Posts by Ken Hagan 8163 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007
...is really hard if you try to do it manually rather than putting a high-speed comms link between the computer flying the front plane and the computers flying all the others.
You could make the same remarks about formation driving, but various research groups are already doing this on public roads and I expect my grandchildren will not have to learn how to drive a car, just as I never learned how to steer a horse-drawn carriage.
"Are there self growing and repairing organic aircraft parts?"
As I said, the main unproven suggestions are in the materials and airframe. However, medical researchers people are working with growing biological structures (with desirable properties) over micro-frameworks (which are easier to make and more robust) so even there I think it would be sticking your neck out a bit to say definitely that self-repairing composites won't happen.
They seemed fairly conservative to me. As the article notes, most of them have already been done either by military craft or in cases of crisis. The main unproven suggestions are in the materials and airframe and I think it is quite laughable to suggest that we'll still be using rigid lumps of metal in high-performance applications in 40 years time. Materials science has come on quite along way since the 70s you know.
Last I heard, Windows still has a registry and Linux still has an /etc directory tree full of poky little text files all in different formats. Also last I heard, *neither* is a single point of failure since both Windows implementation of registry hives and Linux' implementation of filesystems are generally pretty damn robust. Both, however, can be easily trashed by end-users who don't know what they are doing.
I believe that "best practice" on Linux is to run some sort of version control software on the /etc tree. This at least allows for reverting bad changes and documenting the reasons for good ones. I don't think Windows has anything equivalent. Linux therefore has an architectural edge in my book, but this is pretty marginal.
Since 2006, Twitter has consumed about $250m of VC cash. As far as anyone can tell, it didn't actually make a profit until last year and has earned just a fraction of that. Meanwhile, Farcebook has shown that at least one highly regarded player in this sector was almost pure bubble.
It does look like Amazon have given up on the "proper" Kindle product line. No larger format device. No colour device. No software upgrades for existing devices. Odd really. Having established e-Readers as a mainstream product they seem content to walk away and let others take over. Meanwhile they are trying to compete with Apple, like they are ever going to have more success than a giant like Samsung.
"Was Java doomed from the start, has it mutated into something new, is it considered a failure in the field?"
It was not doomed from the start. As a programming language, Java was (and remains) very conventional, with no ground-breaking features. However, the JVM had a provably correct execution model that (if correctly implemented) would have permitted running untrusted code (think: web pages) without compromising the security of the client. That was and remains a desirable feature.
It *has*, however, mutated into something new. Hardly anyone uses Java on the client side anymore. Consequently, no-one bothers to implement the security model correctly and so we are left with a conventional programming language used for conventional applications but with a gratuitous layer between the code and the actual hardware. Quality of implementation in Java-land is a euphemism for just how much of that gratuitous layer can be optimised away. The answer is "most, but not all".
It isn't a complete failure in the field, but it has certainly had its day. Since it no longer pretends to be a client-side language, its main claim to success must surely be the extensive libraries it can tap into. However, both Android and C# have demonstrated that a large company can make extensive libraries available to any new language they come up with. The fact that Java already has these libraries is nice, but it isn't a compelling argument. (Fortran has lots of numerical libraries, but coders in various other languages can use them too, so no-one choose Fortran just to use the libraries.)
You are presuming that I (or any normal person) happen to have a comprehensive test suite for every program on my system. Your "to be on the safe side" suggestion presumes that none of the people who use the computer (not just me) depend on web-sites that use Java.
Yes I know I can just break everything and wait for my users to perform the above testing by their random efforts *and* have the IT literacy to realise that their stuff doesn't work anymore because of something I did rather than something they did. I just wondered if there was a less Neanderthal approach.
Let's say I'm tempted to completely uninstall Java, but I'm worried that at some point in the last few years I might have installed some application that (at least in part) depends on a bit of Java code. (After all, presumably there was a reason it got installed in the first place, right?) In the absence of an easy way to identify such code, saying that the safest course of action is to ditch Java is surely just asking for millions of people to break applications in ways that might be really hard for a novice to diagnose and put right.
So what is the easy way to check for civilians in the target zone before dropping that nuke from orbit?
Psychology is a fairly broad discipline. You *can* use scientific methods (controlled experiments, double-blinds, etc.) to explore how people behave. Perhaps the main difference is the extent to which you can get published *without* having done these things.
This paper would seem to be a case in point. I couldn't begin to enumerate the uncontrolled variables in this experiment. It is distressing that anyone claiming to be a scientist would ever think it was worth trying. Even the terms aren't rigorously defined. Different people have different reasons for "behaving in ways that cause *other* people to classify them as climate skeptics" and then disagree with them about whether they are or not.
That's beyond soft science. That's vacuous rhetoric.
"You might say the exact same thing about every ISP. Or BitLocker for that matter."
