D-Wave's computer maintains coherence for a handful of nanoseconds. They've got a long way to go before reaching microseconds.
Their technology is also significantly slower than conventional PCs solving the same problem. While an impressive proof of concept, their quantum computer is a long way from usability.
My 50 year old company has been putting out "The Porcelain Press" in the can for years. They do it mostly for health & safety stuff, but the idea's the same. It just took Google a few decades to catch up.
We've got a VA Tech-style Apple cluster over the course of the last year here at our university, and let me tell you, that thing had serious problem. It works now, but it took over a year of fighting Apple's stupidity to make the thing function decently. And we're one of the first people to get an Apple cluster up and running for serious computation (unlike VA Tech who have been building it, running the LINPACK benchmark and taking it apart time and time again).
Examples of Apple's stupidity:
Apple's NFS server only supports 64 simultaneous connection.
Apple attempts to explain that "real" supercomputers don't have networked file systems.
Disk I/O was slow as molasses. Apple suggests using the AppleTalk protocol to communicate to the file server to speed things up.
Disk I/O still slow as molasses. Grad student discovers the software defaulted to non-buffered disk output (flush to disk).
William A. Arbaugh, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Maryland and a member of the Red Team exercise, said, "I can say with confidence that nobody looked at the system with an eye to security who understands security."
Mr. Wertheimer said the application of security was inconsistent, with encryption applied in some places without the accompanying technology of authentication to ensure that the machines that are communicating with each other are the ones that are supposed to be communicating and that an interloper has not jumped in. "It's like washing your face and drying it with a dirty towel," he said.
Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest and Stein (aka the CLR book). In many ways, there is nothing more fundamental to computer science than using the right method to solve the problem at hand. That's what algorithms are all about.
"...results that are not reproducable, and conclusions drawn from insufficient data."
Such as...?
Well, for the vast majority of their book, Epstein and Axtell use the same initial configuration of their Sugarscape.... its that two hill picture that's in every example.... not once do they actually explain how to generate that initial data.
Epstein and Axtell's book "Growing Artificial Societies," bears all of the typical marks of what we call bad science. While I am making no statments about Epstein and Axtell as human persons or as intellectuals, I do clearly state that their book is not good science.
The complaint about their lack of understanding of computer science issues was a throw-away comment and was irrelevent to the substance of my main beef with the book --- results that are not reproducable, and conclusions drawn from insufficient data. That is why I recommended that people not purchase Epstein and Axtell's book.
...who wrote a really horrible book...
on
Simulating Societies
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I worked with that book in college, and I have to say that it is probably the worst academic text that I have ever seen, for a number of reasons.
First, the book is full of examples, but nowhere to Epstein and Axtell give you enough information to actually reproduce their results (a classic mark of shady science).
Second, there are parts of the book where they draw conclusions from things that are obviously simulation artifacts (ie. if you change the grid size, these effects disappear or are mitigated severely).
Did I mention their lack of understanding of basic computer science issues? (Their formal training is in the social sciences).
For a pair of scholars at the esteemed Brookings Institute, you would would expect more. Unfortunately, you wouldn't get it.
The Chinese enjoy nearly every individual right the American does: freedom of speech, of worship, of belief, of assembly, to own property, privacy, to engage in business.
Not true. Roman Catholicism --- the largest Christian denomination in the world, having about 1 billion members --- has been illegal in China since the 1950s. Priests, bishops, religious and faithful lay people are in jail for "re-education through labor" for the crime of being Roman Catholic. That doesn't sound like freedom of religion to me.
"However, her research is currently limited by IVF legislation. 'The next stage will involve experiments with mice or dogs. If that works, we shall ask to take our work beyond the 14-day limit now imposed on such research.'"
Am I the only one who's wondering how in the world this got past the ethics board? If I remember my medical ethics correctly, new proceedures are supposed to be tested on animals first and people later. Not the other way around. That's shady ethics.
And the whole "science by press release" mentality speaks to me of shady science. After scanning the web page for Cornell's Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility, I could not find any reference to published documentation of Dr. Liu's work. It annoys me when the media draws attention to unpublished (and potentially unreproducable) work just because its "trendy."
Mr. Hart -
Many works which have been written in different languages have been translated multiple times, and many of these translations are now in the public domain. What sort of criteria does the project have for including translated works in the archive?
