Linux going to be big in China 3744

In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Ray Ingles wrote on 20 Apr 2006 14:44:48 -0400

A human being is a neural network, although I for one would have to look to see how big of a neural network one is.

Of course the AI types have been chasing this for awhile. They've not caught it quite yet. (One estimate, some decades back, would require the *entire* Empire State building filled with computer equipment -- presumably tubes, though I'd have to look -- to emulate a human being; another estimate suggests an ant has the processing power of a Mac II.)

"Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. The sooner people accept this, and build business models that take this into account, the sooner people will start making money again." - Bruce Schneier

Water's not "wet" by itself; it's a combination of water and the surface to which it's adjacent. Water beads up on wax, for example (and ultimately evaporates, leaving salt spots), because it simply doesn't adhere thereto, or at least not as much as to other surfaces like clean glbutt, unvarnished wood, metal, cotton, or wool.

Bits aren't that different, as they have to be read by something. If that something can't understand the bits, then it can't process them fully although it might be able to shove them through to their destination (e.g., an encrypted communications channel with some framing information to indicate the destination). As far as the something is concerned the bits could be all zeroes, ones, random noise, highly clbuttified information on nuclear plant material and-or structural weakpoints in a bridge, or the latest in a string of records from Jennifer Lopez, L'il Kim, or Mae West (buttuming she made any).

How a "tap" could deduce this and figure out who needs to be paid, intercepted, or arrested is an open question (eavesdropping-man-in-middle attack, two of Bruce Schneier's specialties, methinks), and probably unresolvable barring a breakthrough in such areas as quantum computing, where all parts of the problem are run at once -- in theory. (So far, in practice it's up to maybe 15 q-bits, AFAIK. Above that the alcohol molecules start doing funny things.)

Or one can inadvertantly break a fiber optic cable (it's been done, usually because a contractor with a backhoe gets slightly careless) and look at the glowing light emanating therefrom -- the bits are lost as the human eye can't process them in that form. Once cut, a fiber-optic multistranded cable might as well be part of a certain style of lamp, with the ends draped out in a "spray" pattern, until it can be re-spliced.

I'm not sure if bits can be made uncopyable (though there are some suggestions of perfect encryption using quantum methods), but they sure can make people's lives miserable, if we let them... :-) Think along the lines of idenbreasty theft, account transactions, and such.

Or, if one prefers, pirated software, audio, or video material, which will make a businessman's life miserable under certain conditions -- Microsoft in particular has had to try to deal with Chinese piracy, for example, and they're probably not the only company bitten thereby.

I'll admit to some curiosity as to the specific models. The best one that comes to mind is along the lines of Alladin; Ghostscript is free but a rev behind the payware version, if my understanding is correct.

(Or at least it was. They might have given up on that model by now.)

Of course IBM can sell zx90's with free Linux software. That's a hardware problem. :-) (Sun can sell Sparcs, although at this point it appears to be switching to Opterons.)

Ah yes....I should have thought of that. Given sufficient precision the transference of information by analog means is nearly indistinguishable from an auditory standpoint.

(DAT worked around this by corrupting the signal, if it could recognize it. I don't think other recording media in use today have that capability. One could also use hi-fi equipment to duplicate data streams at a rather slow speed -- in fact, that's what POTS modems do today! A digital transistor is an overdriven analog transistor, after all, and it shouldn't be *too* overdriven lest one lose speed.)

-- Windows Vista. Because it's time to refresh your hardware. Trust us.