I'm a Canadian, so I don't have a vote in your election. For me, it's a cross between a circus sideshow, and an oncoming oil tanker heading right at my canoe.
But the strange way your electoral system is set up means that third-party votes are, for all intents and purposes, thrown away. All they do is reduce the size of the population who actually determines who gets to win. And the smaller that portion gets, the more likely the decision is going to be made by power blocs that vote en masse for one of your two parties.
Depending on the relative size and power of these blocs, you're giving power to some pretty scary people with some pretty scary agendas....
A protest vote may feel nice (and here, in Canada, it can actually be effective - our version of the Republicans went from running the country to effective non-existance in one election!) but they way your system works, not only does it accomplish nothing, it actively works against you.
I'd go so far as to say "Any vote for a third-party candidate in a US election is a vote for the guy you don't want"
I don't disagree with any of your motivations, but were I in your shoes, I'd hold my nose, and vote Gore.
I, for one, am very happy to see that *someone* is still compiling and releasing bleeding-edge distros.
"Release early, release often" should be burned onto the foreheads of every single distro manager. It's the whole engine that powers Open Source.
And as for "GCC 2.96"... That's a great idea. The GCC folks have a really nasty-bad habit of living behind their ivory walls, and tossing a release over the gate once every *year* or so. Rubbish! Get it out there, let us use it, let us find the bugs!
And if the widespread adoption of a GCC newer than 2.7.8 finally convinces Linus to fix the hackery in the kernel that exploits non-standard GCC behaviour in older versions of the compiler, well, then so much the better.
Hey, newbies! One of the whole points of this "Linux" thing is to actively find and report software bugs, so that they can be fixed. Linux is a participatry experience, not a "product". Red Hat's "product" is the service of gathering up all the bleeding-edge stuff, testing it for a certain level of usability, and then packaging it in a convenient format for you to get at. To expect a distro- any distro - to be bug-free is to miss the whole point!
I *strongly* recommend starting with a RedHat *.0 release - you get to see the newest stuff, and you get to actually contribute to the process.
Go Red Hat! The distribution for people with balls!
Because, you see, every major automaker, every year, goes out and purchases one of each of the competitor's products, tears it down, analyzes it, and publishes (internally) a report on what was found.
Any good idea (that isn't patented or legally protected) will be taken note of, and may find its way into a future project. Any bad idea or poor tradeoff will be laughed at.:)
There is a very long history of "reverse engineering" in the nuts and bolts world. The software world should expect no less.
KDE *is* tainted, at least for me.
on
KDE Strikes Back
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· Score: 2
KDE fans, this isn't a flame. It's a free world, you have choices, and whatever you choose is fine with me.
But *I* choose not to use KDE, specifically because the underlying toolkit is not Free. Period. Be as "technically superior" as you want, but I am not going to rely on any software built on a proprietary foundation. Been there, done that, got seriously burnt.
Until such time as the QT toolkit is properly released under a true Free Software licence, then any software that depends on QT will not be installed on my system.
At the risk of sounding too much like "me too!"....
"Me too!"
Hey, Sony, are you listening? I'm not going to buy that PS2, or those speakers, or that Mavica, or that really cool HDTV. I'm going to your competitors.
Actually, TOW (and similarly guided missiles, like Sagger) are actually fairly slow, in the 400MPH range. Of course, the 4km range and the ability to steer the missile make up for it somewhat.;)
And TOW wires break *all the time*. The last TOW shoot I did had 2 wire breaks in 10 missiles.
I would imagine that keeping a wire alive in water, which is much more viscous than air, would be even tougher.
But it's moot anyway - further reading reveals that the Russian torps in question are unguided.
It is extremely unlikely that a torpedo - especially one moving as fast as claimed - would circle around and hit the firing ship. The turning radius is just too large, and there's only so much fuel on board the torp.
It is much more likely that the warhead armed too early, and it detonated in the tube, or perhaps <i>Kusk</i> wound up downrange, and got shot by the tester - although a 200 knot torpedo would make a HELL of a lot of noise, so you'd think one of the Yank subs would have heard it if the latter was the case.
What strikes me as odd though is that I'm pretty sure <i>Kursk</i> is a boomer, that is, a strategic missle sub. It seems an odd choice to use a boomer to test a hunter/killer weapon.
The 200 knot torpedo is pretty impressive though. That's like 4 times faster than the current crop. I wonder how long the range is, and how fast it can turn, and how the guidence system (if any) works. Most modern torpedos are wire-guided, active-homing terminal. You steer it from the ship via commands down the wire until it picks up the target with its own active sonar, and then it homes in from there. Keeping a wire payed out without breaking at 200kts is quite the trick.
This is probably a really really dumb question (to someone) but every time I hear about some new advance in wireless networking (which assumes 2-way communications) I start wondering about this:
How much wireless stuff can be crammed into a given volume of physical space before the crosstalk and interference disrupts everything?
I visualize the problem as this: radio is really just another form of light, so each wireless device is the electromagnetic equivelent of a 3-watt light bulb. The color of the light is its frequency (or "channel", if you prefer.)
Imagine the average suburban neighborhood, but where all the houses are made of glass (to allow the light metaphor to work - radio passes through walls) Each house now has a couple of thousand of these colored lights stuck in it (all my appliences, etc. are networked), shining all over the place. The neighbourhood is awash in light! How are these devices supposed to function in this kind of environment?
If you staple $100 bills all over your clothing, walk through the most crime-ridden part of down, and then duck into a back alley - and then get robbed - it doesn't mean you're not a robbery victim, and it doesn't mean that you shouldn't be given legal recourse.
But neither does it mean you're very _smart_, either. It's not good that you got robbed, it's not right that you got robbed, but it's not suprising you got robbed. And in retrospect, the decision to walk around with $100 bills stapled to your clothing doesn't look very bright.
It'll help if you've ever read an issue of 2600. I've got about a dozen of them, as the local bookstore carries it from time to time.
