So your argument is that changing the core operating system will get rid of viruses, and make the virus makers to start from scratch? I bet if I switch to a new OS, like WebOS, and a catch up quickly, it will take some time for viruses to show up. so your argument doesn't disprove anything.
OS X has been around for thirteen years, and has been the default OS on all new Macs for ten years. And Windows viruses still outnumber Mac viruses by well over a thousand to one. Are virus writers really that slow? I don't think so.
The only reason why Macs are perceived as more secure is because they have less market share, and therefore less interest to those who make the malware.
-1, Security Through Obscurity.
I'll remind you yet again that in the pre-OS X era, there was quite a bit of Mac malware floating around; never as much for DOS/Windows PCs, to be sure, but still a lot of it. At a rough guess, it existed about in proportion to the relative market share of the Mac OS... which kind of gives credence to the market share argument, except that when OS X became the standard, the number dropped to damn near zero, and stayed there for many years. There's more OS X malware out there than there used to be, now, but the proportion is still nowhere near the market share of OS X relative to Windows. And the vast majority of exploits are, like this one, browser-based, rather than targeting the OS itself.
In short, the market share argument is just as much bullshit as security-through-obscurity arguments always are.
I didn't read past the first half dozen, but it appears only the first two discuss the contribution of antibiotics in animal feed to antibiotic resistance.
Which is one-third of the abstracts you bothered reading. By my count, again just looking at the abstracts, at least six of the twenty papers on the first page indicate a connection between antibiotics in animal feed and the growth of resistant strains; several of those in the next twenty do as well. I'm not going to sit here and do a detailed analysis of how many of the hits are spurious -- like any search engine, Pubmed will turn up a lot of irrelevant crap with any search string -- but the point is that there are many, many papers which do show evidence of a connection, making OP's statement that "there isn't any real scientific evidence there is an issue" clearly false.
It's considered ok because there isn't any real scientific evidence there is an issue. And it's been studied since at least 1990.
Do you want to cite some of those studies to back up your claim? A quick Pubmed search turns up a whole lot of papers indicating that the use of antibiotics in animal feed is a major contributor the rise of resistant strains.
We need new antibiotics, because the ones we have don't work anymore, AND we need to protect the new ones by not abusing them!
Absolutely, and I hope we can avoid abusing newer antibiotics as we have the old ones. Right now, most of the newer ones are insanely expensive and come with nasty side effects; these are not good things, of course, but they do help hold the abuse down. So far.
How many people in the IT field would want their performance, as measured by some random measurement (such as the ever popular Lines-of-Code-per-Hour), published by their employer? For their clients and future employers and clients to see?
Oh, but that's different, you see. Coding quality is a high holy mystical secret which only true gurus can understand. Teaching quality is simple and easy to measure and everyone knows how to do it better than the actual teachers, who of course are lazy overpaid unionized public employees -- essentially, communists -- and whose opinion on anything can safely be disregarded.
Determining if something is NP-Hard, is... wait for it.... wait for it... NP-Hard!
I don't think that's true. All you have to do is show that it's equivalent to another problem already known to be NP-hard. If you can show, for example, that a solution to the Traveling Salesman Problem would also be a solution to your problem, and vice versa, that's sufficient.
As for the value of proving it, one thing that knowing your problem is NP-hard does for you is that it tells you whether you're wasting your time trying to find a polynomial-time solution. Look, nobody knows for sure if P != NP, but that's the way to bet. If someone ever shows differently, that will be one of the great mathematical discoveries of our time, and it will change the way we address a lot of problems; in the meantime, if you know you have an NP-hard problem you can say, "There's (almost certainly) no really efficient way to solve this, so I'd better assume it's going to take a hell of a lot of processor time to get a decent numerical solution."
"The English language, for example, is NP-Hard" is pretty much meaningless. Computational linguistics is a rapidly evolving field and a lot of aspects haven't been worked out yet, but it seems reasonable to bet that -- like most fields of study -- it contains a lot of problems in P, a few clearly in NP, and a fair number where it's hard to be sure without extensive analysis.
Say what? There was nothing [science-fictional-about, I assume you meant to say] The Lord of the Rings
That was kind of alphatel's point, I think: Avatar was fantasy with futuristic trappings. It's easy to say, "If it's got horses and elves it's fantasy, if it's got spaceships and aliens it's science fiction," but it's also lazy.
I don't think it can be treated as serious entertainment or hard sci-fi.
Like you, I think Gattaca was basically a lousy movie and I don't understand why so many people like it so much -- but IMO its problem is exactly that it tries to be "serious" rather than just telling the damn story. If it had been contemporary rather than near-future, all of the problems you mention would have written Oscar Bait all over it. As for "hard," well, that's generally about as hard as Hollywood science fiction gets.
