2^179 of the possible decrypts will actually make any kind of sense. But because we've tried 2^1024 different keys, we obtained 2^1024 different candidate plaintexts - which means that 2^179 of them look like they might make sense. In other words, we've got almost a googol different English language plaintexts - all of which could have been encrypted to make the same ciphertext, depending on the one time pad used. It's a little like saying 'A CD is just a stream of numbers. If we burned every possible CD, starting from 0000000..(50 odd million bits)...000001 up to 11111....11111, one of them will contain the next album Hendrix would have made if he'd lived'. It's true, but somewhat useless.
So, one time pads are, indeed, completely non-brute-forceable.
They can be cracked if they aren't used correctly or if they aren't generated correctly. Take two messages accidentally encrypted with the same one time pad, and the game's up - both messages will be revealed. If the pad isn't truly random, then the keyfield gets reduced. You only need to reduce the keyfield by a factor of, oo, about 2^179 (well, it'll vary depending on the length of the ciphertext), to start getting to the point where the number of plausible plaintexts generatable from any valid key is small enough to be interesting. If you generate your random numbers with a pseudorandom generator, the key size is effectively reduced to the size of the key used to seed the generator.
Reminds me of a paving slab in the corner of the Domplatz (cathedral square) in Koeln (Cologne - damn Slashdot's hatred of HTML entities), Germany. When I was there in the early nineties, there was the big Friedenmauer (peace-wall) - generally a post unification, end-of-history, anti-Gulf-War kind of thing - and the square was a really busy centre of demonstrators, artists and so on. Over in one corner, one of the slabs had, engraved into it, "This could be a place of historical importance". At the time, when everybody was kind of filled with a sense of capital-H history going on all around them, what with the end of the cold war, and atlases going out of date left right and centre, this seemed like a fairly profound statement - and probably encouraged the Friedenmauer builders to think that maybe they could make a difference.
Seeing this story finally inspired me to Google this phrase, and it turns out to have been the work of one Braco Dimitrijevic, and apparently other similar slabs can be found around St Martin's College in London.
Obviously no Kubrick reference, so not so geeky, but still a pretty cool bit of public-space art.
It's got some whacky units in there too. Want to know what the speed of light is in knots? or how many cubits in a parsec? Google will tell you.
And, I'm pleased to see its constants database includes the value for one googol. Check out how many light years there are in one googol attometres...
If Douglas Adams' publishers had waited until Douglas was happy with anything before publishing it, we'd still be waiting for the first hitch-hiker novel.
An artist's own opinion is not always the best one to decide whether something is worth publishing.
When you've eliminated the impossible, what remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. So...
I'd say the repo guys had access to a fully functioning matter transporter.
How does speed of result reporting affect business confidence? Businesses know there's going to be an election years in advance. The country doesn't enter an anarchic state of limbo the moment polls close, that is only resolved when the result is announced. The only reason a delay between the time the citizenry cast their ballots to the moment when the result is announced could possibly cause any uncertainty is if the length of the delay is unknown. But provided your investors and industry bigwigs know, within a reasonable margin, when the result of the election will be finally announced, then that's fine - they can go about their business.
Florida caused so much trouble simply because it wasn't entirely clear whether there was actually going to be a president to take office in January. That kind of uncertainty is obviously bad for business confidence.
But if you built in a three week delay after election day to when the results came out, and guaranteed to have the result at 9am on a particular morning, I'm sure the markets would take it in their stride, because there's no additional uncertainty.
Most importantly, this asteroid has a palermo scale rating of -1.25 This roughly translates to effectively say that we are 17 times more likely to get hit by a different asteroid the same size or larger than this one before this one hits us.
It's potential impacts down the line that have palermo values above zero that we need to be most concerned about. Look here to see the current highest risk known NEOs. Notice that this asteroid, QQ47 is the highest rated known threat (these asteroids are sorted by their cumulative palermo scale ratings).
In other words, at the moment, if we do get hit by anything, it's most likely not going to be one of the asteroids on that list.
Your 'chance that it won't hit' value is wrong - the only zero on that chart is referring to the distance between the anticipated line the asteroidll be travelling on (about which there is some uncertainty, of course), and the edge of the earth's atmosphere. The zero indicates that the anticipated course of the asteroid takes it through the earth. however, the error margins are such that they still reckon there's a nice high chance of it missing.
I'm guessing that Michael Crichton had a really bad theme park experience as a child. Westworld, Jurassic Park, and Timeline ALL deal with the unintended consequences of the naivety or downright ruthlessness of theme park developers. I'm betting that Congo was originally going to be about some theme park magnate trying to build Gorilla-World until the editor suggested maybe Mikey should consider a mineral company as his naive capitalist entity brought down by nature.