Both the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the College of William and Mary(VA) use Tom Andersen's NACHOS projects. I also know that the University of Virginia also used to use NACHOS, though they may not any more. They also use NACHOS at UC Berkely, since that is where NACHOS was developed.
NACHOS provides basically everything you need to do a meaningful OS academic implementation. And its writen in C++ (with a hair of assembly), whose features make it easier to write the OS in than plain old C. NACHOS runs on top of the SPIM simulator (which simulates the MIPS instruction set), so you can run NACHOS on linux or unix w/o having to recompile your programs which run under NACHOS.
Hagelin writes:
One simple and viable way to implement across-the-board tax cuts is through a low flat tax.
Wow. There is nothing that this nation's elite could want more than a flat tax. Think about it --- with a flat tax, who saves lots of money? The rich. Who gets little, if no benefit? The poor. And for that matter, the working class.
Its a shame that Hagelin's platform is so tied to protecting the rights of the elite. If only he found the poor and working class America so worthy of his compassion.
Cyberspace, writes Wertheim, is a completely new kind of space, a New Jerusalem, potentially
welcoming male and female, First World and Third, "...is open to anyone who can afford a personal
computer and a monthly Internet access fee... many cyber-enthusiasts would have us believe that that the Net dissolves the very barriers of race and gender, elevating everybody equally to a disembodied digital stream."
How in can Wertheim (or maybe these are merely Katz's words) think that the internet can truly unite the First and Third world?! The internet is only open to the "haves" --- those people "who
can afford personal computer and a monthly Internet access fee."
Face facts. There are millions of people on earth who don't have the monetary resources to get sufficient food. Or get clean drinking water. Or have access to elementary-level education. Or basic medical care.
The internet will accomplish precisely nothing for these people until we as members of the Western world can make the serious commitment to work for justice.
Though the internet may be more like a new Beruit than a new Jerusalem (flame wars, anyone?), its true potential cannot be realized until we realize justice in our international society.
If you want peace, work for justice.
Yes! A Fact /. Needs to Hear!
on
Anonymity
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· Score: 1
Yea, the 9th amendment gives you the right, but what most people fail to realize is that rights do not exist in vacuo. Rights are irreducibly tied to responsibilities -- you cannot have rights without responsibilities.
Thank you Dr. Tom! I'm always glad to see someone telling things like they are, when the majority of posters completely disagree. This idea of the tying of rights and responsibilities is also related to the concept of natural law --- that certain laws are natural products of humn social interaction, and thus cannot be disregarded.
For your reading pleasure, I give you a quote from Pope John XXIII:
For every fundamental human right draws its indestructable moral force from international law, which in granting it imposes a corresponding obligation.
Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth) 1963
A degree in Computer Science is not a certification. It does not mean that you "know language X." It does not mean that you "know X company's products."
But a real CS degree means that it doesn't matter. In a computer science department, you learn how to think. How to solve problems intellegently. Which methodlogies work well for which problems.
My old university's CS dept used to get calls every couple of weeks asking "Do you teach Microsoft Certification?" The answer always was, "No, we teach computer science. Go call the local community college for something like that."
With a real CS degree, the programming language or company's product doesn't matter so much. You can figure it out quickly. Yeah, your code won't be quite as sexy as the 12 year-old C whiz, but once the compiler is done optimizing, his code won't run any faster than yours anyway (optimizing compilers really do level the field:)
So the next time you're asked in an interview, "What languages can you program in?" Standup proud and say, "All of them":)
As a disclaimer, let me first state that I am a numerical analyst, not a theorist. But I am a CS grad student:) For a long time now, there have been NP-complete problems which are almost solvable in polynomial time. For example, I remember hearing about a heuristic for the bin packing problem what was right about 85% percent of the time. (Had they got up to about 92%, they could have proven that P=NP. Likewise, modern algorithms for travelling salesmen (like those developed at Rice University) find a solution incredibly quickly..... However, the algorithm needs to spend a long time verifying its solution, so it doesn't work in polynomial time.
In my opinion, I feel that P!=NP. There are too many problems (eg. in combinatorial optimization) where there is no useful heuristic that guarantees the right answer.