Tor is offering a significantly different capability to either of your examples.
The channel provided by an ISP can be snooped. (Indeed, that is an essential premise of the original article.)
The "channel" provided by BitLocker is not normally made available on the internet for use by anonymous third parties.
"It can't be suspicious to be using encryption if everyone is using it."
More to the point, it can't be suspicious to be using encryption if you were forced to because the web-site in question does not offer an unencrypted version. Mainstream web-sites that switch to SSL are protecting their users from suspicion as well as from snooping.
That depends on your definition of dictators.
In terms of "desire", I think you will *really* struggle to identify any UK government in all of history that hasn't wanted to be able to make people do as they are told and keep a watchful eye on anyone they like. If anything, they are less bloody-minded in recent centuries than in the past. The rot set in about 10,000 years ago in the Middle East as far as I can tell.
In terms of "ability", obviously we've seen changes in technology but since most of the same technologies are available to the populace (SSL-on-everything has been mentioned already) it isn't clear to me that the government has an advantage. If you look at the reaction of *real* dictatorships to the internet then you might reckon that the 21st century will see a truly historic shift in power away from the centre. (Like, the biggest shift in ten thousand years.)
I'm aware of the rule. My point is that the rule hasn't stopped the committee from awarding a prize to a humungous collaboration. I hate to pick on individuals, since it implies I don't think they deserved it (which is something I'm not knowledgeable enough to claim) but an example may give others something to shoot at:
Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer shared the 1984 prize for creating the W and Z bosons at CERN. The basic idea of colliding protons and anti-protons is not *that* inventive. The inventiveness comes from solving the engineering problem of actually making the scheme work. I find it hard to believe that just two people made the crucial engineering breakthroughs. I bet there are dozens of others who reckon they have a moral share in the prize.
The scientists behind Voyager are a mixture of physicists and geologists. The former discipline has a Nobel prize. In the past, the committee have been willing to award that prize to those who head up massive collaborations. I wonder if they have the imagination to reward the Voyager team. It is surely one of the most stunningly successful scientific experiments ever.
I've put Class Shell on my Win8 test box and I'm hardly aware of Metro. As a result, I regard Win8 as a very minor revision of 7. (The biggest change is that most of the .NET bloat is gone, but it will be re-installed as soon as you wave a .NET app at the system, so the improvement here is only temporary.) The big change was between Vista and 7 because that's when they halved the footprint and doubled the performance.
XP's memory limits are less of an issue than you might think. It is fairly easy (and for corporates with enterprisey licences, quite legal) to bung XP in a VM and have it running blisteringly fast on machines with many gigs of RAM and a clutch of SATA SSDs. (You may also find that backups and root-kits are easier to deal with once you do.) Such a machine might run almost any OS on the host and which of the two actually showed up in an OS usage survey would depend on the survey's methodology.
So, yes, XP will be with us for quite a while yet, even if pollsters can't see it.
I can accept your remarks about improving the performance of one's own eyesight.
I'm more skeptical about the "sharing" and "remote" access. If your eyes are built to accept external inputs, how can you trust that you are seeing the real world when you *think* you are working internally? How hard would it bee for someone to hack your eyes' visual stream, filter it in real time to remove things or people that they didn't want you to see, and the play the resulting lie back into your head?
Then again, perhaps we'll have learned something about securing IT systems by then.
No. I don't think it is.
For millions of normal folk, Apple will *not* be checking the death registration records in every jurisdiction and pre-emptively disabling those accounts. Therefore, as long as you leave your account name and password to your chosen inheritor, the whole thing will carry on working.
Besides, what child actually wants to be able to listen to their parents' music collection?
I would also disagree and would point out that TripAdvisor's own business model depends entirely on "reasonable persons" accepting that the sheer number of reviews will somehow "cancel out the bias" and result in a site that is trustworthy.
TripAdvisisor are still in business, right? They make a profit, right? OK, that's *objective* proof that most people believe in this "wisdom of crowds" rubbish. So either most people aren't reasonable or the judge is demonstrably wrong.
"I reckon the torture machines in the museums must be a fairly recent addition then?"
Not at all. That's my point. From the point of view of an orthodox 17th century European human, torturing the mortal flesh of a sinner was not just permissible but probably *necessary*. If you didn't at least *try* to save the poor wretch's soul then you were as bad as those Levites in the parable of the Good Samaritan.
Our android descendants will view us in the same way that we view witch-hunters, I'm sure, but equally will regard themselves as the lawful inheritors of the term "human".
This could equally be used to create an army of human warriors to destroy the cyborgs.
Most of what *I* regard as "human" is cultural and intellectual, so I'm not too fussed about the hardware platform. In a thousand years' time, we'll all be mostly artificial and we'll still call ourselves humanity and still claim a direct line of descent "out of Africa".
