Take a look at it through a fairly simple algebraic proof.
1.) 0.99999... * 10 = 9.99999...// decimal multiplication by 10 means we just shift to the left and the infinite decimal expansion isn't affected.
2.) 9.99999... - 0.99999... = 9// the infinite decimal expansion is still a number and there's no reason we can't subtract it.
3.) 9 / 9 = 1// if we take the difference from the above subtraction and "undo" the multiplication in step 1, we need to divide by 9 because we've just removed one of what we multiplied.
What does a 4-4 decision mean, anyway? TFA called this a "non-decision" but if that's the case, what are we reading about besides some remarks on the issue? Anybody got any clarification, because the folks at Forbes' sure don't.
That's a good point about this being a misdiagnosis rate - I hadn't thought of it from that angle. Even though I read the article, that point still wasn't terribly clear, so thanks for bringing it up.
It's still not clear to me, though, how the spurious brain activity can be ruled out based on what the article described. Yes, you're right - asking a series of ?'s can be much less subject to random bias than asking a ? in isolation. However, is it possible for said spurious brain activity to occur for a longer period of time, enough to throw off multiple questions? What I'm thinking about is a situation analogous to the following.
Imagine a kid who, for whatever reason, goes into "hollywood" seizures (uncontrolled body movements, shaking, etc). If you ask such a kid to shake to answer "yes" and then, while he is having a seizure, ask him a series of questions, he's not really answering even though he's displaying the predetermined signal.
Now imagine that one these people, who by definition have brain damage, suffers from some sort of condition where that part of his brain lights up like a Christmas tree every so often (similar to a seizure I suppose). If you're looking for activity in the affected region as a signal, you'll see it but its relevance as a signal is completely lost. Is this scenario even possible?
Bear in mind that I'm not a neuroscientist. I'm coming at this from the perspective of an interested outsider, so it's HIGHLY likely that I am missing something fundamental. If I am, though - I'd like to know (it's a slow day at work).
I'm not a neuroscientist, but it seems to me that 4 out of 23 is a pretty low success rate, especially given the kind of indirection the researchers were resorting to in order to elicit the signals they were looking for. How do we know, for example, that a patient doesn't have some kind of spurious activity in the brain area they're using to signal "A"? For that matter, how can we distinguish between "no answer" and a deliberate "B" in the absence of such activity? How can we assume that the patient, who by definition has brain damage, is capable of understanding the question correctly and answering correctly? I agree, this is better than absolutely no communication, but I'm curious how they intend to control for factors like these.
... but I bet you could some how measure how disordered the data stream was and make a guess about weather or not it was encrypted. It seems that encrypted data should also have some level of order to it.
Encryption doesn't work that way, at least not good encryption. The goal of every encryption scheme is to transform a plaintext input into a ciphertext output that is indistinguishable from random noise. Your example of frequency analysis being used to attack ROT13 shows that it's a terrible encryption algorithm because it leaves so much information about the original message embedded in the transformed output. Every time you hear about an encryption scheme being broken, you're hearing about some way to recover information about the plaintext from the ciphertext. That information is what allows adversaries to beat brute-force decryption (although not always by much - a scheme with a keyspace of 2^n is considered broken if an attack is found that requires only 2^n-1 of the keys to be examined).
The OP brings up an interesting point, of knowing when your data is actually decrypted.
This is why a one-time pad is "perfect". A one-time pad leaves absolutely zero information about the original plaintext apart from length (and even that can be obfuscated by null padding). That means that there is no way for an adversary, even through a brute-force attack, to positively identify the original plaintext. Let's say we encrypt "HELLO WORLD" with a one-time pad, and the output is "ZBCHGRTKOP". "ZBCHGRTKOP" could be brute-forced by an adversary and produce "HELLO WORLD", but such an attempt would also produce "BUY MUSTARD" or "URINAL TOWN" or any other string of 10 characters (possibly including nulls - remember padding!). All of these are equally plausible if the one-time pad scheme is implemented perfectly. The point is that, depending on the encryption scheme, in a sense you can't always know that you've done it perfectly. Recreated internal structure is a good signal that you have done it correctly, but if you were trying to decrypt something you knew NOTHING about (couldn't tell it from random noise), you'd have a hell of a time telling whether you screwed up your decryption. Make things any clearer?