Honestly, Shockwave Rider was ok, but not a great book. When it comes to that kind of literature cyberpunky, Gibson is just a lot better. SR does have the advantage of being one of the shorter of Brunner's novels, however, so it is a worth a read if you're bored.
There are two socio-political schemes which Bunner discusses in SR. The first is the concept of collective versus inidividual knowledge, and that people together know more than individuals separately. For those of you who read the book, this is "Delphi." Brunner thinks this is bad.
The second issue is the loss of human relationships encouraged by the misuse of technology. This is represented by the people who allow you to virtually murder someone, without the knowledge that it is virtual. The person finds out that it is vertual later.... The main characters in the novel think this is horrible, and (in my opinion) rightfully so. But in the SR society, this passes for perfectly normal. Human relationships are torn asunder.
By the same token, they also have a fantastically popular phone service where you can anonymously talk, and people just listen. This service is what prevents the society from becoming unglued.... as it is probably the only social connection many people in the SR world have.
Thats the two minute summary. If you have any more questions... read the book:)
I made the same comments the last time Katz posted an "Open Media" article, but my point bears repeating. Katz writes:
Whatever their commonality as members of the Open Media, the differences in these emerging sites are striking. Open Media embraces interactivity -- they reflect ideas, commentary and information from a wide range of sources, especially their readers. They don't merely provide the occasional link to other sites on the Web, as traditional sites.
Of course "Open Media" sites are interactive... thats half the fun! However, this is all they provide, since open media sites DO NOT provide news. Katz continues:
They [Open Media Sites] are almost totally disconnected from the mainstream political and media system -- the network newscasts, major newspapers, TV talk shows and political events that dominate conventional, closed media. Such subjects rarely surface on Open Media sites.
This is an outright lie. CNN and the New York Times, for example, are two top closed media journals. On any given day, I'm apt to see articles from their sites referred to on slashdot. The issues that they discuss are precisely the issues for discussion on sites like this one. We happen to use/. as a filter, but we conect to the same "closed media" sources.
"Open Media" will never supplant traditional media. Traditional news outlets have something that "Open Media" can never match --- reporters, and lots of them. These reporters are the people who make it there work to relate to us the happenings of the world, and they will remain for us the primary source of information for a long time.
Marcus Thomas, chief of the FBI's Cyber Technology Section at Quantico, said Carnivore represents the bureau's effort to keep abreast of rapid changes in Internet communications while still meeting the rigid demands of federal wiretapping statutes. "This is just a very specialized sniffer," he said.
He also noted that criminal and civil penalties prohibit the bureau from placing unauthorized wiretaps, and any information gleaned in those types of criminal cases would be thrown out of court. Typical Internet wiretaps last around 45 days, after which the FBI removes the equipment. Mr. Thomas said the bureau usually has as many as 20 Carnivore systems on hand, "just in case."
Mr. Thomas is entirely correct --- Carnivore is just a very complicated sniffer. And while privacy advocates are correct --- the government COULD sniff anyone. But the government COULD also wiretap anyone. The rule of law is what prevents that. The FBI can pay through the nose if they get caught making illegal wiretaps.
The Carnivore system is perfectly consistant with the current laws and norms on government surveilence. To question Carnivore but allow for regular wiretaps, is in my opinion, an indefensible view point.
Cute idea! However, Java has some significant problems (security, concurrency, etc) that have to be solved before that becomes feasible. The inability to read/write data from disk is a real killer for these problems.
Using the internet as a platform for high performance computing has some disadvantages that CNN missed.
First, as they suggested with the SETI project, numerical accuracy is always a concern. Floating point mathematics (which are critical to 99.9999% of huge computing problems) are vary widely from machine to machine. Results do vary across platforms.
Secondly, use of the internet adds tremendously to communication overhead, compared to use of a local network. This means that some projects that would benefit from classical local parallelism may wind up being hurt by a internet scheme.
Third, real industrial computations (oil-field computations included) tend to involve tremendously large and arcane libraries and datafiles that the user will have to copy. This will bloat the size of what the user has to download.
Fourth, real industrial computation is extremely sensitive. I'm a grad student, and I've been working on a problem from a DOE lab. The only way we have a copy of the binary is due to our special connections with the lab. There is no way in the world a lot of "real" HPC code/binaries can be publically distributed.