Yep. And if you go with the informal version of Moore's law, "X doubles every year and a half" where X is just about any measure of computer capability, we're still almost on track. 2^10 = 1024, as/.er should know by heart; strictly speaking, this should mean about a thousandfold improvement between 1995 and 2010 rather than 2012, but everything you list was available two years ago, if at a somewhat higher price. And yes, X may just as well be boot time as RAM or processing power.;)
We need less antibiotics, we need doctors who do not prescribe antibiotics as a cure-all solution and we need people to understand why it is such a bad idea to just pump more and more of those in yourself, all those around you, and even animals!
This is true. It is also true that we have antibiotic-resistant strains of serious diseases killing people right now, and we need ways to treat these diseases. What are you going to tell someone who's dying of a MRSA infection -- "Sorry, too many farmers give antibiotic-laced feed to their dairy cattle, and we're not going to treat you because we don't want to encourage the growth of more resistant strains, so go ahead and die"?
Many, many of the things that kill people could be prevented by better practices. Almost all lung cancers, and many cases of heart disease, could be prevented if nobody smoked, or even if smokers smoked much less. Most of the remaining cases of heart disease could be prevented by better diet and more exercise. Most types of liver disease would be much less prevalent if nobody drank, or at least nobody drank to excess. MVA trauma could be almost eliminated if people drove better; for those few accidents which are truly nobody's fault, consistent seatbelt usage would take care of most of the rest. AIDS would very nearly go away if everybody wore condoms when having sex with anyone they weren't 100% sure was clean, and no IV drug users shared needles. Etc. But the reality is that people are dying of all of these things, right now, and you have to be a real shithead to say to them, "Too bad, you shouldn't have eaten all those Big Macs," when they're clutching their chests and falling over. And you'd have to be even more of a shithead to write off people suffering from antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections, because -- unlike most of the other diseases I mentioned above -- it's not even a matter of personal choice of behavior on the victims' part.
In a perfect world, medicine wouldn't exist. Anyone who's spent any time in patient care knows we don't live in that world. Medicine is about dealing with the ways in which the world is imperfect, and that means dealing with the way it actually is, not the way it ought to be.
Drones are good. They allow us to kill little brown people from a distance. Bonus points if the little brown people are Muslims. I love drones.
But now drones are being used by liberal hippie enviro-commie scum! They're bad people! And only bad people do bad things! That must mean drones are bad!
Aaargh! My head hurts! I'd say "cognitive dissonance" except Rush doesn't like me using big words! What should I do? WHAT SHOULD I --
And it's made worse by the fact that we've allowed ourselves to all too often automatically reject activists as some sort of fringe; those who would lead the fight on our behalf are all too often not supported. We listen to the media tear them down; we fight against our own self interests.
This.
You know all the "stupid commie anarchist trustafarians with iPhones" stereotyping of the Occupiers that we saw here on Slashdot? Those stereotypes were present in the MSM, too, of course, but you kind of expect it from CNN and the NYT. But for a bunch of people who are, as a group, generally strongly opposed to corporate power grabs to turn against another large group of people who were on their side was disheartening, to say the least. And that's why Occupy made a bunch of noise and then faded away without accomplishing anything -- not because the Occupiers were morons (they weren't; I know a lot of them well, and they're smart, committed people who had very clear goals) but because people who should have known better let themselves be told, "don't pay any attention to those dumb hippies over there." The people who were sending this message were, of course, the exact same people behind ACTA, SOPA/PIPA, etc. Good going, guys.
Funny how many different numbers I see flying around for how old humans are, yet everyone's up in arms about a simple oversight.
And all of the numbers are a hell of a lot bigger than 30000. Face it, you're an ignorant Luddite whose opinions on this or any scientific matter are of less value than my dog's barking, and every post you make just underscores that fact. Now go play, kid, the grown-ups are talking.
I'm inclined to go with the atter since sequencing protiens isnt all that entertaining.
Protein sequencing is just as important as DNA sequencing. You can learn things from each technique that you can't learn from the other. Sequencing is rarely entertaining in either case.;)
The real world is most likely to have them be fairly autonomous. A bit smarter than an off the shelf air to air missile, but probably not a heck of a lot smarter.
We're already seeing problems with semi-autonomous UCAVs going off mission. People are going to be very very nervous, and rightly so, about the idea of sending off a Death Star with anything less than near-real-time human control. People won't necessarily be on the "front line" (to the degree that the concept of a "line" has any meaning in space) but they won't be too far away either -- and that means they, as much as the armed robots, will be targets.