2600 is not exactly Scientific American. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of editing, and many of the articles are written in an informal, spoken-word kind of voice. It's not as bad as 3133t3 sp33k, but there's a lot of slang, bad grammar, and the like.
There's also a lot of "fight the Man!" rhetoric and quasi-revolutionary language, and the occasional thinly-veiled disclaimer. "This is totally illegal, and you should never do this, but if you wanted to here's how to do it...."
The impression created by reading a typical 2600 issue is eavesdropping on a conversation at a prison for tech-savvy criminals. It's not a fair impression, and it's more for show and image than substance ("We Bad! We 3133t3!") But 2600 manages to convey the message that it and its readership don't have much respect for law or law enforcement.
So when 2600 gets boned by a group of _real_ criminals (posing as Fine Upstanding Captialists) it's hard to imagine any judge reading a stack of 2600s and coming away with any sympathy for them. Page after page of "how to crack this system" and "how to phreak this phone" doesn't install much confidence in the argument that DeCSS wasn't intended as a copying/pirating tool. Page after page after tedious page of "Our legal system sucks. Judges are all corrupt. Free Kevin!!" rhetoric doesn't do much in the way of image building either.
What _really_ sucks is how much influence all this seems to have had on the judge - because once you get past all that noise and look at this case at the pure merits, it's obvious that the MPAA doesn't have a leg to stand on. If the legal system really was 100% pure logic and objective reason, the case would be done by now, and the MPAA would have been sent packing.
But that's not what happened. Obviously, 2600's somewhat grey-hat presentation style made a bigger impression on the judge than the actual facts of the case. And given that 2600 has worked very hard to create that "Hax0r 3133t3" image (that is now biting them very hard) they are reaping what they have sown.
I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that if 2600 was a little more like Scientific American, and a little less like the Hax0r Pravda, that their troubles would be a lot less.
And yet, the fact that a change of editorial voice could sway a judicial proceeding is truly a Very Bad Thing. That 2600 ran afoul of the law is just Karma; that the judicial system was unable to look past the bullshit and see the real case is... disturbing.
So I'm torn myself. On the one hand, I see 2600 getting a little Karmic balancing for all the "on the edge" stuff they've done. On the other hand, to see them lose a meritorious and _important_ case because of their image (and the associated implication that if you want to have your rights protected by the courts, you had better toe the editorial line) strikes me as wrong too.
And in all of this, I see the litigational genius of the MPAA's legal team. They've picked the perfect target, one that is going to have to work very, very hard to create any sort of judicial sympathy.
As much as I hate to say it, as much as it sucks, I'm afraid 2600 is fast becoming a victim of their own reputation.
The editorial linked to is intelligent and well-written. The defense case made for 2600 well-argued, well-presented, and logical. But the fact remains that large portions of the 2600 issues that I have read appear to be written as how-to documents for crackers and would-be cyberterrorists.
Now you and I know that, at best, your typical 2600 Hax0r is more of the network equivelent of the flaming bag of dog shit left on a front porch than a series threat to national security - but the judge doesn't see that. The judge sees a small-time larcenist with his hand caught in a bigger bag, and a long-running distain for law enforcement and legal proceedings. (Free Kevin! indeed)
No wonder that, despite their truly iron-clad defence, that the judge gives them almost no credibility. Imagine a skinhead trying to sue for (legitimate!) racial discrimination, and you get the idea.
It's not right, and it's not fair - but it's not suprising either. 2600 is reaping the harvest they have sown the last few years.
Give the MPAA credit - they knew _exactly_ who to tackle first. When you seek to set precident, attack the weakest defendant, then move on to the strong.
It's wrong that what is supposed to be an objective exercise in logical deduction has turned into a public relations contest, but that's what it is.
...whatever remains, however improbable, must be the case.
That's typically how the "logic" in science's attempts to describe reality functions, and it functions quite well that way, Godel be dammed.
Or in other words:
"I think X is so"
"This experiment foo tests X"
"If foo fails, X cannot be true"
"If foo succeeds, X may be true, and can probably be treated as true until something better comes along"
As far as the quantum mechanical property that observing changes the observed, that isn't as screwed up as you seem to think. Instead, consider how one might "observe" something at a quantum mechanical scale. Anything bounced off a quantum mechanical particle with sufficient energy to perform a "measurement" is locally "large" enough to affect whatever it is you're observing.
Consider a basic thermometer. If I take your temperature, the amount of heat energy drawn off into the themometer is not enough to materially affect your overall temperature. But if I take that same thermometer and attempt to take the temperature as a drop of liquid nitrogen, the heat energy in the (room temperature) thermometer will boil off the nitrogen, and thus alter it.
Just because NVidia may (or may not) privately express their wish to Open Source their drivers doesn't change the _real_ problem one whit.
The problem is not some metaphysical "corruption" of a "pure and free" Linux system, it's a much more practical issue.
The Linux kernel is under constant revision and continual development. Sometimes, the driver API changes - typically for a very good reason - and then any binary-only driver will break.
This means that in order for your binary-only driver to continue to function as the kernel is revised, the provider of that binary-only driver must keep pace with the mainstream kernel development.
Furthermore, in the case of stable-API but unstable behaviour, it is very difficult to get an almost-functioning binary-only driver fixed in any sort of reasonable timeframe, nor is it easy to debug instabilities that may arise through driver/kernel interaction.
The only real solution to these technical problems is to release source.
Let me put it this way - any company that releases binary-only drivers must needs become a slave to maintaining these drivers. If they aren't up to the task, then the result is poor or no support as the kernel mutates through successive versions.
Binary-only drivers SUCK from a purly technical perspective. That's not FUD, it's truth.
I'm sticking myself out on a karma limb here, but what the hell. Some things are worth taking a hit for.