Take a look at Neal Stephenson's In the beginning was the command line for an interesting take on this - he argues that WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointers) interfaces were only ever meant to serve as a metaphor for controlling virtual objects on a computer screen as if they were physical objects (windows~=documents, etc.), but have been used as so much more that the metaphor (never that well defined in the first place) has got lost. So much so that devices like phones and video recorders have introduced interfaces which use a WIMP metaphor - an interface which is supposed to remind you of a computer windowing GUI. at that point, all metaphor is gone, and your left with very insubstantial user interfaces.
An even worse trend now is towards 'web-like' interfaces. This crops up in applications like MS Money which uses the incredibly misguided metaphor of presenting you with what seems to be a web site devoted to your finances. And because web interfaces are even less standardised than WIMP GUIs, this is an excuse for creating truly appalling interfaces. With 'web-like' interfaces cropping up on cashpoints, personal video recorders, and the like, we're well due for a user interface revolution, because frankly most systems I use these days are really just a flashy mask over a crappy hierarchical menu system (look at digital cameras, MP3 players, in-car computers, and DVD players). Personally, I want more physical dials, switches and buttons on these devices, not just a sleekly styled 'up-down-left-right-select' control.
Experience is useless without the ability to draw on it by analogy. That's the real challenge in these systems - the conceptual frameworks they draw up to say 'this situation is a bit like that situation, only this thing has changed'. That's tricky, though. After all, crashing a plane is a bit like landing a plane, only the impact speed is different. Some analogies make sense. Landing planes in a blizzard is a bit like landing planes in fog. Lining planes up on runway 1 is a bit like lining planes up on runway 14. Others don't: directing a plane is not like directing a helicopter. Landing planes with the radar out is not like landing planes with the runway lights out.
If these systems are left to figure out the boundaries on their own, there's real danger of them coming up with faulty analogies, probably because the input data is limited in scope. The 'experience' database may not have had a way of storing 'a man in a lounge chair with a weather balloon tied to each corner drifted across the flightpath', or 'at this time of year, we always adjust the flightpath away from the lake because of migratory geese' - so behavior it learns from these scenarios is learned by rote, not by reason, and the machine can't use this information in its analogy-building.
The translation example's a great one. No matter how extensive its database, it'll always encounter new words it's never seen before. It might be translating technical texts, or childrens fantasy literature. Whatever, it'll come up against a situation where its database has no experience of dealing with a particular word. In order to translate it, it's going to need a lot more context than just a bunch of translated texts, and a really powerful analogy engine. Human translators, on the other hand, can usually take this sort of situation in their stride.
So quickly people forget, in a world where the main application for computers is email and web browsing, that the biggest driver behind Apple's original Mac GUI, one which I still think is valid today, was WYSIWYG. Remember that one of the key functions of business computers used to be document editing and printing. Macs were created to let you produce nice, well laid out documents, preview them on screen, then print them out on your laserwriter.
That's what drove people away from the text based interfaces of WordPerfect and, yes, TeX. And it was a good reason to switch to high res display. Graphics was another obvious driver - the first time I used MacPaint with a mouse, I was convinced this was how computers were meant to be. Look at the original mac application suite - programs like MacPaint, MacWrite and MacDraw - and you've got a basic reason for almost every feature of standard GUIs ever since (buttons, dialog boxes, toolbars, menus...).
What you're saying is a reproduction of all the glory of a modern GUI in text form is just a reproduction of those bits - buttons, dialog boxes, menus. You're losing the ability to have high res WYSIWYG documents - which was the whole point.
Of course, if you're a programmer, you probably do most of you work in a fixed width font anyway, so WYSIWYG doesn't really affect you. Personally, though, I like the way text looks rendered on screen with a little anti-aliasing, so I tend to prefer my terminals and text editors the way they look in a windowed GUI with a bit of eye candy, rather than raw and sharp on a pure text terminal.
Depends what you want the statistics for. Yes, you're right, there are more women than there are kids in the world, so even though women are less likely to be gamers than kids are, there's more of them, so they catch up in raw numbers. Question is, does that make the argument that women should be given more attention by the game industry any less valid?
Let's say (totally made up statistics but the point is the same) right now 2% of adult women play computer games, and 20% of high school boys do. Because there are 10 times as many women, though, you get the fact that there are as many women as there are teenage boys playing games.
But in absolute terms, that means that both groups are equally important communities of customers for computer games companies and magazine publishers. They should be spending as much effort addressing the needs of women gamers as they do on teenage boys. In fact, look at those numbers again. Tasked with the job of doubling the number of computer game players (ignoring the other two market groups for a moment), where would you go looking for them? To double the total number of players by just targetting teenage boys, you need to move the proportion of boys playing games to 60%. To double the numbers by just recruiting women, you only need to move their figure to 6%. Given that virtually no effort at all has been made to sell games to women by games marketers so far - and they've already got as many customers in that market as they have in a heavily marketed market like teenage kids - they've got to be taking those numbers seriously...
Now, I'm not saying this research is necessarily valid. I'm just saying that you can't dismiss the stats as meaningless because the two groups they're comparing aren't the same size.