If 17th century Europeans could have seen what modern society looks like, they'd conclude that we'd sold our souls to Satan and fornicated our merry way to hell in a hand-cart. We, however, take pride in having progressed from such backward ideals and actually increased our "humanity" in the process.
The JVM was designed to make it possible for the owner of the target machine to trust arbitrary third-party software. That was the principal design objective and all other characteristics of the JVM and the Java language were (and ought still to be) subservient to that. To this end, the exact semantics of every instruction were nailed down with mathematical precision.
Given that detail of specification, which most language implementors would kill for, it must surely be regarded as hugely embarrassing that 20 years on we are still waiting for multiple implementations that are (i) provably secure, and (ii) semantically equivalent.
Personally I have more faith in the cross-platform and security of Javascript. It's a contemptible, filthy hack of a language, but it seems to get the programming effort needed to make it work, unlike its near-namesake. These days I hear far more calls to "disable Java" than "disable Javascript". That's quite different from 10-15 years ago. The world is moving on but the JVM is not.
There's no problem with the police assuming that everyone is guilty. In a sense, that's part of their job (just as a network security specialist will spend time thinking like a cracker). You only get problems if they start acting like we are guilty.
When I start getting pulled over or sent accusing letters, requiring effort on my part to bat them off, *then* it's a problem. Having a police computer tracking my whereabouts for years, only to never actually use the data? That doesn't bother me. Indeed, how would I ever know that it was happening?
For the same reason, I'm not bothered by the (clearly quite large) numbers of people on this comments thread who think I'm sleep-walking into a Stalinist nightmare. I know I'm not and your opinions don't affect me. If it is any consolation, I'm sure the same is true for my opinion of you.
Thank you. And for the room temperature IQ brigade (who seem to be out in force today), please bear in mind that if a police state wants to pick on you then they'll just kick your door down one morning and drag you away. They won't bother to trump up some spurious charge relating to your car number plate.
If you don't know the difference between the UK and a police state, please emigrate to one and don't come back until you've found out. I hear Zimbabwe is nice at this time of year and you won't have to learn a new language.
Perhaps because you don't know who the bad apples are?
If you actually trusted the police not to abuse this dataset (and go trawling when they feel bored) then it might be quite re-assuring to know that it might be possible to follow things up when new evidence crops up a few years after a case has gone cold.
The cost of keeping such records is just a few discs. (I assume, for legal purposes, that you would want to retain the images and not just the registration numbers.) You don't need to clear up many cases to justify that cost. In fact, a single "cleared up" serious crime might be enough to justify it.
Contrariwise, if such evidence became available and it transpired that the local plod had deleted the critical records a month earlier to save having to splash out £100 on a new hard disc, what would be the reaction of the general public?
Obviously the system could be abused and then you'd have to add in the "cost" of such abuse and you'd need to be clearing up a whole lot more cases before the privacy trade-off is worth it. Your comment, however, appears to take the position that such abuse could never be prevented (or its costs mitigated by the benefits of solving cold cases). I'm cynical enough to understand that position, but I hardly think we can take it as read.
What auditing and procedural checks would have to be in place before you'd accept that the system was "unlikely" to be abused and that the benefits to society outweighed the costs? If you answer "it can't be done" then I'm afraid you've just disqualified yourself from the 21st century. Criminals will use every piece of technology they can to pursue their aims. Society would be daft to deny its own police any access to comparable tools. If you don't trust the police, the solution is to fix the police, not to tie their hands.
All 3 of your proposed definitions have an element of compulsion that "default option" lacks. So by your own argument, this isn't enforcement.
And unticking the box on your ISP's settings page is not "in effect a license". Licences are things you have to pay for or obtain approval for from some agency who have the authority to say "no". That's not what is suggested here. One can easily imagine a police state where that is the next step, but no-one with political credibility has suggested that yet and we can beat them to a pulp with a clue stick as and when they do.
All that an *optional* filter would do would be to give the vast majority of people as much control as they want. It would take the sting out of this issue, since the rabid control freaks would no longer have the silent majority behind them muttering "well, yes, the present system isn't working".
Really? You cannot possibly be a parent. Consider...
A family has three children. The eldest is 15 and can easily figure all that out. The youngest is 8 and couldn't possibly figure it out but can certainly copy his big brother's memory stick once he's been let in on the secret. Aforesaid 8-year-old then exchanges "magic internet stick" with friends in playground who don't have older siblings. End result? The parents of an 8yo with no elder siblings to learn from has managed to bypass the parental controls software on a PC that is "locked down" with separate administrative and normal user accounts in the approved manner. So he finds some juicy porn and shows it to his younger sibling because he knows it will make her shriek in an amusing fashion.
Now, what proportion of the parental population do you think are able to block that attack vector? 1%?
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