The post I have replied to is NOT a troll, despite having been moderated as such. The poster has presented an entirely on-topic opinion (that, as an aside, I tend to agree with)
You, as a moderator, may or may not agree with the post, but not sharing the same viewpoint does not entitle you to slap him with "Troll" - especially when there are so many other REAL trolls to slap down.
Far better than just posting the binaries, it would be _fantastic_ if some of these abandonware sites could contact original authors and get _source code_ released.
Why emulate, when you can port?
Is there any example of such a thing ever happening, outside of ID's sourcing of Quake/Quake2/Doom?
I don't know what is scarier - the fact that the Yanks have the right to carry weapons manufactured to kill other people in their Constitution, or the fact that some nutballs think they may actually use these arms against their own government.
Here's a trivia fact for you: If you take all the wars that Americans have ever fought in, and add up all the casulties, it turns out there is one war that has more Americans killed and wounded than all the others COMBINED.
Guess which one?
The American Civil War.
Yup. The all-time greatest killer of Americans is... Americans.
Gaaa... I'm going to wind up responding to most of the responses to my own post. How gauche.:)
In all your examples, there was indeed an individual acting as the driver. But in none of them did the "individual" act alone and unaided.
All of them had help.
It's not Adolf you have to worry about, it's Adolf + the Brownshirts. It's not Genghis, it's Genghis + the Mongol Hordes. And so on.
Groups may do better when led by a powerful leader, but it's still the _group_ getting the job done - so legislate the group, and leave the individual alone.
The difference between "government" and all other groups, is that the government is directly responsible to the people, whereas all other groups are responsible only to themselves, a subset of the people.
If I don't like the way the government is acting, I have recourse, via my vote. If I don't like the way Microsoft is acting, I can go pound sand. My President/Prime Minister/Congrassman/whatever answers to me, but Gates et al answer to no-one.
There are, of course, some sticky bits here: I don't like how the government is handling issue foo. I form a group, the "Association For Better Foo Handling". By virtue of being a member of that group, I am subject to higher regulation. How do we prevent the government (in power) from unjustly interfering with a group that is legitimately trying to affect/reduce the government's power?
So yes, even the government must be regulated - as it largely is now anyway. The regulation of groups must clearly spell out governmental limits, and even groups must have certain uninfringeable rights. But I maintain that a group has much less in the way of rights than an individual does.
Western countries actually do a pretty good job of limiting and decentralizing governmental power - especially the ultra-paranoid American system. Where they fall down is giving too much in the way of rights and freedoms to groups (and especially corporations) at the expense of individual freedoms.
Perhaps someone will find this interesting, and comment on it.
Although I often find myself with strong libertarian leanings, especially towards issues like abortion, legal drug use, and seatbelt laws (even though I personally never plan on using drugs, and I always wear my seatbelt) I still think there's a real need for strong government.
The crux, at least as I see it, is that while individual freedoms should be held as uninfringed as possible, groups should be closely regulated, and the larger the group, the more closely it should be regulated.
The idea here is that the destructive power of a lone individual acting is fairly limited - not only in terms of raw ability, but in terms of the tendancy of functioning as part of a group to dissociate an individual from the group's actions. For example, your average German circa 1941 was as decent a human being as any other, but grouped together as "Nazi Germany" they did a lot of horrible things.
It's not ESR that worries me; it's the NRA. It's not Lars (from Metallica); it's the RIAA. It's not the employees; it's Disney/Sony/Union Carbide/etc.
It seems a simple concept: The larger the group, the more the regulation, the smaller the group, the smaller the regulation. Free the individual, restrain the collective.
I think a large share of the blame falls on Western law that treats a "corporation" as a "legal person", so that a corporation is treated the same way before the law as a private citizen. That's crazy! Microsoft Corporation (for example) is capable of far, far more damage to society than any individual. That Microsoft and myself should be considered equal before the law is outrageous.
Equally outrageous is that most individuals are, for all intents and purposes, enslaved by corporations. They own us! Isn't that supposed to be the other way around?
I'm not sure what label to hang on this political philosophy, but whatever it is, I'm for it.
I run the risk of being tagged "flamebait", but those who think "Star Wars" is the only reason to mourn Sir Alec should run out immediately and rent Bridge
What I am saying is that it isn't likely that all of this arose out of random events, which was my argument from the beginning.
On the contrary, once you see the logic in the chain of events that forms "evolution" (and I use the word "logic" here in the mathematical sense) it's no longer a question of "likely" - the math demands that all this arise out of random events.
Yes, the probability that this happen is (as far as we can tell) staggering - but then, the odds on winning a lottery are staggering too. It happens.
A few errors in your biology.
[ much technical detail on types of mutation deleted ]
Not "errors" - simplifications. The physical process by which mutation occurs matters not one whit. It does not matter if 99% of all mutations are destructive, nor does it matter that 99% of the remaining 1% do not breed true. All the process requires is that a finite percentage of all possible mutations be inheritable and confer a survival advantage. Once you have that, all else becomes inevitable - the math demands it.
All you do by making "good" mutations more rare is extend the time it takes to develop a certain level of organism - and as we both know, Nature has had plenty of time to play.
I'm not convinced your entire discussion of probability really gives credence to your argument. Sure, given enough time, anything can happen.
Then I'm afaid you don't understand the math here. The statement is not "given enough time, anything can happen". The statement is "given enough time, any process with a demonstratable positive probibility of occuring must happen"
Once one can demonstrate a means by which "a" becomes "b", then, eventually, "a" must become "b". So all that is required to "prove" evolution is to demonstrate a means where "a" evolves into "b" with positive probability - and that has been done over and over again with generations of fruit flies in genetics labs. The mechanisms that drive evolution - genetic mutation and natural selection - are WELL proven out.
Yes, there are a number of missing details, especially in the very early and simple forms of life - but those missing details do not invalidate the process by virtue of being missing. It is not necessary to determine if eukayotic preceeded prokaryotic (for example) in order to "prove" evolution, any more than it is needed to add every number to every other number to prove that addition always works.
