Re:I've used genetic algorithms
on
Digital Darwin
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· Score: 1
Not to mention the fact that nobody has really answered the simple question, what prevents lots of microevolution from adding up to macroevolution?
Nobody seems to have come up with a mechanism for that. Since we've observed instances of speciation for at least 100 years, I'm not sure how much further we need to push the issue.
Did anybody else play Mission: Critical from Legend Enterntainment? Seriously immersive story. Of course, if you could get through it without any hints, you have my respect.
Am I the only person who really hates the retailers who keep expired rebate offers up on the price listings as long as they can get away with it? Best Buy does this a lot in my area. The price is marked as including a rebate, but you don't find out until you've waited in line and scanned the item that the rebate expired 2 days ago. Do you want to put the item back at the 11th hour? It happens so often, I have a hard time attributing that to incompetence.
At the same time, I'm not too upset at those people. My opinion on the matter is that if you need a bunch of people riding you to get you to vote, I'd rather not have you voting to begin with. What's the deal with people trying to get the lazy and uniformed to vote more often?
Then again, there are a number of people who I'd rather not have voting... like the huge number of voters who can't tell you who the Secretary of State is. What will be will be, I suppose.
Too bad we can't jail congressmen for stupid remarks. Then again, maybe it's for the best. The prisons are overcrowded enough as it is, and the last thing these people need are more free meals.
Actually, the easier elected officials make it for me to determine which special interests own them, the easier it is for me to choose who to vote for when elections come around. It's a lot easier than having to do heavy research to figure out whose bitch he is. Imagine seeing this on a ballot:
Joe Smith [MPAA / RIAA]
Bill Smith [Tobacco / Guns]
Steve Smith [Oil / Aerospace]
Easier, eh? We can vote directly for companies or industry groups. By all means, Congressman, make all the rediculous statements you want. I'm all for transparent government.
Not to mention that even now, years into the game with billions of dollars with which to develop software, they can't read half of the MIME attachments that come in correctly. I often have to have my mother forward her mail to me so I can use mutt to grab the attachments.
The point is that the parent post was implying that the Democratic (at least, that's who I assume the poster was calling "in the pockets of trial lawyers") majority of the past was the obstacle to getting something like this passed. The point was that it was a fairly even split (thus invalidating the parent's bullshit implication).
Iris patterns are unique, even among twins. Far more unique than fingerprints or just about anything but DNA. It's really an amazing technology. See the web site of its inventor, John Daugman.
This is why these technologies work best with a changeable PIN. That combination is pretty damned hard to beat. Also, the database doesn't store iris images. It stores what amounts to a one-way hash. It's possible to get some information about the iris from the key, but the formula is very VERY lossy, so attempting to work backward wouldn't give you an image to use.
No worries about infections. It doesn't require physical contact with anything. It's a camera that takes a picture from 16-20" away (range can change depending on how sophisticated you want to make the device). Worry more about touching the keys on the keypad.
The point is, the people who steal ATM cards and PINs generally do it because it's a very anonymous crime and they don't have the balls to do anything worse. If you're a truly ruthless criminal, there are more profitable crimes to commit. Cutting out somebody's eye is not going to be a fast or convenient process, and there's a high likelihood that you'll get caught as ATMs have cameras built into them. Anyway, the whole thing can be made moot by requiring a PIN as well as an iris scan. Then you're back to where you were with an added layer of security
Sure, there are people out there who might try, but odds are, they're the same people who are out there murdering 7-11 operators and trying to rob banks. Making ATM theft harder isn't going to make them more likely to attempt it. The idea that ATM card thieves are suddenly going to start slashing people's eyes out is simply alarmist bull.
I'm not sure what part of the eye you're thinking of, but the references I've seen indicate that there are very few things that change the patterns in the iris after infancy. In fact, most irises remain very constant throughout their owners' lives. As for iridology, it's generally acknowledged as quackery by medical science, largely for the reason I mentioned above.