User security is also an issue. Many of these codes have to do a bunch of disk I/O. Whats to stop a "customer" from distributing a program that gathers user data and/or modifies disk files?
A lot of HPC code is written in FORTRAN. 'nuff said.
The internet still has a long way to go to be a real platform for high performance computing. Building yourself a Beowulf cluster and syphoning time off of your in-house linux boxes makes much more sense for now.
Unfortunately, this Fling is mostly a pipe dream. The author makes the following claim:
Fling destroys forever the ability of anyone to force the content of the information you share. That information will also include ecash - so fling will destroy anyone's ability to control or surveil online purchases, transfers, or holdings
Does the Fling system prevent finding the original sending IP of the message? Yes, but so does classic IP spoofing. Now, we all know that any real sysadmin can get around that by contacting other sysadmins on the packet's path.
The layered encryption is a waste of time --- any idiot with a copy of the Fling source can decrypt the message down to the final level --- and discover all the targeted computer on the path. Plain old PGP would accomplish the same (w/o revealing the 'allied' machines on the route).
And of course there is no server authentication, which makes the utterly useless for ecommerce.
All in all, Fling wastes bandwidth with uneccesary encryption, and offers no real increase in security. Sorry guys. No party today.
Any kid with a computer has access to vast amounts of the world's information archives, perhaps the most frightening reality of the Internet to most older Americans and political figures.
Precisely because all of them can read the online papers, and online libraries --- they have access to the "Closed Media."
Katz is right about the need for filtering of information. And what Katz calls the "Closed Media" provides precisely that. In today's convienience-driven society only "closed media" can deliver information without hassle. "Open media" outlets require too much effort, and will be disregarded by the masses. Sorry John.
Slashdot Mirror
D-Wave's computer maintains coherence for a handful of nanoseconds. They've got a long way to go before reaching microseconds.
Their technology is also significantly slower than conventional PCs solving the same problem. While an impressive proof of concept, their quantum computer is a long way from usability.
My 50 year old company has been putting out "The Porcelain Press" in the can for years. They do it mostly for health & safety stuff, but the idea's the same. It just took Google a few decades to catch up.
UIUC is generally agreed to be the number 5 ranked CS school in the country after MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford and U Cal @ Berkeley.
William A. Arbaugh, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Maryland and a member of the Red Team exercise, said, "I can say with confidence that nobody looked at the system with an eye to security who understands security."
Mr. Wertheimer said the application of security was inconsistent, with encryption applied in some places without the accompanying technology of authentication to ensure that the machines that are communicating with each other are the ones that are supposed to be communicating and that an interloper has not jumped in. "It's like washing your face and drying it with a dirty towel," he said.
Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest and Stein (aka the CLR book). In many ways, there is nothing more fundamental to computer science than using the right method to solve the problem at hand. That's what algorithms are all about.
Such as...?
Well, for the vast majority of their book, Epstein and Axtell use the same initial configuration of their Sugarscape.... its that two hill picture that's in every example.... not once do they actually explain how to generate that initial data.
Epstein and Axtell's book "Growing Artificial Societies," bears all of the typical marks of what we call bad science. While I am making no statments about Epstein and Axtell as human persons or as intellectuals, I do clearly state that their book is not good science.
The complaint about their lack of understanding of computer science issues was a throw-away comment and was irrelevent to the substance of my main beef with the book --- results that are not reproducable, and conclusions drawn from insufficient data. That is why I recommended that people not purchase Epstein and Axtell's book.
First, the book is full of examples, but nowhere to Epstein and Axtell give you enough information to actually reproduce their results (a classic mark of shady science).
Second, there are parts of the book where they draw conclusions from things that are obviously simulation artifacts (ie. if you change the grid size, these effects disappear or are mitigated severely).
Did I mention their lack of understanding of basic computer science issues? (Their formal training is in the social sciences).
For a pair of scholars at the esteemed Brookings Institute, you would would expect more. Unfortunately, you wouldn't get it.
Don't buy their book.
The Chinese enjoy nearly every individual right the American does: freedom of speech, of worship, of belief, of assembly, to own property, privacy, to engage in business.
Not true. Roman Catholicism --- the largest Christian denomination in the world, having about 1 billion members --- has been illegal in China since the 1950s. Priests, bishops, religious and faithful lay people are in jail for "re-education through labor" for the crime of being Roman Catholic. That doesn't sound like freedom of religion to me.