"Evolution" is well beyond the "I do or do not believe it" stage. It's as good a "fact" as science can produce. Choosing to disbelieve evolution is like refusing to believe in calculus.
"The basic micro-processes of cellular biology are so complex that there's no way I can believe they're the product of random chance"
At its very root, the argument depends on Bethe's belief of the suitability of evolution and natural selection to produce complex systems. There's no evidence there to support the position, just Bethe's stubborn refusal to accept what he sees before him.
Evolution is complexity-neutral - all you need is more time, and you develop more complexity.
What Bethe really misses is that, thanks to heredity, future organisms don't have to re-invent the wheel. Instead, they build upon the work of what has gone before them. It's a kind of code reuse.
The evidence is right there in front of you. You and Bethe may choose to deny it, but it doesn't change it being there.
You're missing out on two very important pieces of the puzzle here, plus a drop of statistics.
Let's do the statistics first: "Any event with a positive probability, no matter how small, when given enough time, must eventually happen"
So to use your watch example, if one assumes that there is a process by which your analogue watch could be transformed into a digital watch, then, given enough time, that result MUST happen. That's not evolution, just math.
So it therefore follows that in order for your watch to transform, it must be proven that there is a process that would achieve the transformation with positive probibility.
In order for the transformation to occur within a reasonable amount of time, the process must have a sufficiently large probability, in order to escape fates with larger-order probabilities. For instance, if left alone for aeons, it is possible that your watch could be discovered by an analogue watch upgrader person, a man who wanders the earth looking for watches to transform. This is a positive-probability postulation, but the probability is a very, very small number, whereas the probability that the watch would simply corrode away is very high.
So much for math.
Now, here's the first bit of biology, broken into 4 pieces:
1) Our biological structure is controlled by bits of information-storing molecules called DNA
2) DNA is sometimes changed by random chance
3) Mutated DNA sometimes results in changes to the DNA_controlled physical structure of an organism
4) Some DNA-based mutations are inheritable
All four of these little bits of biology are well proven and well established facts. We know that DNA determines structure for a fact. We know that DNA can be made to mutate for a fact. (and, incidently, you don't need gamma rays to mutate DNA. Sex does a perfectly acceptable job sometimes) We know that sometimes mutated DNA changes physical structure for a fact, and we know that sometimes that mutated DNA is inheritable for a fact.
Taken together, this means that it is possible for a mutation to occur that breeds true - positive probability.
The second missing piece is "natural selection" which simply states that organisms that are well suited to their environment will be more likely to survive, and so more likely to breed. This is a positive feedback loop - the better you are at surviving, the more you breed, the more well-adapted offspring you have, who will in turn produce well-adapted offspring, and so on. Well proven, well established fact.
Now couple the two together, and you get "If a mutation that breeds true and produces a structural change provides the mutated organism with a survival advantage, then that organism is more likely to breed and produce similarly altered offspring" Bingo! We have our process! Not to get your watch from analogue to digital, but certainly how to go from single-celled life to Humanity.
All you need now to make the process a near-certainty is time, lots and lots of time - and guess what? We've had several BILLION years for this process to work.
There you go, can't get much more logical than that.
I'm afraid the only failing here is your failing to understand the level of rigour in the logic here - not to mention the physical evidence. Go back and look at your textbooks. Start with the single-celled organisms and work your way up. We all work the same way! We all burn sugar for energy, we all have the same molecule (DNA) that determines our structure, all our cellular biology is nearly identical, and as you progress up the ladder, we all have pretty much the same design in our organs, skeletal structure - even our senses! We all have sex, all our sex organs work pretty much the same, we all breathe, we all pump blood with a single pump.... The evidence is enormous!
Evolution, my friend, as as factual as it gets. All you have to do to see it is pay attention.
I think it's entirely possible to do fun projects and lectures on low-level, hardware-based computing, without having to go into the exhausting detail, or involving the really gritty stuff like Karnough maps.
For example, most digital IC-based circuits use a +5V DC value for a logical "1". The reason why a "1" is +5V DC has to do with the contruction of the transistors used to build the gates. It's sufficient to state something like "transistors can be used as switches, and they switch between 0V and +5 V because of the way they are made" without having to get into the guts of semiconductor theory.
Similarly, one could present a diagram of a 2-bit adder circuit made of logic gates, and demonstrate that it really does add 2 2-bit numbers, even following the states of the gates inside the circuit, without showing the Karnough map that led to the circuit's design.
I envision the hands-on portion of the class using slightly more complex chips than raw logic gates. Shift registers, ALUs, small static RAM chips, and the like can be wired together fairly easily and do fun things without having to get into the undergrad stuff.
But even so, exposing kids to difficult concepts and forcing them to THINK is not a bad thing at all. School should be challenging! I'd rather see kids struggle with difficult material than have them bored with pablum.
One of the failings (that I see at least) of high school level CS classes is that they don't pay any attention to the real low-level hardware bits, down at the level of individual logic gates.
A lot - and I mean A LOT - of basic understanding of "why computers are built the way they are" comes from wiring up really basic componants, flipping some switches, and watching LEDs flash on and off.
For instance, I remember doing a project where I wired up 2 shift registers and an ALU chip to a rack of switches and 8 LEDs. By flipping the switches, one could input a pair of binary numbers into the shift registers, and then another switch (wired up as the clock) would trigger the ALU, and the resultant sum would show up on the LEDs.
After doing something like this, you gain understanding of such things as: Why do computers work in binary? How do instruction sets work? How do data busses work? What is the signifigance of the clock? And so on.
The only downside to projects like this is that you need some hardware - breadboards, power supplies, a selection of cheap ICs, a bunch of wire, and LEDs. But tinkering with this crap is just soooooo worth it - and it's fun!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a Canadian, so I don't have a vote in your election. For me, it's a cross between a circus sideshow, and an oncoming oil tanker heading right at my canoe.