Why not just handle that the same way unlicensed drivers are currently handled in the U.S.? A cop isn't going to pull every car over just to make sure that the driver is licensed - the penalty is just much stiffer if you are pulled and found to be unlicensed. In your scenario, if a policeman sees a Porsche barreling down the outside lane and pulls it over, he'll discover that the driver doesn't have an appropriate license and then can take some sort of punitive action.
I see this as a corollary to a phrase a Latin professor of mine used to use all the time: "Clarity of grammar is clarity of thought."
If you haven't taken the time to think through what you mean in order to translate it from concepts into words, then there's a high probability that you have missed something at the conceptual level and are hiding it in the noise and ambiguity of language. Misspelled words such as variable names or even misspellings in comments, ESPECIALLY when they're not consistently misspelled, strike me as the same sort of disregard for the rules of the system and throw up a big red flag that something may not be as it should. At best, it's an impediment to grep, but frequently I find that misspellings in and around code mean that there is more work to be done.
Can you explain a little more? I just RTFA and I'm not convinced this is revolutionary either, but it's hard to say because this seems more like marketing than actual research. However, I'm hesitant to say he's full of shit without hearing a bit more of the debate around his ideas.
One question I was hoping would be answered is what this flow routing buys you that something like SCTP wouldn't?
Foo -
There's a big difference between the undergrad and grad programs at Wake. From what I've heard from every one of my friends who graduated from the undergrad business program, which is VERY highly regarded, Wake's graduate business school is pretty much awful - a paper tiger. They give out same day acceptances, with scholarship offers, because they can't fill spots in their grad program. Supposedly the best professors in the MBA program were asked to switch to teaching undergrads. It's my understanding that this was a conscious choice to help maintain Wake's "focus on the undergrads" image. Whether it's good or not is not really my say, but this is what I've heard from folks who have gone on to bigger and better things in the business world.
I graduated WFU in '05 to give you a time frame for this blatant display of hearsay and anecdotal evidence. I also had no contact with the business school apart from fraternity brothers (Lambda Chi), so take this with as much salt as you wish.
Alternatively, after you get your bachelor's and get a job see if your company will pay for your master's. Many companies will do "tuition reimbursement" as long as its a relevant degree field and you make good grades. Its a lot of work but trust me, its worth it, and you should get it done now before you get married and have kids.
I'm torn on this. I just completed an M.S. in CS while working full-time as a developer, and now that it's all over, I'm not sure how I feel about the decision I made to do the two concurrently. On one hand, the expensive parts of school were free (before my in-state residency kicked in and I paid my own much cheaper way). I've been getting a pretty good paycheck which has funded an engagement ring, much of a wedding, and a couple of years of my fiancee's college education. Now that I'm done, I have a graduate degree with 3 years experience instead of a graduate degree with 1 year. In theory this will help with my current job hunt. Even though the economy is down, I've got a couple of promising leads that I strongly doubt I would have without both the work experience and the graduate degree. While those leads are pretty much hot air until they turn into interviews / offers, I got them with only a couple of weeks looking around and so I believe I'm in a better spot than I was after college.
HOWEVER, I feel like I didn't get as much out of my degree as I wanted. I didn't have the time to spend really digging into courses that challenged me (namely a theory of computation course). I had to pass on a number of courses that would have been interesting, but couldn't be made to work with my professional schedule. I wasn't able to go to department colloquia or talks because they were during work hours. I had a funded summer research project that I wasn't able to take as far as I wanted because research is not something you can do "after hours". For the same reason, I had to abandon my thesis after a literature review because there wasn't any way I was going to be able to put out good work, and I thought it better to just graduate with a comprehensive exam to get the damned thing over with. I don't regret that decision, but I regret not changing the circumstances that led to it. As I look back, I realize that the time in school was far more rewarding to me.
