Slashback: Errata, Futurity, Portality 193
Better than world-wide anarchy and privation. kejoki writes: "I came into work today and nobody had voicemail. We use an ancient AT&T system 25 (Merlin) with the Audix automated attendant/voice mail system ... not my bailiwick but the boss was going nuts trying to figure it out.
He finally called his System 25 guy and found out that quite a few people were having the same problem. Inspiration hit, and he set the system date back before 31 Dec 1999 ... whammo! The voice mail returneth.
AT&T->Lucent->Avaya, of course, no longer supports the system...as a matter of fact the boss seems to recall getting a letter from AT&T saying that they'd be taking care of the Y2K problems which might be in their equipment; but another soon after saying that support for the System 25 would be dropped as of 31 Dec 1999 ... hmmm.
Oddly enough, he's had a problem with the system giving a database I/O error for a while, but since he reset the date that has also vanished.
All very interesting. At any rate, if you have a System 25 and you can't get your voice mail, set back the date!"And in related news, Che Fox writes :"The OpenLDAP project is one of the first to be hit by a major bug due to the S1G (one billion seconds) Unix time rollover. The slurpd replication daemon, which pushes changes from the master LDAP server to the slaves, no longer works now that time has rolled over to 1 billion seconds. This means that all LDAP-using networks in the world that use OpenLDAP and slave servers to replicate the data (very common) are now broken. There is a fix available against both the 1.2 and 2.x OpenLDAP releases in the OpenLDAP CVS repository."
You may assume your former activities for the moment. Agent Green writes: "I was checking out my firewall logs this morning and noticed an unusual amount of port 80 traffic and come to find out...it seems that AT&T Broadband has lifted their port 80 restrictions on its residential network. Let's see how long this lasts ..."
Probably until the next worm that takes over everyone's port 80, whatever OS it runs under.
So what did one giant say to the other? jshep writes: "Inventor Ray Kurzweil recently responded to physicist Stephen Hawking's concerns regarding the progression of AI (previous Slashdot story can be viewed here). Kurzweil takes aim at Hawking's suggestion that we use genetic engineering to augment the power of the human brain."
The man behind the curtain is ... uh, vital to national security! camusflage writes: "Reuters has a story (courtesy of Yahoo) that says the judge in the Nicodemo Scarfo believes the "national security" gambit about as much as the /. community does regarding the use of keyloggers. The most choice quote is "I don't know what it means. It's gobbledygook. More gobbledygook," referring to the argument put forth that the keylogger is a sensitive piece of national security. An assistant U.S. Attorney indicated he would provide "classified and unclassified summaries of the system's operation and more affidavits detailing the national security aspects at stake," next Friday."
Re:slurpd replication daemon (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't buy it (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't buy it for a second! It seems completely disingenuous of the Wigler to suggest that this is a legal grey area. I am almost positive that this evidence will be suppressed (rightfully). I don't think many people if it were explained to them would see this as anything besides a wire tap. Disagree?
Re:Port 80 blocking (Score:1, Insightful)
I am an AT&T customer who's ability to run a server was protected by AT&T's TOS, as long as I acepted all security risks. I did accept all risks, and had my servers patched long before anyone knew about CodeRed.
AT&T then, without my knowledge or consent, made me into an @home customer, forcing me to abide by a different TOS, and didn't even inform me of this!
It was only when I brought it to their attention that my right to run a server is protected by their own TOS, that they told me that I now had to abide by @home's TOS.
But AT&T gladly take my money every month.
Re:Nobody but nobody... (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, yes, yes capitalism sucks. This isn't a totally original observation, you know. The thing is--can YOU give us something better? Until this happens, capitalism shall remain dominant.
Think about it. When Jesus Christ was up and walking around, there was still a tax collector! Tax collector implies taxes. Taxes imply money. Money implies capitalism. It's been around for a *really* *long* time. It's gonna be hard to get rid of it.
Gödel's Incompleteness Thm (AFAIK) says that a system P, which might be complete, can't have its completeness proven in its own system. The upshot is that there must, in any set of logical systems, be at least one logical system whose completeness or correctness is simply assumed rather than proven. I'm not sure what this has to do with capitalism. It's not really a logical system anyway. Trying to apply mathematical reasoning to capitalism is like trying to apply it to English (it's a (not very logical) system too) or something. GIGO.Poetry has sometimes played an important role in major political and sociological changes in the past. If you want things to change, you've gotta try to change peoples minds. If you write enough poetry, perhaps you can achieve this.