:)
But the strange way your electoral system is set up means that third-party votes are, for all intents and purposes, thrown away. All they do is reduce the size of the population who actually determines who gets to win. And the smaller that portion gets, the more likely the decision is going to be made by power blocs that vote en masse for one of your two parties.
Depending on the relative size and power of these blocs, you're giving power to some pretty scary people with some pretty scary agendas....
A protest vote may feel nice (and here, in Canada, it can actually be effective - our version of the Republicans went from running the country to effective non-existance in one election!) but they way your system works, not only does it accomplish nothing, it actively works against you.
I'd go so far as to say "Any vote for a third-party candidate in a US election is a vote for the guy you don't want"
I don't disagree with any of your motivations, but were I in your shoes, I'd hold my nose, and vote Gore.
It's the Supreme Court, Stupid.
I, for one, am very happy to see that *someone* is still compiling and releasing bleeding-edge distros.
"Release early, release often" should be burned onto the foreheads of every single distro manager. It's the whole engine that powers Open Source.
And as for "GCC 2.96"... That's a great idea. The GCC folks have a really nasty-bad habit of living behind their ivory walls, and tossing a release over the gate once every *year* or so. Rubbish! Get it out there, let us use it, let us find the bugs!
And if the widespread adoption of a GCC newer than 2.7.8 finally convinces Linus to fix the hackery in the kernel that exploits non-standard GCC behaviour in older versions of the compiler, well, then so much the better.
Hey, newbies! One of the whole points of this "Linux" thing is to actively find and report software bugs, so that they can be fixed. Linux is a participatry experience, not a "product". Red Hat's "product" is the service of gathering up all the bleeding-edge stuff, testing it for a certain level of usability, and then packaging it in a convenient format for you to get at. To expect a distro- any distro - to be bug-free is to miss the whole point!
I *strongly* recommend starting with a RedHat *.0 release - you get to see the newest stuff, and you get to actually contribute to the process.
Go Red Hat! The distribution for people with balls!
Because, you see, every major automaker, every year, goes out and purchases one of each of the competitor's products, tears it down, analyzes it, and publishes (internally) a report on what was found.
:)
Any good idea (that isn't patented or legally protected) will be taken note of, and may find its way into a future project. Any bad idea or poor tradeoff will be laughed at.
There is a very long history of "reverse engineering" in the nuts and bolts world. The software world should expect no less.
KDE fans, this isn't a flame. It's a free world, you have choices, and whatever you choose is fine with me.
But *I* choose not to use KDE, specifically because the underlying toolkit is not Free. Period. Be as "technically superior" as you want, but I am not going to rely on any software built on a proprietary foundation. Been there, done that, got seriously burnt.
Until such time as the QT toolkit is properly released under a true Free Software licence, then any software that depends on QT will not be installed on my system.
Yes, it's THAT important.
At the risk of sounding too much like "me too!"....
"Me too!"
Hey, Sony, are you listening? I'm not going to buy that PS2, or those speakers, or that Mavica, or that really cool HDTV. I'm going to your competitors.
Be sure and thank your VP for me.
Actually, TOW (and similarly guided missiles, like Sagger) are actually fairly slow, in the 400MPH range. Of course, the 4km range and the ability to steer the missile make up for it somewhat. ;)
And TOW wires break *all the time*. The last TOW shoot I did had 2 wire breaks in 10 missiles.
I would imagine that keeping a wire alive in water, which is much more viscous than air, would be even tougher.
But it's moot anyway - further reading reveals that the Russian torps in question are unguided.
It is extremely unlikely that a torpedo - especially one moving as fast as claimed - would circle around and hit the firing ship. The turning radius is just too large, and there's only so much fuel on board the torp.
It is much more likely that the warhead armed too early, and it detonated in the tube, or perhaps <i>Kusk</i> wound up downrange, and got shot by the tester - although a 200 knot torpedo would make a HELL of a lot of noise, so you'd think one of the Yank subs would have heard it if the latter was the case.
What strikes me as odd though is that I'm pretty sure <i>Kursk</i> is a boomer, that is, a strategic missle sub. It seems an odd choice to use a boomer to test a hunter/killer weapon.
The 200 knot torpedo is pretty impressive though. That's like 4 times faster than the current crop. I wonder how long the range is, and how fast it can turn, and how the guidence system (if any) works. Most modern torpedos are wire-guided, active-homing terminal. You steer it from the ship via commands down the wire until it picks up the target with its own active sonar, and then it homes in from there. Keeping a wire payed out without breaking at 200kts is quite the trick.
This is probably a really really dumb question (to someone) but every time I hear about some new advance in wireless networking (which assumes 2-way communications) I start wondering about this:
How much wireless stuff can be crammed into a given volume of physical space before the crosstalk and interference disrupts everything?
I visualize the problem as this: radio is really just another form of light, so each wireless device is the electromagnetic equivelent of a 3-watt light bulb. The color of the light is its frequency (or "channel", if you prefer.)
Imagine the average suburban neighborhood, but where all the houses are made of glass (to allow the light metaphor to work - radio passes through walls) Each house now has a couple of thousand of these colored lights stuck in it (all my appliences, etc. are networked), shining all over the place. The neighbourhood is awash in light! How are these devices supposed to function in this kind of environment?
How well does the aether scale?
If you staple $100 bills all over your clothing, walk through the most crime-ridden part of down, and then duck into a back alley - and then get robbed - it doesn't mean you're not a robbery victim, and it doesn't mean that you shouldn't be given legal recourse.
But neither does it mean you're very _smart_, either. It's not good that you got robbed, it's not right that you got robbed, but it's not suprising you got robbed. And in retrospect, the decision to walk around with $100 bills stapled to your clothing doesn't look very bright.