On mornings when I just didn't want to get out of bed (sucky weather, didn't sleep well), it wasn't my job that made me get up. What got me out of bed was the thought of learning something new, of figuring out how some small part of the computer science world worked. Now, in one hand I've got an M.S. that I'm only superficially proud of because it does not represent the full extent of my abilities. In the other hand, I've got excellent performance reviews for a job I have no pride in and a bunch of clueless co-workers and managers who are congratulating me for "finally finishing college".
I guess the point of this Slashdot-confession post is that working full-time and doing an M.S. concurrently is not a decision to be undertaken lightly. I'm not talking about a lack of social life, as that's a relatively easy problem to solve. The problem is prioritization. Something will have to play second fiddle, and YOU are the ultimate arbiter of what needs to give if you do this. Otherwise, you'll wind up half-assing one or the other, and you may not like where that leaves you. Good luck, though - I wish you well!
I concur - the same happened to me. Of course, programming had the sizable advantage that a Latin degree isn't worth nearly what it was 1,000 years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Take a look at it through a fairly simple algebraic proof.
// decimal multiplication by 10 means we just shift to the left and the infinite decimal expansion isn't affected.
// the infinite decimal expansion is still a number and there's no reason we can't subtract it.
// if we take the difference from the above subtraction and "undo" the multiplication in step 1, we need to divide by 9 because we've just removed one of what we multiplied.
1.) 0.99999... * 10 = 9.99999...
2.) 9.99999... - 0.99999... = 9
3.) 9 / 9 = 1
Therefore 0.99999... = 1. Q.E.D.
What does a 4-4 decision mean, anyway? TFA called this a "non-decision" but if that's the case, what are we reading about besides some remarks on the issue? Anybody got any clarification, because the folks at Forbes' sure don't.
The spores germinate only in very alkaline environments... ...but the bases are nominally covered.
I see what you did there.
Exaggerate much? This is up there with the summary from a few years ago about how the squid's beak will revolutionize engineering .
we don't make enough software we ......?
We make the USAF look like wusses.
The Army, Navy, Marines, Coast Guard, NYPD and Stokes County Volunteer Fire Brigade all say the same thing.
That's a good point about this being a misdiagnosis rate - I hadn't thought of it from that angle. Even though I read the article, that point still wasn't terribly clear, so thanks for bringing it up. It's still not clear to me, though, how the spurious brain activity can be ruled out based on what the article described. Yes, you're right - asking a series of ?'s can be much less subject to random bias than asking a ? in isolation. However, is it possible for said spurious brain activity to occur for a longer period of time, enough to throw off multiple questions? What I'm thinking about is a situation analogous to the following. Imagine a kid who, for whatever reason, goes into "hollywood" seizures (uncontrolled body movements, shaking, etc). If you ask such a kid to shake to answer "yes" and then, while he is having a seizure, ask him a series of questions, he's not really answering even though he's displaying the predetermined signal. Now imagine that one these people, who by definition have brain damage, suffers from some sort of condition where that part of his brain lights up like a Christmas tree every so often (similar to a seizure I suppose). If you're looking for activity in the affected region as a signal, you'll see it but its relevance as a signal is completely lost. Is this scenario even possible? Bear in mind that I'm not a neuroscientist. I'm coming at this from the perspective of an interested outsider, so it's HIGHLY likely that I am missing something fundamental. If I am, though - I'd like to know (it's a slow day at work).