Am I the only one who's wondering how in the world this got past the ethics board? If I remember my medical ethics correctly, new proceedures are supposed to be tested on animals first and people later. Not the other way around. That's shady ethics.
And the whole "science by press release" mentality speaks to me of shady science. After scanning the web page for Cornell's Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility, I could not find any reference to published documentation of Dr. Liu's work. It annoys me when the media draws attention to unpublished (and potentially unreproducable) work just because its "trendy."
Mr. Hart - Many works which have been written in different languages have been translated multiple times, and many of these translations are now in the public domain. What sort of criteria does the project have for including translated works in the archive?
NACHOS provides basically everything you need to do a meaningful OS academic implementation. And its writen in C++ (with a hair of assembly), whose features make it easier to write the OS in than plain old C. NACHOS runs on top of the SPIM simulator (which simulates the MIPS instruction set), so you can run NACHOS on linux or unix w/o having to recompile your programs which run under NACHOS.
Wow. There is nothing that this nation's elite could want more than a flat tax. Think about it --- with a flat tax, who saves lots of money? The rich. Who gets little, if no benefit? The poor. And for that matter, the working class.
Its a shame that Hagelin's platform is so tied to protecting the rights of the elite. If only he found the poor and working class America so worthy of his compassion.
How in can Wertheim (or maybe these are merely Katz's words) think that the internet can truly unite the First and Third world?! The internet is only open to the "haves" --- those people "who can afford personal computer and a monthly Internet access fee."
Face facts. There are millions of people on earth who don't have the monetary resources to get sufficient food. Or get clean drinking water. Or have access to elementary-level education. Or basic medical care.
The internet will accomplish precisely nothing for these people until we as members of the Western world can make the serious commitment to work for justice.
Though the internet may be more like a new Beruit than a new Jerusalem (flame wars, anyone?), its true potential cannot be realized until we realize justice in our international society.
If you want peace, work for justice.
Thank you Dr. Tom! I'm always glad to see someone telling things like they are, when the majority of posters completely disagree. This idea of the tying of rights and responsibilities is also related to the concept of natural law --- that certain laws are natural products of humn social interaction, and thus cannot be disregarded.
For your reading pleasure, I give you a quote from Pope John XXIII:
But a real CS degree means that it doesn't matter. In a computer science department, you learn how to think. How to solve problems intellegently. Which methodlogies work well for which problems.
My old university's CS dept used to get calls every couple of weeks asking "Do you teach Microsoft Certification?" The answer always was, "No, we teach computer science. Go call the local community college for something like that."
With a real CS degree, the programming language or company's product doesn't matter so much. You can figure it out quickly. Yeah, your code won't be quite as sexy as the 12 year-old C whiz, but once the compiler is done optimizing, his code won't run any faster than yours anyway (optimizing compilers really do level the field:)
So the next time you're asked in an interview, "What languages can you program in?" Standup proud and say, "All of them" :)
In my opinion, I feel that P!=NP. There are too many problems (eg. in combinatorial optimization) where there is no useful heuristic that guarantees the right answer.
There are two socio-political schemes which Bunner discusses in SR. The first is the concept of collective versus inidividual knowledge, and that people together know more than individuals separately. For those of you who read the book, this is "Delphi." Brunner thinks this is bad.
The second issue is the loss of human relationships encouraged by the misuse of technology. This is represented by the people who allow you to virtually murder someone, without the knowledge that it is virtual. The person finds out that it is vertual later.... The main characters in the novel think this is horrible, and (in my opinion) rightfully so. But in the SR society, this passes for perfectly normal. Human relationships are torn asunder.
By the same token, they also have a fantastically popular phone service where you can anonymously talk, and people just listen. This service is what prevents the society from becoming unglued.... as it is probably the only social connection many people in the SR world have.
Thats the two minute summary. If you have any more questions... read the book:)
Whatever their commonality as members of the Open Media, the differences in these emerging sites are striking. Open Media embraces interactivity -- they reflect ideas, commentary and information from a wide range of sources, especially their readers. They don't merely provide the occasional link to other sites on the Web, as traditional sites.