Minor technical note: A detailed copy of the iris is not kept on file. The algorithm generates a one way hash 2kbits long. An attacker can't really do anything with such a key as the input for these systems is a camera which expects the image that generates the key.
It doesn't work with colored lenses. The extra patterning changes the signal significantly. Clear contacts (and even glasses) don't alter the pattern, though.
You're thinking of retinal scanning. The iris is the contractile piece of colored tissue surrounding (defining) your pupil. It's flat, and very few medicatl conditions alter it significantly. It remains the same your entire natural life, barring damage to your eye.
Sure, it's good to have a backup, but all you need to be identified is one eye (and only a relatively small percentage of that eye, given the density of biometric information available in it). Very few people damage both eyes so badly that today's iris recognition software won't work for them.
It is possible to reproduce your iris with a high quality image and a hole in the pupil. It has been done with some success on today's commercial scanners. It's not easy to do, though, and there are a number of simple countermeasures ( It is possible to reproduce your iris with a high quality image and a hole in the pupil. It has been done with some success on today's commercial scanners. It's not easy to do, though, and there are a number of simple countermeasures (a quick flash of light to see if your iris contracts, for example).
The contacts simply won't work. Experiments have shown that patterned contacts don't have the same optical properties as an iris (they're curved rather than flat, for one thing) and the key an iris scanner generates is wildly different.
The safest way to do this is probably iris + PIN. That's about as close to foolproof as you can get.
a quick flash of light to see if your iris contracts, for example).
The contacts simply won't work. Experiments have shown that patterned contacts don't have the same optical properties as an iris (they're curved rather than flat, for one thing) and the key an iris scanner generates is wildly different.
The safest way to do this is probably iris + PIN. That's about as close to foolproof as you can get.
I'm not sure why this awful example comes up so frequently. I'm sorry, but nobody is going to carve your eye out of your head to get to an ATM. The process would likely damage the eye too much to be of use, and frankly, it's not worth it. You can't get that much out of an ATM. It's just not worth it.
I see the conflict as well. If the future is known, the future is determined. If the future is determined, I can't change it. If I can't change it, I have no free will. The idea behind all possible alternative lines is nice, and I'd imagine an omniscient being would have to see all possible paths, but He isn't truly omniscient unless He sees which one will happen, and if He does see, the other possibilities cease to be possibilities. The apparent paradox continues.
I doubt if you'll find much in journals as Behe's work on irreducible complexity is published in popular books and not journals, but several good discussions of IR and ID are found at Talk.origins.
Re:I know this book is about software RAID ...
on
Managing RAID on Linux
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Links to your evidence please? All tests I've seen show a marked improvement on disk speed with minimal impact on CPU. Please get your facts straight before posting.
CPU usage isn't entirely the point. It doesn't take much CPU power to do RAID these days (that's why software RAID in Linux is a pretty good option). The problem is that it requires drivers and software control over RAID functionality (just what you want to avoid) when the RAID card should just be making the RAID array look like a single drive to the operating system. Notable examples include the HighPoint "RAID" controller found on some Abit motherboards.
Anyway, I think "Please get your facts straight before posting" is kind of a nasty response to somebody who is pointing out something that is well known to most people who have tried using these pieces of crap with their non-Windows operating systems. Try using Google if you want references, one way or another. They won't be hard to find if you search through driver development lists for Linux and *BSD.
Kasparov won the first Deep Blue match. My thought is this: DB always plays at its best (being a computer). Kasparov has good days and bad days (and occasionally becomes a basket case like when Deep Blue had him on the run toward the end of those matches). Since Kasparov won even one game (I believe he won two... my memory is fuzzy on this as well), I'd say that makes him the better player, all other things being equal. I also think that given time to regroup and play again, he'd have taken Deep Blue out. Pure speculation, but one cannot discount the fact that humans don't handle stress nearly as well as computers.
I tend to agree for all practical purposes, but there is a small possibility that in the end, that evaluation isn't quite right. Since there are a finite number of possible games, it's possible that there is a way for one side or the other to force a win (it's also possible, like tic tac toe, that two players playing the best lines will always draw).
