1. In TOS, it was somewhat legitimate science fiction to suppose that alien worlds could be identical to Earth. It was theorized that we might be the "optimal" path for evolution to take, and hence things might develop along extremely similar lines. This is why there is literally an episode where they find a planet that has gone through World War III, which ends with Shatner moralizing about the virtues of the US Constitution. This was much-loved because it meant they could re-use props from other productions. Other exciting examples of this kind of imaginary thriftiness include the modern Roman empire, although many were softened: the 20s gangster planet was created by accidentally leaving a history book behind, and the Nazi episode (TM) was deliberate meddling by "a Federation historian" (whom I guess we'd call a neo-Nazi today.)
(Hey there! One of the projects in our lab is apicomplexan genomics, so I get a few earfuls of plasmodia and trypanosomae every lab meeting.)
Even if cancer has a universal underlying mechanism, research tends to be more about examining individual routes of mutagenesis, and the existing cures for leukaemia are very specific to particular infection sites. I think it's safe to assume we will develop subtype-specific defences long before a general treatment is feasible.
Generally I'd agree with you, but it's hard to come up with a pesticide that only effects mosquitoes. In the past, some countries relied very heavily on DDT, which had hilariously bad effects on the environment and can cause severe developmental defects in birds. We have to be careful not to destroy the entire ecology, as it does eventually come back to us, especially in Africa where humans have been part of the food chain for millions of years.
However, there's still a way in which malaria is 'bigger' than cancer: there are many different kinds of cancers, not all of which can be fixed using a single mechanism. Each cancer is a separate and distinctive problem as far as medicine is concerned. Malaria, on the other hand, is only caused by a few parasites in one genus, and they cause the same symptoms via the same mechanism. Thus if you contribute to malaria research, your contribution will affect far more people than cancer research.
It's a pretty old idea, more or less back-formed by historians searching for the beginning of the written record, examining various cultural traditions about when certain legendary events occurred, and by counting up ages and overlapping lifespans of various biblical figures.
You may have a point about the client licensing, although I'm pretty confident your streams would still be safe from Comcast. The codecs used for digital cable sacrifice compression ratios to make that kind of thing possible; typical web codecs rely much more on keyframing and require a delay of a few seconds to re-encode on the fly, which would disrupt service to the user. Also, Netflix would get mighty annoyed and block all of Comcast for advertising on their content unfairly—part of why they want DRM in the first place.
You'd have to consult your hardware vendor(s) for that kind of information. A well-written package will peg your machine when it's not in use, obviously; so distributed grid computing shouldn't be any different in terms of its impact from using your machine all the time at maximum.
Perceived, yes, but the death rates are still extraordinarily high. For a long time the numbers were massively under-estimated because half of the deaths were unreported, and a staggering 3.3 billion people remain at risk of infection. (Although it looks like I was wrong when I said malaria kills more than cancer, there are fewer types of malaria, hence treatments will still reach more people.)
It's on the World Community Grid, so... I think so? Either that or it's a separate BOINC-based client that gets you access to all the WCG projects; I'm not sure.
Are you sure I can't change your mind? Malaria kills far more people per year than cancer, and the grid computing project has far fewer participants. It's also a technically simpler problem they're trying to tackle, meaning your compute time will have significantly higher value in the long run.
Honestly, I hope it doesn't work with a public key, because then you could just brute-force all integers, and for a hundred times the same computational effort, all currency values. Public-key crypto makes the exposure problem worse.
I think it would depend on not knowing what the search index itself contained. You could deduce patterns ("this person keeps searching for x, the query keeps returning these pages") but not directly infer the content. Page hits would be ranked by multiplying topic relevance scores. It would be a much simpler algorithm than PageRank, but still feasible for keyword search.
For nosy ISPs, you just need encryption. (Although given the complexity of the video codecs used for such streams, the idea of inserting content into one on the fly would require a staggering amount of resources—so much so that they're guaranteed to lose money on it, so it's a non-issue.)
And as for the MPAA's comforting illusions, Stallman points out that they'd fall down fast—you wouldn't be allowed to do it on an open-source kernel, so "me" excludes Linux users... and probably Android, which is a pretty darn big market. (Although I might be wrong on the Android thing.)
I was explaining for the layperson how you would actually put such a scheme to use, as not everything can be directly reduced to the addition and multiplication of matrices. Imagine there is a post between yours and mine asking "what good is that?"
Those can be circumvented through the analogue hole, making DRM only an obnoxious hurdle, not a cure. If you want to give people a sample of something, adopt the Apogee model: give them the first part and end it on a really nasty cliffhanger. If there's no data to copy, there's no risk of it being copied.
...and from there, you can go on to implement just about any mathematical operation, as long as you encrypt all of your operands first and don't mind an ungodly number of steps just to do a simple division. The algorithm implementer has to be more trusted than the hardware provider, though, to get arbitrary operations done.