In space this translates to first getting to the enemy star system undetected. This is dead easy, due to space being so huge and the spaceships being so small.
Any propulsion system capable of moving spacecraft over interstellar distances anywhere near the speed of light -- which would be necessary to fight an interstellar war on anything approaching a human timescale; you're not going to send your superweapon off at some tiny fraction of c and wait a few thousand years for it to reach your enemy -- will generate an enormous amount of radiation on the way, which will be easily detectable. Space is huge, but it's also mostly, you know, empty space. "Colonel, we've picked up a matter-anti-matter drive signature headed our way from Gliese 581!" "Sound the alarm, Sergeant, we've only got 25 years to get ready."
I think this is still push back for declaring "Make Love, Not War".
I think you're right. They lost the culture war decades ago, and deep down they know it, but they're going to keep fighting to make the mopping-up operation as nasty as possible.
... it's hard to know where to even start. But possibly the absolute worst is at the end of Paragraph B:
B. For the purposes of this section, "public school" means a public preschool program, a public elementary school, a public junior high school, a public middle school, a public high school, a public vocational education program, a public community college or a public university in this state.
(emphasis mine)
For K-12 teachers, okay, I can kind of see this, although the penalties seem Draconian and I'm willing to bet that they already have in-school codes of conducts that prohibit swearing in the classroom. But are they actually saying that this is going to apply to professors in a classroom full of people who are legally adults? To discussions of literature containing the word "fuck"? To research faculty in their labs? Seriously?
Apparently the bill's sponsor, Lori Klein, showed off her gun by aiming it at a reporter a while back. That tells you everything you need to know about the mentality of the people behind this. They're completely insane. Um, apeshit, if you will. And they're growing in power all over the country.
the government can pull out the standard anti-business talking points
Only in right-wing-nutball-land can a policy designed to ensure that all players have equal access to the information infrastructure be called "anti-business." For that matter, the idea that the US government is in any way, shape, or form "anti-business" is also strictly in wingnut territory.
Slashdot Mirror
So your argument is that changing the core operating system will get rid of viruses, and make the virus makers to start from scratch? I bet if I switch to a new OS, like WebOS, and a catch up quickly, it will take some time for viruses to show up. so your argument doesn't disprove anything.
OS X has been around for thirteen years, and has been the default OS on all new Macs for ten years. And Windows viruses still outnumber Mac viruses by well over a thousand to one. Are virus writers really that slow? I don't think so.
The only reason why Macs are perceived as more secure is because they have less market share, and therefore less interest to those who make the malware.
-1, Security Through Obscurity.
I'll remind you yet again that in the pre-OS X era, there was quite a bit of Mac malware floating around; never as much for DOS/Windows PCs, to be sure, but still a lot of it. At a rough guess, it existed about in proportion to the relative market share of the Mac OS ... which kind of gives credence to the market share argument, except that when OS X became the standard, the number dropped to damn near zero, and stayed there for many years. There's more OS X malware out there than there used to be, now, but the proportion is still nowhere near the market share of OS X relative to Windows. And the vast majority of exploits are, like this one, browser-based, rather than targeting the OS itself.
In short, the market share argument is just as much bullshit as security-through-obscurity arguments always are.
I didn't read past the first half dozen, but it appears only the first two discuss the contribution of antibiotics in animal feed to antibiotic resistance.
Which is one-third of the abstracts you bothered reading. By my count, again just looking at the abstracts, at least six of the twenty papers on the first page indicate a connection between antibiotics in animal feed and the growth of resistant strains; several of those in the next twenty do as well. I'm not going to sit here and do a detailed analysis of how many of the hits are spurious -- like any search engine, Pubmed will turn up a lot of irrelevant crap with any search string -- but the point is that there are many, many papers which do show evidence of a connection, making OP's statement that "there isn't any real scientific evidence there is an issue" clearly false.
It's considered ok because there isn't any real scientific evidence there is an issue. And it's been studied since at least 1990.
Do you want to cite some of those studies to back up your claim? A quick Pubmed search turns up a whole lot of papers indicating that the use of antibiotics in animal feed is a major contributor the rise of resistant strains.
We need new antibiotics, because the ones we have don't work anymore, AND we need to protect the new ones by not abusing them!
Absolutely, and I hope we can avoid abusing newer antibiotics as we have the old ones. Right now, most of the newer ones are insanely expensive and come with nasty side effects; these are not good things, of course, but they do help hold the abuse down. So far.
How many people in the IT field would want their performance, as measured by some random measurement (such as the ever popular Lines-of-Code-per-Hour), published by their employer? For their clients and future employers and clients to see?