It'll help if you've ever read an issue of 2600. I've got about a dozen of them, as the local bookstore carries it from time to time.
2600 is not exactly Scientific American. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of editing, and many of the articles are written in an informal, spoken-word kind of voice. It's not as bad as 3133t3 sp33k, but there's a lot of slang, bad grammar, and the like.
There's also a lot of "fight the Man!" rhetoric and quasi-revolutionary language, and the occasional thinly-veiled disclaimer. "This is totally illegal, and you should never do this, but if you wanted to here's how to do it...."
The impression created by reading a typical 2600 issue is eavesdropping on a conversation at a prison for tech-savvy criminals. It's not a fair impression, and it's more for show and image than substance ("We Bad! We 3133t3!") But 2600 manages to convey the message that it and its readership don't have much respect for law or law enforcement.
So when 2600 gets boned by a group of _real_ criminals (posing as Fine Upstanding Captialists) it's hard to imagine any judge reading a stack of 2600s and coming away with any sympathy for them. Page after page of "how to crack this system" and "how to phreak this phone" doesn't install much confidence in the argument that DeCSS wasn't intended as a copying/pirating tool. Page after page after tedious page of "Our legal system sucks. Judges are all corrupt. Free Kevin!!" rhetoric doesn't do much in the way of image building either.
What _really_ sucks is how much influence all this seems to have had on the judge - because once you get past all that noise and look at this case at the pure merits, it's obvious that the MPAA doesn't have a leg to stand on. If the legal system really was 100% pure logic and objective reason, the case would be done by now, and the MPAA would have been sent packing.
But that's not what happened. Obviously, 2600's somewhat grey-hat presentation style made a bigger impression on the judge than the actual facts of the case. And given that 2600 has worked very hard to create that "Hax0r 3133t3" image (that is now biting them very hard) they are reaping what they have sown.
I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that if 2600 was a little more like Scientific American, and a little less like the Hax0r Pravda, that their troubles would be a lot less.
And yet, the fact that a change of editorial voice could sway a judicial proceeding is truly a Very Bad Thing. That 2600 ran afoul of the law is just Karma; that the judicial system was unable to look past the bullshit and see the real case is... disturbing.
So I'm torn myself. On the one hand, I see 2600 getting a little Karmic balancing for all the "on the edge" stuff they've done. On the other hand, to see them lose a meritorious and _important_ case because of their image (and the associated implication that if you want to have your rights protected by the courts, you had better toe the editorial line) strikes me as wrong too.
And in all of this, I see the litigational genius of the MPAA's legal team. They've picked the perfect target, one that is going to have to work very, very hard to create any sort of judicial sympathy.
Does that help at all?
DG
As much as I hate to say it, as much as it sucks, I'm afraid 2600 is fast becoming a victim of their own reputation.
The editorial linked to is intelligent and well-written. The defense case made for 2600 well-argued, well-presented, and logical. But the fact remains that large portions of the 2600 issues that I have read appear to be written as how-to documents for crackers and would-be cyberterrorists.
Now you and I know that, at best, your typical 2600 Hax0r is more of the network equivelent of the flaming bag of dog shit left on a front porch than a series threat to national security - but the judge doesn't see that. The judge sees a small-time larcenist with his hand caught in a bigger bag, and a long-running distain for law enforcement and legal proceedings. (Free Kevin! indeed)
No wonder that, despite their truly iron-clad defence, that the judge gives them almost no credibility. Imagine a skinhead trying to sue for (legitimate!) racial discrimination, and you get the idea.
It's not right, and it's not fair - but it's not suprising either. 2600 is reaping the harvest they have sown the last few years.
Give the MPAA credit - they knew _exactly_ who to tackle first. When you seek to set precident, attack the weakest defendant, then move on to the strong.
It's wrong that what is supposed to be an objective exercise in logical deduction has turned into a public relations contest, but that's what it is.
Good luck 2600 and the EFF. You need it.
...whatever remains, however improbable, must be the case.
That's typically how the "logic" in science's attempts to describe reality functions, and it functions quite well that way, Godel be dammed.
Or in other words:
"I think X is so"
"This experiment foo tests X"
"If foo fails, X cannot be true"
"If foo succeeds, X may be true, and can probably be treated as true until something better comes along"
As far as the quantum mechanical property that observing changes the observed, that isn't as screwed up as you seem to think. Instead, consider how one might "observe" something at a quantum mechanical scale. Anything bounced off a quantum mechanical particle with sufficient energy to perform a "measurement" is locally "large" enough to affect whatever it is you're observing.
Consider a basic thermometer. If I take your temperature, the amount of heat energy drawn off into the themometer is not enough to materially affect your overall temperature. But if I take that same thermometer and attempt to take the temperature as a drop of liquid nitrogen, the heat energy in the (room temperature) thermometer will boil off the nitrogen, and thus alter it.
It's just a question of scale, not metaphysics.
Just because NVidia may (or may not) privately express their wish to Open Source their drivers doesn't change the _real_ problem one whit.
The problem is not some metaphysical "corruption" of a "pure and free" Linux system, it's a much more practical issue.
The Linux kernel is under constant revision and continual development. Sometimes, the driver API changes - typically for a very good reason - and then any binary-only driver will break.
This means that in order for your binary-only driver to continue to function as the kernel is revised, the provider of that binary-only driver must keep pace with the mainstream kernel development.
Furthermore, in the case of stable-API but unstable behaviour, it is very difficult to get an almost-functioning binary-only driver fixed in any sort of reasonable timeframe, nor is it easy to debug instabilities that may arise through driver/kernel interaction.
The only real solution to these technical problems is to release source.
Let me put it this way - any company that releases binary-only drivers must needs become a slave to maintaining these drivers. If they aren't up to the task, then the result is poor or no support as the kernel mutates through successive versions.
Binary-only drivers SUCK from a purly technical perspective. That's not FUD, it's truth.