I'm not a neuroscientist, but it seems to me that 4 out of 23 is a pretty low success rate, especially given the kind of indirection the researchers were resorting to in order to elicit the signals they were looking for. How do we know, for example, that a patient doesn't have some kind of spurious activity in the brain area they're using to signal "A"? For that matter, how can we distinguish between "no answer" and a deliberate "B" in the absence of such activity? How can we assume that the patient, who by definition has brain damage, is capable of understanding the question correctly and answering correctly? I agree, this is better than absolutely no communication, but I'm curious how they intend to control for factors like these.
... but I bet you could some how measure how disordered the data stream was and make a guess about weather or not it was encrypted. It seems that encrypted data should also have some level of order to it.
Encryption doesn't work that way, at least not good encryption. The goal of every encryption scheme is to transform a plaintext input into a ciphertext output that is indistinguishable from random noise. Your example of frequency analysis being used to attack ROT13 shows that it's a terrible encryption algorithm because it leaves so much information about the original message embedded in the transformed output. Every time you hear about an encryption scheme being broken, you're hearing about some way to recover information about the plaintext from the ciphertext. That information is what allows adversaries to beat brute-force decryption (although not always by much - a scheme with a keyspace of 2^n is considered broken if an attack is found that requires only 2^n-1 of the keys to be examined).
The OP brings up an interesting point, of knowing when your data is actually decrypted.
This is why a one-time pad is "perfect". A one-time pad leaves absolutely zero information about the original plaintext apart from length (and even that can be obfuscated by null padding). That means that there is no way for an adversary, even through a brute-force attack, to positively identify the original plaintext. Let's say we encrypt "HELLO WORLD" with a one-time pad, and the output is "ZBCHGRTKOP". "ZBCHGRTKOP" could be brute-forced by an adversary and produce "HELLO WORLD", but such an attempt would also produce "BUY MUSTARD" or "URINAL TOWN" or any other string of 10 characters (possibly including nulls - remember padding!). All of these are equally plausible if the one-time pad scheme is implemented perfectly. The point is that, depending on the encryption scheme, in a sense you can't always know that you've done it perfectly. Recreated internal structure is a good signal that you have done it correctly, but if you were trying to decrypt something you knew NOTHING about (couldn't tell it from random noise), you'd have a hell of a time telling whether you screwed up your decryption. Make things any clearer?
Why not just handle that the same way unlicensed drivers are currently handled in the U.S.? A cop isn't going to pull every car over just to make sure that the driver is licensed - the penalty is just much stiffer if you are pulled and found to be unlicensed. In your scenario, if a policeman sees a Porsche barreling down the outside lane and pulls it over, he'll discover that the driver doesn't have an appropriate license and then can take some sort of punitive action.
I see this as a corollary to a phrase a Latin professor of mine used to use all the time: "Clarity of grammar is clarity of thought."
If you haven't taken the time to think through what you mean in order to translate it from concepts into words, then there's a high probability that you have missed something at the conceptual level and are hiding it in the noise and ambiguity of language. Misspelled words such as variable names or even misspellings in comments, ESPECIALLY when they're not consistently misspelled, strike me as the same sort of disregard for the rules of the system and throw up a big red flag that something may not be as it should. At best, it's an impediment to grep, but frequently I find that misspellings in and around code mean that there is more work to be done.
So... are your friends vegetables or are you taking the couch potato metaphor a little too seriously?
What's that, 21 minutes?
Whooooosh, eh?
Wow, what a bunch of bullshit. RMS is obviously the person most people around here think of when they think "purest".
You, sir, are a fool!
I think Alanis Morissette sang a song about this post...
Can you explain a little more? I just RTFA and I'm not convinced this is revolutionary either, but it's hard to say because this seems more like marketing than actual research. However, I'm hesitant to say he's full of shit without hearing a bit more of the debate around his ideas.
One question I was hoping would be answered is what this flow routing buys you that something like SCTP wouldn't?
That's okay - next time, just click the auto-comment button and let Slashdot post the tricky stuff for you.