Survivial at a point dependant on GE? (Score:3, Insightful)
Still because of this I'm not willing to reject GE out of hand, it seems better to be informed if and when this event might occur.
Of course existance of the moral ability and maturity within the modern culture to be able to deal with GE technology is debatable at present.
People have a limited idea of their own brains. (Score:4, Insightful)
I study the programming of the human brain. I have an opinion that is quite different than yours.
Most people in the U.S., and most people in the other cultures I've studied, believe that they are less intelligent and less mentally capable than they potentially are. Since they have a limited idea of their own brains, they make a mistake when they try to guess how easy it would be for a computer to duplicate human mental ability.
AI wouldn't take control of the world (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Nobody but nobody... (Score:2, Insightful)
You sound afraid. Fear is generally born of ignorance. Why not try learning about it? It may be closer than you think, and not so scary when you didn't realize the difference:
what will it be like to grow up knowing you wouldn't have just "happened" the way normal kids have.
Why not ask that of your roommate, assuming you're in college? Odds are not small that he or she was conceived in a test tube and didn't "happen" the way "normal" kids have. What will you do? Will you treat him differently when you find out? Why? Is he any less human? Is the person with the genetically-determined mental retardation less than human? So how would an artificially engineered person be less than human?
Why do we build the bigger accelerator? Because we didn't find the answers to the questions we found with the smaller one. You only need a Time Magazine-level of physics knowledge to understand that.
For someone who claims to be above the "ignorant masses" on whom "technological tools are wasted," and thus fit to say what should and should not be (else what gives you the right to make the judgement?), you're displaying a fair amount of ignorance--and this is causing you to evidently lose sleep.
For your next book, I suggest Richard Dawkins's "Unweaving the Rainbow," [amazon.com] perhaps followed by Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World." [amazon.com]
Rest assured, they show proper appreciation of poetry and gently introduce one to the broader world that lies outside the narrow confines of the human imagination.
Re:Nobody but nobody... (Score:1, Insightful)
While he agress that we can theoretically have a Turing model of the brain (which would be subject to the Godel theorem), he is really unsure of whether such a theorem applies to the real system that is the brain. The problem is that people always use the computational metaphor for the brain (which is how the field of cognitive science was built in the 60's), but we must always keep in mind that the brain is NOT a computer - at least not in the way that people think when they use the metaphor. From all that I can tell as a neuroscience and AI student, is that the jury is out on whether we can create strong AI, and it will be out for many, many years. People who claim otherwise are just speculating.
As for your other arguments - other than the wackos - most scientists are very much against human cloning and large-scale genetic manipulation, as we don't know all the safety issues and effects. I honestly and truly do think that people do not understand that most scientists in these fields DO think about moral issues - the cold, uncaring scientists is mostly a media/cultural artifact. The problem is, is that people have to realize that sci-fi is STILL fiction, and just because it brings up issues on the subject of GE or cloning, does not mean that the author's conclusions are accurate or truly insightful. I *HATE* it when people use "Jurassic Park" as some kind of detailed and realistic treatise against cloning of animals and GE. You want good opinions about the issues involved? Fine, go to your nearest university biology lab, and talk to the scientists, or find some bioethicists, but don't think that Mr. Crichton has all the moral answers!
Sincerely,
Kevin Christie
Neuroscience Program
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
crispiewm@hotmail.com
Re:Microsoft & code theft (Score:3, Insightful)
MSDOS 2.0 (the one that started on copying Unix/Xenix) was a vast improvement over 1.0. There were absolutely no performance problems. There were compatability problems and they panicked and "fixed" them in bad ways that we are living with today. This compatability has been the main reason a lot of stuff does not match Unix for no reason whatsoever (like backward slashes in the pathnames, useless \r characters in the files, and drive letters).
If VMS was the source of inspiration you would expect to see things resemble VMS more than Unix. But VMS used [n,m] and colons as parts of the filenames, used field-based files for text files, and did not have drive letters. Although NT does not match Unix, it certainly resembles it more closely than VMS.
Dave Cutler and friends were pissed that their baby was massacred by BSD Unix, and saw the chance MicroSoft offered as a chance for revenge. It should be obvious that gratuitious incompatability with Unix serves MicroSoft no competitive purpose (I would expect Linux would be nowhere and MicroSoft in 100% control if they had made it easier to port Unix programs to NT) and is entirely the result of a bunch of bitter old men.