I'm sticking myself out on a karma limb here, but what the hell. Some things are worth taking a hit for.
The post I have replied to is NOT a troll, despite having been moderated as such. The poster has presented an entirely on-topic opinion (that, as an aside, I tend to agree with)
You, as a moderator, may or may not agree with the post, but not sharing the same viewpoint does not entitle you to slap him with "Troll" - especially when there are so many other REAL trolls to slap down.
I'll be looking for this one in meta-mod....
Good post Mr. AC.
Far better than just posting the binaries, it would be _fantastic_ if some of these abandonware sites could contact original authors and get _source code_ released.
Why emulate, when you can port?
Is there any example of such a thing ever happening, outside of ID's sourcing of Quake/Quake2/Doom?
I don't know what is scarier - the fact that the Yanks have the right to carry weapons manufactured to kill other people in their Constitution, or the fact that some nutballs think they may actually use these arms against their own government.
Here's a trivia fact for you: If you take all the wars that Americans have ever fought in, and add up all the casulties, it turns out there is one war that has more Americans killed and wounded than all the others COMBINED.
Guess which one?
The American Civil War.
Yup. The all-time greatest killer of Americans is... Americans.
There's your "right to bear arms"
Gaaa... I'm going to wind up responding to most of the responses to my own post. How gauche. :)
In all your examples, there was indeed an individual acting as the driver. But in none of them did the "individual" act alone and unaided.
All of them had help.
It's not Adolf you have to worry about, it's Adolf + the Brownshirts. It's not Genghis, it's Genghis + the Mongol Hordes. And so on.
Groups may do better when led by a powerful leader, but it's still the _group_ getting the job done - so legislate the group, and leave the individual alone.
The difference between "government" and all other groups, is that the government is directly responsible to the people, whereas all other groups are responsible only to themselves, a subset of the people.
If I don't like the way the government is acting, I have recourse, via my vote. If I don't like the way Microsoft is acting, I can go pound sand. My President/Prime Minister/Congrassman/whatever answers to me, but Gates et al answer to no-one.
There are, of course, some sticky bits here: I don't like how the government is handling issue foo. I form a group, the "Association For Better Foo Handling". By virtue of being a member of that group, I am subject to higher regulation. How do we prevent the government (in power) from unjustly interfering with a group that is legitimately trying to affect/reduce the government's power?
So yes, even the government must be regulated - as it largely is now anyway. The regulation of groups must clearly spell out governmental limits, and even groups must have certain uninfringeable rights. But I maintain that a group has much less in the way of rights than an individual does.
Western countries actually do a pretty good job of limiting and decentralizing governmental power - especially the ultra-paranoid American system. Where they fall down is giving too much in the way of rights and freedoms to groups (and especially corporations) at the expense of individual freedoms.
Perhaps someone will find this interesting, and comment on it.
Although I often find myself with strong libertarian leanings, especially towards issues like abortion, legal drug use, and seatbelt laws (even though I personally never plan on using drugs, and I always wear my seatbelt) I still think there's a real need for strong government.
The crux, at least as I see it, is that while individual freedoms should be held as uninfringed as possible, groups should be closely regulated, and the larger the group, the more closely it should be regulated.
The idea here is that the destructive power of a lone individual acting is fairly limited - not only in terms of raw ability, but in terms of the tendancy of functioning as part of a group to dissociate an individual from the group's actions. For example, your average German circa 1941 was as decent a human being as any other, but grouped together as "Nazi Germany" they did a lot of horrible things.
It's not ESR that worries me; it's the NRA. It's not Lars (from Metallica); it's the RIAA. It's not the employees; it's Disney/Sony/Union Carbide/etc.
It seems a simple concept: The larger the group, the more the regulation, the smaller the group, the smaller the regulation. Free the individual, restrain the collective.
I think a large share of the blame falls on Western law that treats a "corporation" as a "legal person", so that a corporation is treated the same way before the law as a private citizen. That's crazy! Microsoft Corporation (for example) is capable of far, far more damage to society than any individual. That Microsoft and myself should be considered equal before the law is outrageous.
Equally outrageous is that most individuals are, for all intents and purposes, enslaved by corporations. They own us! Isn't that supposed to be the other way around?
I'm not sure what label to hang on this political philosophy, but whatever it is, I'm for it.
THAT is a movie!
On the contrary, once you see the logic in the chain of events that forms "evolution" (and I use the word "logic" here in the mathematical sense) it's no longer a question of "likely" - the math demands that all this arise out of random events.
Yes, the probability that this happen is (as far as we can tell) staggering - but then, the odds on winning a lottery are staggering too. It happens.
A few errors in your biology.[ much technical detail on types of mutation deleted ]
Not "errors" - simplifications. The physical process by which mutation occurs matters not one whit. It does not matter if 99% of all mutations are destructive, nor does it matter that 99% of the remaining 1% do not breed true. All the process requires is that a finite percentage of all possible mutations be inheritable and confer a survival advantage. Once you have that, all else becomes inevitable - the math demands it.
All you do by making "good" mutations more rare is extend the time it takes to develop a certain level of organism - and as we both know, Nature has had plenty of time to play.
I'm not convinced your entire discussion of probability really gives credence to your argument. Sure, given enough time, anything can happen.Then I'm afaid you don't understand the math here. The statement is not "given enough time, anything can happen". The statement is "given enough time, any process with a demonstratable positive probibility of occuring must happen"
Once one can demonstrate a means by which "a" becomes "b", then, eventually, "a" must become "b". So all that is required to "prove" evolution is to demonstrate a means where "a" evolves into "b" with positive probability - and that has been done over and over again with generations of fruit flies in genetics labs. The mechanisms that drive evolution - genetic mutation and natural selection - are WELL proven out.
Yes, there are a number of missing details, especially in the very early and simple forms of life - but those missing details do not invalidate the process by virtue of being missing. It is not necessary to determine if eukayotic preceeded prokaryotic (for example) in order to "prove" evolution, any more than it is needed to add every number to every other number to prove that addition always works.