I think this is a product of the fact that, in spite of the best intentions of computer scientists and hardware engineers over the years, the massive commercialsation of the industry means that computing really lacks a scientific underpinning. Electronic engineering, on which all computing depends, of course, is applied physics, with all the laws and theories that implies. And computing brings in a branch of mathematics - information theory - which has its own laws and theorems (not theories, because it's maths, not empirical science), and that's what most computer scientists are interested in.
What computing, as a scientific discipline, should do is combine these to derive its own laws and theories for how these two worlds interact.
Communications engineering has done a great job of being a proper engineering discipline, and there's a ton of laws and theories about the maximum information you can transmit through a medium, and so on, and is full of formulae which mix up amounts of information (measured in bits) with amounts of physical stuff, like distances, energy, and time. But computer engineering seems not to have the same interest in things like 'what's the maximum amount of information you can process using x Joules of energy?'. The kind of scientific units used in computing are laughable, like MIPS and Megaflops... they're meaningless. The processor speed indicator is pointless since it only tells you that a processor does something x times per second - not what that thing that it does is. One processor might perform an eighty bit floating point operation in a clock cycle. Another might just add two eight bit numbers together. The relationship between the clock speeds of these machines doesn't tell us much about their relative information processing capacity.
There almost certainly are some laws to be found in computing if we looked for them. And they might (when combined with observations of economic development and growth of the IT industry) go some way to explain why Moore's law (which measures the increasing ability of humans to extract information processing capacity from materials over time) has held for so long...
I'm ranting, but I think the point is that if Moore's law is what passes for a law in computing, we need to get some more laws.
> by the way, isn't "$250 million dollars" redundant?
Only if you're Bill Gates
Yeah, cos heaven know I'm always buying my CRT monitors, flat screens, video recorders and CD players from cheap American brands that knocked off Sony or Matsushita's R&D...
> This is one reason why we should be keeping more of the research money on terra firma.
You appear to be under the impression that when money is spent on space exploration, we actually ship the money itself into space, losing it from the economy forever. So, presumably, the 25 billion dollars spent on the ISS is all up there in space right now, circling the earth...
Wow. That would be one hell of a bank job.
twice in the last year I've had to phone up to make insurance claims. I'm sure on both occasions my voice stress levels would have been through the roof. On one occasion I'd just come downstairs to find my house had been burgled in the night. On the other, I was calling my travel insurer because all flights out of the airport I was in had been cancelled due to a strike and it was looking like I was going to be stuck abroad for another day. In either situation, I guess it was conceivable I might have been lying, but it would seem slightly more likely that any stress detected would be down to the cause of the claim in the first place...
> First of all, the birthrate would have to be chopped. Deathrate would have to be equal to the birthrate.
Hmm... birthrate's more complex than you think.
In general, you get population stability (in a monogamous society with stable marriage) when each couple - on average - gives birth to two children during their lifetime who reproduce. If you toss out monogamy (allowing serial monogamy, i.e. divorce and remarriage, or even other more exotic relationship structures) then you still have population stability if each person is, on average, a parent to two kids - whether they're by different partners is irrelevant.
So, regardless of how long people live for, if people choose to only have a couple of kids in their lifetime, the population will be stable. Question is, at what level will it stabilise?
The problem is that when you have a period of expanding lifespans, you get change in generational overlap. It's complicated by the age when people choose to have children, which is also increasing in line with expanding lifespans. At the moment (in western societies), typically three generations are alive at the same time (grandparents generally die a few years before or after their grandkids start reproducing - although since the baby boomers' kids started having their own kids, it's actually becoming more common for kids to be born after their grandparents have died, because people are having kids later, and often they can't afford to until they inherit the money from their parents' house).
For the population to increase, you need there to be an increasing overlap between generations - that is, you need people to have kids while their grandparents are still alive. But as I hinted above, the need for wealth to trickle down the generations and enable that might mitigate against people choosing to have kids so early. If you're going to live to 300, what's the rush with having kids when you're thirty? in fact, there's every chance that the generational overlap will decrease, driving down the number of generations who coexist within one family.
It may be that society just continually adapts so that in general, people give birth to an average of two children, and do so around the time when their grandparents are reaching the end of their natural life. In that case, you don't get any overall increase in population.
Of course, this is all predicated on the assumption that these lifespan benefits will only occur in wealthy societies that already have stable populations, thanks to female equality and family planning.
You now need to google news search for 'sco stock' to get the full report.
Yeah, in the UK banks rely on asking you questions nobody else could possibly know the nswer to - like your mother's maiden name, or the name of your pet. Obviously identity theft by people's own mothers is near epidemic proportions, but otherwise, this system has proven flawless.
Still, to be on the safe side, you should never play that game where you find out your pornstar name (by taking your pet's name and your mother's maiden name) with people you don't trust...
Fido McNorris