Depends on the area. Bigger grants = fewer curious people, more glory-seekers. Embedded systems engineering and cancer research are both quite unpleasant, but CS is relatively polite. You also see a lot of in-fighting and ego in theoretically shallow fields where there's so little to publish that squabbles over grants and departmental status become all-consuming, because people can't distinguish themselves through their work otherwise.
But, most importantly, this is hardly true of all of academia, and outside of the humanities and the social sciences, such problem fields are rare.
According to Wikipedia, scanning tunneling microscopy can be sped up to PAL framerates, i.e. 1/50th of a second. (Of course, positioning the atoms probably took a lot longer.)
Yeah, I'm with you. Unfortunately this kind of tribal subdivision is as old as human nature. You should be more alarmed that it's exactly the same behaviour exhibited by anyone profoundly obstinate about just about anything, most obviously politics. Every flamewar since the beginning of Usenet has succinctly demonstrated that the average geek is just a gorilla with a few right answers.
Of course, not everyone likes being called a gorilla, so you may want to insert some other primate or even an early hominid. I don't know of anyone who has ever taken offence to being called a bonobo.
Transaction fees. The policy for how this is handled varies from vendor to vendor, and some won't accept transactions below ten dollars at all. More obnoxiously, many put a 25 cent transaction fee on any direct bank debit (Interac) transaction under five dollars, and some will play with variations like 30 cents, or no limit, or something else. Supposedly this balances out the very small flat cost of all Interac transactions, but ultimately it means you're punished for using your card instead of coinage.
Otherwise, however, the debit system is quite successful, and some people can afford to not even have a credit card. If MintChip can genuinely avoid all transaction fees, it'll be the greatest thing since sliced bread for that alone.
Other goals of the system are account anonymity (a government building an anonymous financial system? say what?) and permitting arbitrary peer-to-peer transactions like PayPal... but with no intermediary. Unfortunately they have yet to figure out how to make people RTFA.
But therein lies the exact problem—it was designed to be human-readable, and is hence terrible as a machine-only format. Finding and resolving matching tags and quotes is something a machine should never have to do unless it's parsing human input. People just got lazy because the tools were already there and it was buzzword-compliant to overuse them.
Slashdot Mirror
You're late to the show! There are many such mappings, and it'd take a while to exhaust them all.
It is, but that wouldn't help you—up-to-date lab pages are a myth. ;)
Two fun facts:
1. In TOS, it was somewhat legitimate science fiction to suppose that alien worlds could be identical to Earth. It was theorized that we might be the "optimal" path for evolution to take, and hence things might develop along extremely similar lines. This is why there is literally an episode where they find a planet that has gone through World War III, which ends with Shatner moralizing about the virtues of the US Constitution. This was much-loved because it meant they could re-use props from other productions. Other exciting examples of this kind of imaginary thriftiness include the modern Roman empire, although many were softened: the 20s gangster planet was created by accidentally leaving a history book behind, and the Nazi episode (TM) was deliberate meddling by "a Federation historian" (whom I guess we'd call a neo-Nazi today.)
2. By TNG, the technobabble problem was so bad that the actors sometimes rehearsed with scripts where the technobabble hadn't even been filled in yet. The writers wanted to write a human drama, and science was just a prop thrown in, to support that. To their credit, it at least created a popular show, something which other science fiction programmes had a lot more trouble doing.
(Hey there! One of the projects in our lab is apicomplexan genomics, so I get a few earfuls of plasmodia and trypanosomae every lab meeting.)
Even if cancer has a universal underlying mechanism, research tends to be more about examining individual routes of mutagenesis, and the existing cures for leukaemia are very specific to particular infection sites. I think it's safe to assume we will develop subtype-specific defences long before a general treatment is feasible.
Generally I'd agree with you, but it's hard to come up with a pesticide that only effects mosquitoes. In the past, some countries relied very heavily on DDT, which had hilariously bad effects on the environment and can cause severe developmental defects in birds. We have to be careful not to destroy the entire ecology, as it does eventually come back to us, especially in Africa where humans have been part of the food chain for millions of years.
Yeah, I caught that in another reply already. Although that malaria figure has been shown to be massively under-estimated due to a lack of reporting.
However, there's still a way in which malaria is 'bigger' than cancer: there are many different kinds of cancers, not all of which can be fixed using a single mechanism. Each cancer is a separate and distinctive problem as far as medicine is concerned. Malaria, on the other hand, is only caused by a few parasites in one genus, and they cause the same symptoms via the same mechanism. Thus if you contribute to malaria research, your contribution will affect far more people than cancer research.
It's a pretty old idea, more or less back-formed by historians searching for the beginning of the written record, examining various cultural traditions about when certain legendary events occurred, and by counting up ages and overlapping lifespans of various biblical figures.
You may have a point about the client licensing, although I'm pretty confident your streams would still be safe from Comcast. The codecs used for digital cable sacrifice compression ratios to make that kind of thing possible; typical web codecs rely much more on keyframing and require a delay of a few seconds to re-encode on the fly, which would disrupt service to the user. Also, Netflix would get mighty annoyed and block all of Comcast for advertising on their content unfairly—part of why they want DRM in the first place.