"Evolution" is well beyond the "I do or do not believe it" stage. It's as good a "fact" as science can produce. Choosing to disbelieve evolution is like refusing to believe in calculus.
Bethe's whole argument comes down to this:
"The basic micro-processes of cellular biology are so complex that there's no way I can believe they're the product of random chance"
At its very root, the argument depends on Bethe's belief of the suitability of evolution and natural selection to produce complex systems. There's no evidence there to support the position, just Bethe's stubborn refusal to accept what he sees before him.
Evolution is complexity-neutral - all you need is more time, and you develop more complexity.
What Bethe really misses is that, thanks to heredity, future organisms don't have to re-invent the wheel. Instead, they build upon the work of what has gone before them. It's a kind of code reuse.
The evidence is right there in front of you. You and Bethe may choose to deny it, but it doesn't change it being there.
You're missing out on two very important pieces of the puzzle here, plus a drop of statistics.
Let's do the statistics first: "Any event with a positive probability, no matter how small, when given enough time, must eventually happen"
So to use your watch example, if one assumes that there is a process by which your analogue watch could be transformed into a digital watch, then, given enough time, that result MUST happen. That's not evolution, just math.
So it therefore follows that in order for your watch to transform, it must be proven that there is a process that would achieve the transformation with positive probibility.
In order for the transformation to occur within a reasonable amount of time, the process must have a sufficiently large probability, in order to escape fates with larger-order probabilities. For instance, if left alone for aeons, it is possible that your watch could be discovered by an analogue watch upgrader person, a man who wanders the earth looking for watches to transform. This is a positive-probability postulation, but the probability is a very, very small number, whereas the probability that the watch would simply corrode away is very high.
So much for math.
Now, here's the first bit of biology, broken into 4 pieces:
1) Our biological structure is controlled by bits of information-storing molecules called DNA
2) DNA is sometimes changed by random chance
3) Mutated DNA sometimes results in changes to the DNA_controlled physical structure of an organism
4) Some DNA-based mutations are inheritable
All four of these little bits of biology are well proven and well established facts. We know that DNA determines structure for a fact. We know that DNA can be made to mutate for a fact. (and, incidently, you don't need gamma rays to mutate DNA. Sex does a perfectly acceptable job sometimes) We know that sometimes mutated DNA changes physical structure for a fact, and we know that sometimes that mutated DNA is inheritable for a fact.
Taken together, this means that it is possible for a mutation to occur that breeds true - positive probability.
The second missing piece is "natural selection" which simply states that organisms that are well suited to their environment will be more likely to survive, and so more likely to breed. This is a positive feedback loop - the better you are at surviving, the more you breed, the more well-adapted offspring you have, who will in turn produce well-adapted offspring, and so on. Well proven, well established fact.
Now couple the two together, and you get "If a mutation that breeds true and produces a structural change provides the mutated organism with a survival advantage, then that organism is more likely to breed and produce similarly altered offspring" Bingo! We have our process! Not to get your watch from analogue to digital, but certainly how to go from single-celled life to Humanity.
All you need now to make the process a near-certainty is time, lots and lots of time - and guess what? We've had several BILLION years for this process to work.
There you go, can't get much more logical than that.
I'm afraid the only failing here is your failing to understand the level of rigour in the logic here - not to mention the physical evidence. Go back and look at your textbooks. Start with the single-celled organisms and work your way up. We all work the same way! We all burn sugar for energy, we all have the same molecule (DNA) that determines our structure, all our cellular biology is nearly identical, and as you progress up the ladder, we all have pretty much the same design in our organs, skeletal structure - even our senses! We all have sex, all our sex organs work pretty much the same, we all breathe, we all pump blood with a single pump.... The evidence is enormous!
Evolution, my friend, as as factual as it gets. All you have to do to see it is pay attention.
I think it's entirely possible to do fun projects and lectures on low-level, hardware-based computing, without having to go into the exhausting detail, or involving the really gritty stuff like Karnough maps.
For example, most digital IC-based circuits use a +5V DC value for a logical "1". The reason why a "1" is +5V DC has to do with the contruction of the transistors used to build the gates. It's sufficient to state something like "transistors can be used as switches, and they switch between 0V and +5 V because of the way they are made" without having to get into the guts of semiconductor theory.
Similarly, one could present a diagram of a 2-bit adder circuit made of logic gates, and demonstrate that it really does add 2 2-bit numbers, even following the states of the gates inside the circuit, without showing the Karnough map that led to the circuit's design.
I envision the hands-on portion of the class using slightly more complex chips than raw logic gates. Shift registers, ALUs, small static RAM chips, and the like can be wired together fairly easily and do fun things without having to get into the undergrad stuff.
But even so, exposing kids to difficult concepts and forcing them to THINK is not a bad thing at all. School should be challenging! I'd rather see kids struggle with difficult material than have them bored with pablum.
One of the failings (that I see at least) of high school level CS classes is that they don't pay any attention to the real low-level hardware bits, down at the level of individual logic gates.
A lot - and I mean A LOT - of basic understanding of "why computers are built the way they are" comes from wiring up really basic componants, flipping some switches, and watching LEDs flash on and off.
For instance, I remember doing a project where I wired up 2 shift registers and an ALU chip to a rack of switches and 8 LEDs. By flipping the switches, one could input a pair of binary numbers into the shift registers, and then another switch (wired up as the clock) would trigger the ALU, and the resultant sum would show up on the LEDs.
After doing something like this, you gain understanding of such things as: Why do computers work in binary? How do instruction sets work? How do data busses work? What is the signifigance of the clock? And so on.
The only downside to projects like this is that you need some hardware - breadboards, power supplies, a selection of cheap ICs, a bunch of wire, and LEDs. But tinkering with this crap is just soooooo worth it - and it's fun!