Oh, but that's different, you see. Coding quality is a high holy mystical secret which only true gurus can understand. Teaching quality is simple and easy to measure and everyone knows how to do it better than the actual teachers, who of course are lazy overpaid unionized public employees -- essentially, communists -- and whose opinion on anything can safely be disregarded.
Hope that clears things up.
Determining if something is NP-Hard, is... wait for it.... wait for it... NP-Hard!
I don't think that's true. All you have to do is show that it's equivalent to another problem already known to be NP-hard. If you can show, for example, that a solution to the Traveling Salesman Problem would also be a solution to your problem, and vice versa, that's sufficient.
As for the value of proving it, one thing that knowing your problem is NP-hard does for you is that it tells you whether you're wasting your time trying to find a polynomial-time solution. Look, nobody knows for sure if P != NP, but that's the way to bet. If someone ever shows differently, that will be one of the great mathematical discoveries of our time, and it will change the way we address a lot of problems; in the meantime, if you know you have an NP-hard problem you can say, "There's (almost certainly) no really efficient way to solve this, so I'd better assume it's going to take a hell of a lot of processor time to get a decent numerical solution."
"The English language, for example, is NP-Hard" is pretty much meaningless. Computational linguistics is a rapidly evolving field and a lot of aspects haven't been worked out yet, but it seems reasonable to bet that -- like most fields of study -- it contains a lot of problems in P, a few clearly in NP, and a fair number where it's hard to be sure without extensive analysis.
Say what? There was nothing [science-fictional-about, I assume you meant to say] The Lord of the Rings
That was kind of alphatel's point, I think: Avatar was fantasy with futuristic trappings. It's easy to say, "If it's got horses and elves it's fantasy, if it's got spaceships and aliens it's science fiction," but it's also lazy.
I don't think it can be treated as serious entertainment or hard sci-fi.
Like you, I think Gattaca was basically a lousy movie and I don't understand why so many people like it so much -- but IMO its problem is exactly that it tries to be "serious" rather than just telling the damn story. If it had been contemporary rather than near-future, all of the problems you mention would have written Oscar Bait all over it. As for "hard," well, that's generally about as hard as Hollywood science fiction gets.
Yep. And if you go with the informal version of Moore's law, "X doubles every year and a half" where X is just about any measure of computer capability, we're still almost on track. 2^10 = 1024, as /.er should know by heart; strictly speaking, this should mean about a thousandfold improvement between 1995 and 2010 rather than 2012, but everything you list was available two years ago, if at a somewhat higher price. And yes, X may just as well be boot time as RAM or processing power. ;)
We need less antibiotics, we need doctors who do not prescribe antibiotics as a cure-all solution and we need people to understand why it is such a bad idea to just pump more and more of those in yourself, all those around you, and even animals!
This is true. It is also true that we have antibiotic-resistant strains of serious diseases killing people right now, and we need ways to treat these diseases. What are you going to tell someone who's dying of a MRSA infection -- "Sorry, too many farmers give antibiotic-laced feed to their dairy cattle, and we're not going to treat you because we don't want to encourage the growth of more resistant strains, so go ahead and die"?
Many, many of the things that kill people could be prevented by better practices. Almost all lung cancers, and many cases of heart disease, could be prevented if nobody smoked, or even if smokers smoked much less. Most of the remaining cases of heart disease could be prevented by better diet and more exercise. Most types of liver disease would be much less prevalent if nobody drank, or at least nobody drank to excess. MVA trauma could be almost eliminated if people drove better; for those few accidents which are truly nobody's fault, consistent seatbelt usage would take care of most of the rest. AIDS would very nearly go away if everybody wore condoms when having sex with anyone they weren't 100% sure was clean, and no IV drug users shared needles. Etc. But the reality is that people are dying of all of these things, right now, and you have to be a real shithead to say to them, "Too bad, you shouldn't have eaten all those Big Macs," when they're clutching their chests and falling over. And you'd have to be even more of a shithead to write off people suffering from antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections, because -- unlike most of the other diseases I mentioned above -- it's not even a matter of personal choice of behavior on the victims' part.
In a perfect world, medicine wouldn't exist. Anyone who's spent any time in patient care knows we don't live in that world. Medicine is about dealing with the ways in which the world is imperfect, and that means dealing with the way it actually is, not the way it ought to be.
And yes, IAAAL.
I Am Alcoholics Anonymous' Lawyer?
Drones are good. They allow us to kill little brown people from a distance. Bonus points if the little brown people are Muslims. I love drones.
