I don't like to take away from their excellent work, but it is possible, though inconvenient, to do private-key crypto for such things.
Your bank, for example, would need to [paper] mail you a private key to type into your machine (or give you a thumbdrive with it, whatever you like). Inconvenient, yes; you'd need a new key for each company you interact with. Probably it would encourage a few monopolies (amazon and eBay) to dominate, since you'd only need to interact with them by paper once. But not impossible.
On more serious note, I am more interested in the ability to send audio, video, data or any signals back to the brain. This would be more useful in stomping out handicaps.
You mean like a
cochlear implant?
They exist, but don't work very well. The deaf community is pretty heavily opposed to them. (n.b. many deaf people are not part of the deaf community.)
There are choices between huge sprawling yards on one hand, and enormous tall apartment buildings on the other.
I live in Cambridge, MA, in an apartment in 3 storey building. We have a yard. There are quite a few parks within walking distance. The streets are safe. Density is high enough that public transit works reasonably well.
You don't have to choose between Nashville and Manhattan.
Personally, I'm inclined to raise fuel taxes slowly, but massively, to be closer to what you see in Europe. Cities can grow denser without being awful.
At least for research funded by the United States National Institute of Health (NIH), there are very stringent requirements designed to prevent abuse of subjects. There is a short free online course describing such
here.
Prisoners, for example, are given special protections precisely since they are in a disadvantageous position. I think you will agree that the policies described are very well considered.
Any attempt at change is to be welcomed; perhaps the new way will accept some well-considered ideas of how to allow learning. Public education systems have a tendency to continue doing the same thing over decades, even when research has shown that better techniques are available.
This is most clearly shown by Dr. Montessori. Her research is commonly used by the private schools that bear her name, but hardly any of her work has made its way into public education, though it's had as long as a century to gain acceptance.
The teachers' unions, like any organisation, are interested in maintaining their own importance. Since Montessori's technique has primarily-uninvolved "directresses" instead of domineering "teachers", these unions are threatened by advancement.
It's no coincidence that private schools usually don't require teachers to be certified.
One fascinating experiment is being tried in Edmonton, Alberta, where something resembling free markets are giving parents the ability to choose between public schools:
see here.
Incidentally, there is a good manual for terrorists, that everyone should read:
Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare. It was written by the CIA for use by the Contras in Nicaragua; it really makes you think who the real terrorists fighting against the US population are.
The problems encountered with the breakdown of the magnet in the body are considerable, but seem to result from protecting the metal with only a thin film of silicon. They might be avoided by putting the magnet inside a small "can" of bio-compatible metal, such as gold. Since gold can also be worked extremely well, it should be possible to make such protection.
You could test to ensure the gold formed a proper barrier by first coating the magnet in dye. If, after being wrapped in gold and dropped in water, the dye doesn't leak, the device is probably as safe as it's going to get.
On the other hand, maybe a ring would be a better choice, but it wouldn't get nearly as good contact with the nerves.
By the way, MRI does not measure "brain waves". It measures blood oxygenation changes, which are related to the firing of neurons.
It is quite likely that the BOLD signal and neural spiking are related. Everybody believes it, myself included. But there is still not that much evidence of the connection.
An egg has a mass of about 50 g; assume that's all water, that it's at room temperature, and that we want to raise it to boiling.
So we have (50 g)*(80 degrees C)*(4.2 J/(g * degree C))
=16800 J
Assume that our phone is putting out 2 W=2J/s, and that it's all going into the egg, it'll take 8400 s, or more than 2 hours. That's assuming the egg cup insulates perfectly.
I was at the GPLv3 launch conference, and I think people are misunderstanding what was intended, and what was written (since it's pretty clear).
The DRM restriction is not intended to forbid, e.g. RedHat from signing their packages with a secret key. It's to prevent them from making a system that refuses to use packages that are unsigned or signed by somebody else.
For example, say I made a modified version of that little applet that times when your tea is ready, and put it into a special device for this purpose, and called it "Tea-vo". I then set up the OS on this Tea-vo so that it checks to see if the copy of the program that it run is signed by my company, and refuse to run any other. This means that if someone else (say, Richard) buys my device, I must give them the source code, of course, but if they compile it, my Tea-vo will refuse to run their compiled code. This reduces Richard's freedom. He's free to use the software on other hardware, but not in the intended way (i.e. on my Tea-vo device).
This is my understanding of the purpose of the DRM clause.
It has entirely to do with the mild winters. I'm from Ottawa, in Canada, and there houses are generally extremely well insulated. Everybody has (at least) double glazed windows.
I'm currently living in Boston. Here it's much milder. Many places still have double glazed windows, but they're not ubiquitous. Until recently our windows were sufficiently old and rotten that there was a gap around the edge big enough for a finger. (Since heating is central, so heating costs affect the landlord directly, they replaced the windows last year as oil prices rose.)