Of course "Open Media" sites are interactive... thats half the fun! However, this is all they provide, since open media sites DO NOT provide news. Katz continues:
They [Open Media Sites] are almost totally disconnected from the mainstream political and media system -- the network newscasts, major newspapers, TV talk shows and political events that dominate conventional, closed media. Such subjects rarely surface on Open Media sites.
This is an outright lie. CNN and the New York Times, for example, are two top closed media journals. On any given day, I'm apt to see articles from their sites referred to on slashdot. The issues that they discuss are precisely the issues for discussion on sites like this one. We happen to use /. as a filter, but we conect to the same "closed media" sources.
"Open Media" will never supplant traditional media. Traditional news outlets have something that "Open Media" can never match --- reporters, and lots of them. These reporters are the people who make it there work to relate to us the happenings of the world, and they will remain for us the primary source of information for a long time.
Marcus Thomas, chief of the FBI's Cyber Technology Section at Quantico, said Carnivore represents the bureau's effort to keep abreast of rapid changes in Internet communications while still meeting the rigid demands of federal wiretapping statutes. "This is just a very specialized sniffer," he said.
He also noted that criminal and civil penalties prohibit the bureau from placing unauthorized wiretaps, and any information gleaned in those types of criminal cases would be thrown out of court. Typical Internet wiretaps last around 45 days, after which the FBI removes the equipment. Mr. Thomas said the bureau usually has as many as 20 Carnivore systems on hand, "just in case."
Mr. Thomas is entirely correct --- Carnivore is just a very complicated sniffer. And while privacy advocates are correct --- the government COULD sniff anyone. But the government COULD also wiretap anyone. The rule of law is what prevents that. The FBI can pay through the nose if they get caught making illegal wiretaps.
The Carnivore system is perfectly consistant with the current laws and norms on government surveilence. To question Carnivore but allow for regular wiretaps, is in my opinion, an indefensible view point.
Cute idea! However, Java has some significant problems (security, concurrency, etc) that have to be solved before that becomes feasible. The inability to read/write data from disk is a real killer for these problems.
- First, as they suggested with the SETI project, numerical accuracy is always a concern. Floating point mathematics (which are critical to 99.9999% of huge computing problems) are vary widely from machine to machine. Results do vary across platforms.
- Secondly, use of the internet adds tremendously to communication overhead, compared to use of a local network. This means that some projects that would benefit from classical local parallelism may wind up being hurt by a internet scheme.
- Third, real industrial computations (oil-field computations included) tend to involve tremendously large and arcane libraries and datafiles that the user will have to copy. This will bloat the size of what the user has to download.
- Fourth, real industrial computation is extremely sensitive. I'm a grad student, and I've been working on a problem from a DOE lab. The only way we have a copy of the binary is due to our special connections with the lab. There is no way in the world a lot of "real" HPC code/binaries can be publically distributed.
- User security is also an issue. Many of these codes have to do a bunch of disk I/O. Whats to stop a "customer" from distributing a program that gathers user data and/or modifies disk files?
- A lot of HPC code is written in FORTRAN. 'nuff said.
The internet still has a long way to go to be a real platform for high performance computing. Building yourself a Beowulf cluster and syphoning time off of your in-house linux boxes makes much more sense for now.Fling destroys forever the ability of anyone to force the content of the information you share. That information will also include ecash - so fling will destroy anyone's ability to control or surveil online purchases, transfers, or holdings
Does the Fling system prevent finding the original sending IP of the message? Yes, but so does classic IP spoofing. Now, we all know that any real sysadmin can get around that by contacting other sysadmins on the packet's path.
The layered encryption is a waste of time --- any idiot with a copy of the Fling source can decrypt the message down to the final level --- and discover all the targeted computer on the path. Plain old PGP would accomplish the same (w/o revealing the 'allied' machines on the route).
And of course there is no server authentication, which makes the utterly useless for ecommerce.
All in all, Fling wastes bandwidth with uneccesary encryption, and offers no real increase in security. Sorry guys. No party today.
Precisely because all of them can read the online papers, and online libraries --- they have access to the "Closed Media."
Katz is right about the need for filtering of information. And what Katz calls the "Closed Media" provides precisely that. In today's convienience-driven society only "closed media" can deliver information without hassle. "Open media" outlets require too much effort, and will be disregarded by the masses. Sorry John.