There are times in many endgames when being able to skip a move and force your opponent to move would keep you out of serious hot water. The question is, is there a way for black to always force some line of play that causes white to have to "jump the gun" and degrade his position? My guess is that there is a roughly equal number of "white wins" possibilities and "black wins" possibilities, so the tempo white gets allows him to force a "white wins" line every time, but wouldn't it be interesting if it went the other way?
Are you contending that if Philip Morris agrees with something, then it's automatically untrue? Perhaps if Philip Morris funded a study confirming gravity's effects, you'd conclude you could walk on the ceiling?
No, I think that the poster is saying that a site put up by a company whose products are, according to the majority of generally accepted scientific studies, dangerous, has a strong incentive to convince the public that they should not base their opinions on generally accepted scientific studies. The other detail that the poster might be trying to point out is that Philip Morris has been shown to be completely full of shit on the subject of product safety and scientific studies thereof, and what they put up on the web regarding those studies is largely obvious propaganda. This implies that some of the other "facts" they post on the same pages might well be propaganda as well.
I'm fairly sure that was just an asinine semi-rhetorical question, but I just had to point out where the straw man argument you're setting up is...well...wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody seems to have come up with a mechanism for that. Since we've observed instances of speciation for at least 100 years, I'm not sure how much further we need to push the issue.
Did anybody else play Mission: Critical from Legend Enterntainment? Seriously immersive story. Of course, if you could get through it without any hints, you have my respect.
Am I the only person who really hates the retailers who keep expired rebate offers up on the price listings as long as they can get away with it? Best Buy does this a lot in my area. The price is marked as including a rebate, but you don't find out until you've waited in line and scanned the item that the rebate expired 2 days ago. Do you want to put the item back at the 11th hour? It happens so often, I have a hard time attributing that to incompetence.
Then again, there are a number of people who I'd rather not have voting... like the huge number of voters who can't tell you who the Secretary of State is. What will be will be, I suppose.
Actually, the easier elected officials make it for me to determine which special interests own them, the easier it is for me to choose who to vote for when elections come around. It's a lot easier than having to do heavy research to figure out whose bitch he is. Imagine seeing this on a ballot:
Joe Smith [MPAA / RIAA]
Bill Smith [Tobacco / Guns]
Steve Smith [Oil / Aerospace]
Easier, eh? We can vote directly for companies or industry groups. By all means, Congressman, make all the rediculous statements you want. I'm all for transparent government.
Not to mention that even now, years into the game with billions of dollars with which to develop software, they can't read half of the MIME attachments that come in correctly. I often have to have my mother forward her mail to me so I can use mutt to grab the attachments.
The point is that the parent post was implying that the Democratic (at least, that's who I assume the poster was calling "in the pockets of trial lawyers") majority of the past was the obstacle to getting something like this passed. The point was that it was a fairly even split (thus invalidating the parent's bullshit implication).
Or, "The SCO lawsuit is to IBM as an insect is to a luxury car's windshield."
Iris patterns are unique, even among twins. Far more unique than fingerprints or just about anything but DNA. It's really an amazing technology. See the web site of its inventor, John Daugman.
This is why these technologies work best with a changeable PIN. That combination is pretty damned hard to beat. Also, the database doesn't store iris images. It stores what amounts to a one-way hash. It's possible to get some information about the iris from the key, but the formula is very VERY lossy, so attempting to work backward wouldn't give you an image to use.
No worries about infections. It doesn't require physical contact with anything. It's a camera that takes a picture from 16-20" away (range can change depending on how sophisticated you want to make the device). Worry more about touching the keys on the keypad.
Sure, there are people out there who might try, but odds are, they're the same people who are out there murdering 7-11 operators and trying to rob banks. Making ATM theft harder isn't going to make them more likely to attempt it. The idea that ATM card thieves are suddenly going to start slashing people's eyes out is simply alarmist bull.