Visiting southern England a few years ago, I was amused to see that essentially nobody had double-glazed windows. People don't want to spend much on renovations, so they get insulation which is "adequate", ignoring that spending more would be cheaper in the long run once you consider the cost of heat.
I think the best way to do this is to use a smart bus, reminiscent of USB. You plug in the device, and it indicates "I'd like 5V DC", or whatever, and the other side provides the appropriate voltage. A powerbar would have to say "I'd like 120 VAC" or "I'd like raw AC power", then be smart enough to switch that to the desired voltage for each device.
You could only have one plug on each wire from the smart hub.
Costs would be higher due to all the electronics involved, but they'd come down with mass production. It should eventually be cheaper than running all those little black transformers for every device; they draw a certain amount of power even when the device is off.
I suppose it depends what you mean by "start" and "life":)
If you read Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, he argues that chemical compounds which replicate begin evolution, even if they aren't something that one would consider to be "alive". If the chemical can make a copy of itself, that chemical will quickly become quite common. A few of the copies won't be perfect, and a few of these imperfect copies will be better (faster, more stable, etc.), and will thus make more copies than the original.
The "start of life" need be only the random coincidence of an amino acid, perhaps one which attracts matching atoms until it is full, at which point it splits into two copies of the original. If you allow that, (and I seem to recall it's been done in a lab, but I can't find a reference right now), evolution will proceed from there.
I have a funky 3M mouse, and it's nice, except that the buttons are too cheap. The first one I had, the buttons failed within two weeks. In particular, they could switch between open and closed without clicking, and without the finger moving any significant amount. I returned it to the store, got a new one; after about two months the same thing happened. I opened it up, removed the case of the switches, deformed the little bit of metal to push down a little harder, and it works fine.
I'm a little surprised, frankly; I would have thought that the switches would be more precisely manufactured, and that mashing them with pliers wouldn't help.:}
This is possible, yes, but only for AM radios. FM radios are considerably more complex. To make an AM radio you need only get an antenna, to pick up the signal, and a bandpass filter, to remove everything you don't want to hear (almost everything).
The Greeks are a bad choice of example. Here's what Plato had to say about a once fertile region, destroyed by the kind of irrigation now being heavily practiced in California, among other places:
What now remains compared with what then existed is like the skeleton of a sick man, all the fat and soft earth having wasted away.... Mountains which now have nothing but food for bees... had trees not very long ago. [The land] was enriched by the yearly rains, which were not lost to it, as now, by flowing from the bare land into the sea; but the soil was deep, and therein received the water, and kept it in the loamy earth... feeding springs and streams running everywhere. Now only abandoned shrines remain to show where the springs once flowed.
(Quoted in A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright. Go read it. A complete English translation of Critas is here.)
Has it never seemed strange to you that the area called the "Fertile Crescent", mostly Iraq and Israel, is now anything but fertile? It's that way because of too little long-term vision in farming practices. We have been stressing our environment for a long time.
I used to use a mouse for the Gimp, Inkscape, or whatever; then recently I got a tablet PC with a Wacom tablet built in; it's amazing. It's not the same as paper; it's better in some ways, and worse in others, but it's much nicer than a mouse.
I have been told that one original purpose to do the "My Documents" thing was to force application writers to deal with spaces in the path. Since the user will usually save into the My Documents directory, the bug of not properly dealing with that path would come up quite readily.
As far as I know, there is no non-free networked object-oriented database. Relational databases are nice, flat files have their place, but OO databases are quite useful too; I've built a few webapps using this. Thanks, Pavel Curtis!
Several programming languages exist only in a free version, or the non-free versions are derivatives. Scheme, Squeak (Smalltalk based), Python, and Perl are just a few that come to mind.
Perhaps this clown would say that these are all derivative works from Fortran, or somesuch, but it's a stretch.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't like to take away from their excellent work, but it is possible, though inconvenient, to do private-key crypto for such things.
Your bank, for example, would need to [paper] mail you a private key to type into your machine (or give you a thumbdrive with it, whatever you like). Inconvenient, yes; you'd need a new key for each company you interact with. Probably it would encourage a few monopolies (amazon and eBay) to dominate, since you'd only need to interact with them by paper once. But not impossible.
On more serious note, I am more interested in the ability to send audio, video, data or any signals back to the brain. This would be more useful in stomping out handicaps.
You mean like a cochlear implant? They exist, but don't work very well. The deaf community is pretty heavily opposed to them. (n.b. many deaf people are not part of the deaf community.)
I did a brief survey on "I hate [X]", and got the following:
Looks like John McCarthy wins.
There are choices between huge sprawling yards on one hand, and enormous tall apartment buildings on the other.
I live in Cambridge, MA, in an apartment in 3 storey building. We have a yard. There are quite a few parks within walking distance. The streets are safe. Density is high enough that public transit works reasonably well.
You don't have to choose between Nashville and Manhattan.
Personally, I'm inclined to raise fuel taxes slowly, but massively, to be closer to what you see in Europe. Cities can grow denser without being awful.