You'd have to consult your hardware vendor(s) for that kind of information. A well-written package will peg your machine when it's not in use, obviously; so distributed grid computing shouldn't be any different in terms of its impact from using your machine all the time at maximum.
Careful, now; you'll give the ecoterrorists ideas with talk like that.
Perceived, yes, but the death rates are still extraordinarily high. For a long time the numbers were massively under-estimated because half of the deaths were unreported, and a staggering 3.3 billion people remain at risk of infection. (Although it looks like I was wrong when I said malaria kills more than cancer, there are fewer types of malaria, hence treatments will still reach more people.)
It's on the World Community Grid, so... I think so? Either that or it's a separate BOINC-based client that gets you access to all the WCG projects; I'm not sure.
Are you sure I can't change your mind? Malaria kills far more people per year than cancer, and the grid computing project has far fewer participants. It's also a technically simpler problem they're trying to tackle, meaning your compute time will have significantly higher value in the long run.
(Incoming whooshes in five, four, three...)
Honestly, I hope it doesn't work with a public key, because then you could just brute-force all integers, and for a hundred times the same computational effort, all currency values. Public-key crypto makes the exposure problem worse.
I think it would depend on not knowing what the search index itself contained. You could deduce patterns ("this person keeps searching for x, the query keeps returning these pages") but not directly infer the content. Page hits would be ranked by multiplying topic relevance scores. It would be a much simpler algorithm than PageRank, but still feasible for keyword search.
For nosy ISPs, you just need encryption. (Although given the complexity of the video codecs used for such streams, the idea of inserting content into one on the fly would require a staggering amount of resources—so much so that they're guaranteed to lose money on it, so it's a non-issue.)
And as for the MPAA's comforting illusions, Stallman points out that they'd fall down fast—you wouldn't be allowed to do it on an open-source kernel, so "me" excludes Linux users... and probably Android, which is a pretty darn big market. (Although I might be wrong on the Android thing.)
I was explaining for the layperson how you would actually put such a scheme to use, as not everything can be directly reduced to the addition and multiplication of matrices. Imagine there is a post between yours and mine asking "what good is that?"
Those can be circumvented through the analogue hole, making DRM only an obnoxious hurdle, not a cure. If you want to give people a sample of something, adopt the Apogee model: give them the first part and end it on a really nasty cliffhanger. If there's no data to copy, there's no risk of it being copied.
...and from there, you can go on to implement just about any mathematical operation, as long as you encrypt all of your operands first and don't mind an ungodly number of steps just to do a simple division. The algorithm implementer has to be more trusted than the hardware provider, though, to get arbitrary operations done.
Depends on the area. Bigger grants = fewer curious people, more glory-seekers. Embedded systems engineering and cancer research are both quite unpleasant, but CS is relatively polite. You also see a lot of in-fighting and ego in theoretically shallow fields where there's so little to publish that squabbles over grants and departmental status become all-consuming, because people can't distinguish themselves through their work otherwise.
But, most importantly, this is hardly true of all of academia, and outside of the humanities and the social sciences, such problem fields are rare.
According to Wikipedia, scanning tunneling microscopy can be sped up to PAL framerates, i.e. 1/50th of a second. (Of course, positioning the atoms probably took a lot longer.)
Yeah, I'm with you. Unfortunately this kind of tribal subdivision is as old as human nature. You should be more alarmed that it's exactly the same behaviour exhibited by anyone profoundly obstinate about just about anything, most obviously politics. Every flamewar since the beginning of Usenet has succinctly demonstrated that the average geek is just a gorilla with a few right answers.
Of course, not everyone likes being called a gorilla, so you may want to insert some other primate or even an early hominid. I don't know of anyone who has ever taken offence to being called a bonobo.
Pfft! Hey, look, everybody! An objectivity fanboi!
Transaction fees. The policy for how this is handled varies from vendor to vendor, and some won't accept transactions below ten dollars at all. More obnoxiously, many put a 25 cent transaction fee on any direct bank debit (Interac) transaction under five dollars, and some will play with variations like 30 cents, or no limit, or something else. Supposedly this balances out the very small flat cost of all Interac transactions, but ultimately it means you're punished for using your card instead of coinage.
Otherwise, however, the debit system is quite successful, and some people can afford to not even have a credit card. If MintChip can genuinely avoid all transaction fees, it'll be the greatest thing since sliced bread for that alone.
Other goals of the system are account anonymity (a government building an anonymous financial system? say what?) and permitting arbitrary peer-to-peer transactions like PayPal... but with no intermediary. Unfortunately they have yet to figure out how to make people RTFA.
But therein lies the exact problem—it was designed to be human-readable, and is hence terrible as a machine-only format. Finding and resolving matching tags and quotes is something a machine should never have to do unless it's parsing human input. People just got lazy because the tools were already there and it was buzzword-compliant to overuse them.