But now drones are being used by liberal hippie enviro-commie scum! They're bad people! And only bad people do bad things! That must mean drones are bad!
Aaargh! My head hurts! I'd say "cognitive dissonance" except Rush doesn't like me using big words! What should I do? WHAT SHOULD I --
[pop]
It's better that you not know. Forget I mentioned it.
Fortunately there's no need to improve upon Slashdot.
Seriously, the more time I spend on the rest of the web, the more convinced I am that this statement is absolutely true.
And it's made worse by the fact that we've allowed ourselves to all too often automatically reject activists as some sort of fringe; those who would lead the fight on our behalf are all too often not supported. We listen to the media tear them down; we fight against our own self interests.
This.
You know all the "stupid commie anarchist trustafarians with iPhones" stereotyping of the Occupiers that we saw here on Slashdot? Those stereotypes were present in the MSM, too, of course, but you kind of expect it from CNN and the NYT. But for a bunch of people who are, as a group, generally strongly opposed to corporate power grabs to turn against another large group of people who were on their side was disheartening, to say the least. And that's why Occupy made a bunch of noise and then faded away without accomplishing anything -- not because the Occupiers were morons (they weren't; I know a lot of them well, and they're smart, committed people who had very clear goals) but because people who should have known better let themselves be told, "don't pay any attention to those dumb hippies over there." The people who were sending this message were, of course, the exact same people behind ACTA, SOPA/PIPA, etc. Good going, guys.
My mistake, I missed a zero.
Suuure you did, buddy.
Funny how many different numbers I see flying around for how old humans are, yet everyone's up in arms about a simple oversight.
And all of the numbers are a hell of a lot bigger than 30000. Face it, you're an ignorant Luddite whose opinions on this or any scientific matter are of less value than my dog's barking, and every post you make just underscores that fact. Now go play, kid, the grown-ups are talking.
I'm inclined to go with the atter since sequencing protiens isnt all that entertaining.
Protein sequencing is just as important as DNA sequencing. You can learn things from each technique that you can't learn from the other. Sequencing is rarely entertaining in either case. ;)
The real world is most likely to have them be fairly autonomous. A bit smarter than an off the shelf air to air missile, but probably not a heck of a lot smarter.
We're already seeing problems with semi-autonomous UCAVs going off mission. People are going to be very very nervous, and rightly so, about the idea of sending off a Death Star with anything less than near-real-time human control. People won't necessarily be on the "front line" (to the degree that the concept of a "line" has any meaning in space) but they won't be too far away either -- and that means they, as much as the armed robots, will be targets.
In space this translates to first getting to the enemy star system undetected. This is dead easy, due to space being so huge and the spaceships being so small.
Any propulsion system capable of moving spacecraft over interstellar distances anywhere near the speed of light -- which would be necessary to fight an interstellar war on anything approaching a human timescale; you're not going to send your superweapon off at some tiny fraction of c and wait a few thousand years for it to reach your enemy -- will generate an enormous amount of radiation on the way, which will be easily detectable. Space is huge, but it's also mostly, you know, empty space. "Colonel, we've picked up a matter-anti-matter drive signature headed our way from Gliese 581!" "Sound the alarm, Sergeant, we've only got 25 years to get ready."
Somebody high up in the university administrations got bribed, is my guess. I honestly can't think of any other reasonable explanation.
I think this is still push back for declaring "Make Love, Not War".
I think you're right. They lost the culture war decades ago, and deep down they know it, but they're going to keep fighting to make the mopping-up operation as nasty as possible.
... it's hard to know where to even start. But possibly the absolute worst is at the end of Paragraph B:
B. For the purposes of this section, "public school" means a public preschool program, a public elementary school, a public junior high school, a public middle school, a public high school, a public vocational education program, a public community college or a public university in this state.
(emphasis mine)
For K-12 teachers, okay, I can kind of see this, although the penalties seem Draconian and I'm willing to bet that they already have in-school codes of conducts that prohibit swearing in the classroom. But are they actually saying that this is going to apply to professors in a classroom full of people who are legally adults? To discussions of literature containing the word "fuck"? To research faculty in their labs? Seriously?
Apparently the bill's sponsor, Lori Klein, showed off her gun by aiming it at a reporter a while back. That tells you everything you need to know about the mentality of the people behind this. They're completely insane. Um, apeshit, if you will. And they're growing in power all over the country.
As opposed to all the non-fraudulent religious organizations?
the government can pull out the standard anti-business talking points
Only in right-wing-nutball-land can a policy designed to ensure that all players have equal access to the information infrastructure be called "anti-business." For that matter, the idea that the US government is in any way, shape, or form "anti-business" is also strictly in wingnut territory.