I'm not sure what part of the eye you're thinking of, but the references I've seen indicate that there are very few things that change the patterns in the iris after infancy. In fact, most irises remain very constant throughout their owners' lives. As for iridology, it's generally acknowledged as quackery by medical science, largely for the reason I mentioned above.
Minor technical note: A detailed copy of the iris is not kept on file. The algorithm generates a one way hash 2kbits long. An attacker can't really do anything with such a key as the input for these systems is a camera which expects the image that generates the key.
It doesn't work with colored lenses. The extra patterning changes the signal significantly. Clear contacts (and even glasses) don't alter the pattern, though.
Sure, it's good to have a backup, but all you need to be identified is one eye (and only a relatively small percentage of that eye, given the density of biometric information available in it). Very few people damage both eyes so badly that today's iris recognition software won't work for them.
The contacts simply won't work. Experiments have shown that patterned contacts don't have the same optical properties as an iris (they're curved rather than flat, for one thing) and the key an iris scanner generates is wildly different.
The safest way to do this is probably iris + PIN. That's about as close to foolproof as you can get.
I'm not sure why this awful example comes up so frequently. I'm sorry, but nobody is going to carve your eye out of your head to get to an ATM. The process would likely damage the eye too much to be of use, and frankly, it's not worth it. You can't get that much out of an ATM. It's just not worth it.
I doubt if you'll find much in journals as Behe's work on irreducible complexity is published in popular books and not journals, but several good discussions of IR and ID are found at Talk.origins.
CPU usage isn't entirely the point. It doesn't take much CPU power to do RAID these days (that's why software RAID in Linux is a pretty good option). The problem is that it requires drivers and software control over RAID functionality (just what you want to avoid) when the RAID card should just be making the RAID array look like a single drive to the operating system. Notable examples include the HighPoint "RAID" controller found on some Abit motherboards.
Anyway, I think "Please get your facts straight before posting" is kind of a nasty response to somebody who is pointing out something that is well known to most people who have tried using these pieces of crap with their non-Windows operating systems. Try using Google if you want references, one way or another. They won't be hard to find if you search through driver development lists for Linux and *BSD.
Kasparov won the first Deep Blue match. My thought is this: DB always plays at its best (being a computer). Kasparov has good days and bad days (and occasionally becomes a basket case like when Deep Blue had him on the run toward the end of those matches). Since Kasparov won even one game (I believe he won two... my memory is fuzzy on this as well), I'd say that makes him the better player, all other things being equal. I also think that given time to regroup and play again, he'd have taken Deep Blue out. Pure speculation, but one cannot discount the fact that humans don't handle stress nearly as well as computers.
I tend to agree for all practical purposes, but there is a small possibility that in the end, that evaluation isn't quite right. Since there are a finite number of possible games, it's possible that there is a way for one side or the other to force a win (it's also possible, like tic tac toe, that two players playing the best lines will always draw).
There are times in many endgames when being able to skip a move and force your opponent to move would keep you out of serious hot water. The question is, is there a way for black to always force some line of play that causes white to have to "jump the gun" and degrade his position? My guess is that there is a roughly equal number of "white wins" possibilities and "black wins" possibilities, so the tempo white gets allows him to force a "white wins" line every time, but wouldn't it be interesting if it went the other way?
I love how people who post "old news" type grumble posts actually think we're interested in hearing a list of things they're not interested in.
No, I think that the poster is saying that a site put up by a company whose products are, according to the majority of generally accepted scientific studies, dangerous, has a strong incentive to convince the public that they should not base their opinions on generally accepted scientific studies. The other detail that the poster might be trying to point out is that Philip Morris has been shown to be completely full of shit on the subject of product safety and scientific studies thereof, and what they put up on the web regarding those studies is largely obvious propaganda. This implies that some of the other "facts" they post on the same pages might well be propaganda as well.
I'm fairly sure that was just an asinine semi-rhetorical question, but I just had to point out where the straw man argument you're setting up is...well...wrong.