Props on the Baz Luhrmann - you owe me a new keyboard.
Foo - There's a big difference between the undergrad and grad programs at Wake. From what I've heard from every one of my friends who graduated from the undergrad business program, which is VERY highly regarded, Wake's graduate business school is pretty much awful - a paper tiger. They give out same day acceptances, with scholarship offers, because they can't fill spots in their grad program. Supposedly the best professors in the MBA program were asked to switch to teaching undergrads. It's my understanding that this was a conscious choice to help maintain Wake's "focus on the undergrads" image. Whether it's good or not is not really my say, but this is what I've heard from folks who have gone on to bigger and better things in the business world. I graduated WFU in '05 to give you a time frame for this blatant display of hearsay and anecdotal evidence. I also had no contact with the business school apart from fraternity brothers (Lambda Chi), so take this with as much salt as you wish.
You're looking for this, I believe.
Buddy Memory Allocation
Disregard that - I suck cocks.
Alternatively, after you get your bachelor's and get a job see if your company will pay for your master's. Many companies will do "tuition reimbursement" as long as its a relevant degree field and you make good grades. Its a lot of work but trust me, its worth it, and you should get it done now before you get married and have kids.
I'm torn on this. I just completed an M.S. in CS while working full-time as a developer, and now that it's all over, I'm not sure how I feel about the decision I made to do the two concurrently. On one hand, the expensive parts of school were free (before my in-state residency kicked in and I paid my own much cheaper way). I've been getting a pretty good paycheck which has funded an engagement ring, much of a wedding, and a couple of years of my fiancee's college education. Now that I'm done, I have a graduate degree with 3 years experience instead of a graduate degree with 1 year. In theory this will help with my current job hunt. Even though the economy is down, I've got a couple of promising leads that I strongly doubt I would have without both the work experience and the graduate degree. While those leads are pretty much hot air until they turn into interviews / offers, I got them with only a couple of weeks looking around and so I believe I'm in a better spot than I was after college.
HOWEVER, I feel like I didn't get as much out of my degree as I wanted. I didn't have the time to spend really digging into courses that challenged me (namely a theory of computation course). I had to pass on a number of courses that would have been interesting, but couldn't be made to work with my professional schedule. I wasn't able to go to department colloquia or talks because they were during work hours. I had a funded summer research project that I wasn't able to take as far as I wanted because research is not something you can do "after hours". For the same reason, I had to abandon my thesis after a literature review because there wasn't any way I was going to be able to put out good work, and I thought it better to just graduate with a comprehensive exam to get the damned thing over with. I don't regret that decision, but I regret not changing the circumstances that led to it. As I look back, I realize that the time in school was far more rewarding to me.
On mornings when I just didn't want to get out of bed (sucky weather, didn't sleep well), it wasn't my job that made me get up. What got me out of bed was the thought of learning something new, of figuring out how some small part of the computer science world worked. Now, in one hand I've got an M.S. that I'm only superficially proud of because it does not represent the full extent of my abilities. In the other hand, I've got excellent performance reviews for a job I have no pride in and a bunch of clueless co-workers and managers who are congratulating me for "finally finishing college".
I guess the point of this Slashdot-confession post is that working full-time and doing an M.S. concurrently is not a decision to be undertaken lightly. I'm not talking about a lack of social life, as that's a relatively easy problem to solve. The problem is prioritization. Something will have to play second fiddle, and YOU are the ultimate arbiter of what needs to give if you do this. Otherwise, you'll wind up half-assing one or the other, and you may not like where that leaves you. Good luck, though - I wish you well!
You could also shoot a pregnant woman and smoke cigars.
I concur - the same happened to me. Of course, programming had the sizable advantage that a Latin degree isn't worth nearly what it was 1,000 years ago.
eyeballs and fingers aren't that hard to remove these days
These days? Bodily mutilation is like the GEICO of injury - so easy, a caveman could do it.