At least for research funded by the United States National Institute of Health (NIH), there are very stringent requirements designed to prevent abuse of subjects. There is a short free online course describing such here.
Prisoners, for example, are given special protections precisely since they are in a disadvantageous position. I think you will agree that the policies described are very well considered.
Any attempt at change is to be welcomed; perhaps the new way will accept some well-considered ideas of how to allow learning. Public education systems have a tendency to continue doing the same thing over decades, even when research has shown that better techniques are available.
This is most clearly shown by Dr. Montessori. Her research is commonly used by the private schools that bear her name, but hardly any of her work has made its way into public education, though it's had as long as a century to gain acceptance.
The teachers' unions, like any organisation, are interested in maintaining their own importance. Since Montessori's technique has primarily-uninvolved "directresses" instead of domineering "teachers", these unions are threatened by advancement. It's no coincidence that private schools usually don't require teachers to be certified.
One fascinating experiment is being tried in Edmonton, Alberta, where something resembling free markets are giving parents the ability to choose between public schools: see here.
Well put.
Incidentally, there is a good manual for terrorists, that everyone should read: Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare. It was written by the CIA for use by the Contras in Nicaragua; it really makes you think who the real terrorists fighting against the US population are.
The problems encountered with the breakdown of the magnet in the body are considerable, but seem to result from protecting the metal with only a thin film of silicon. They might be avoided by putting the magnet inside a small "can" of bio-compatible metal, such as gold. Since gold can also be worked extremely well, it should be possible to make such protection.
You could test to ensure the gold formed a proper barrier by first coating the magnet in dye. If, after being wrapped in gold and dropped in water, the dye doesn't leak, the device is probably as safe as it's going to get.
On the other hand, maybe a ring would be a better choice, but it wouldn't get nearly as good contact with the nerves.
This thing's almost as heavy as the Commodore SX-64, though I suppose its features are a little better.
And there's one of the big problems with fMRI:
By the way, MRI does not measure "brain waves". It measures blood oxygenation changes, which are related to the firing of neurons.
It is quite likely that the BOLD signal and neural spiking are related. Everybody believes it, myself included. But there is still not that much evidence of the connection.
With those horns, shouldn't it be running BSD? :)
I recently bought a new Lenovo Thinkpad, and strangely enough, it was "hecho en Mexico". (Of Asian parts, no doubt.)
An egg has a mass of about 50 g; assume that's all water, that it's at room temperature, and that we want to raise it to boiling.
So we have (50 g)*(80 degrees C)*(4.2 J/(g * degree C))
=16800 J
Assume that our phone is putting out 2 W=2J/s, and that it's all going into the egg, it'll take 8400 s, or more than 2 hours. That's assuming the egg cup insulates perfectly.
I was at the GPLv3 launch conference, and I think people are misunderstanding what was intended, and what was written (since it's pretty clear).
The DRM restriction is not intended to forbid, e.g. RedHat from signing their packages with a secret key. It's to prevent them from making a system that refuses to use packages that are unsigned or signed by somebody else.
For example, say I made a modified version of that little applet that times when your tea is ready, and put it into a special device for this purpose, and called it "Tea-vo". I then set up the OS on this Tea-vo so that it checks to see if the copy of the program that it run is signed by my company, and refuse to run any other. This means that if someone else (say, Richard) buys my device, I must give them the source code, of course, but if they compile it, my Tea-vo will refuse to run their compiled code. This reduces Richard's freedom. He's free to use the software on other hardware, but not in the intended way (i.e. on my Tea-vo device).
This is my understanding of the purpose of the DRM clause.
It has entirely to do with the mild winters. I'm from Ottawa, in Canada, and there houses are generally extremely well insulated. Everybody has (at least) double glazed windows.
I'm currently living in Boston. Here it's much milder. Many places still have double glazed windows, but they're not ubiquitous. Until recently our windows were sufficiently old and rotten that there was a gap around the edge big enough for a finger. (Since heating is central, so heating costs affect the landlord directly, they replaced the windows last year as oil prices rose.)
Visiting southern England a few years ago, I was amused to see that essentially nobody had double-glazed windows. People don't want to spend much on renovations, so they get insulation which is "adequate", ignoring that spending more would be cheaper in the long run once you consider the cost of heat.
I think the best way to do this is to use a smart bus, reminiscent of USB. You plug in the device, and it indicates "I'd like 5V DC", or whatever, and the other side provides the appropriate voltage. A powerbar would have to say "I'd like 120 VAC" or "I'd like raw AC power", then be smart enough to switch that to the desired voltage for each device.
You could only have one plug on each wire from the smart hub.
Costs would be higher due to all the electronics involved, but they'd come down with mass production. It should eventually be cheaper than running all those little black transformers for every device; they draw a certain amount of power even when the device is off.
Evolution isn't a theory about the start of life.
I suppose it depends what you mean by "start" and "life" :)
If you read Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, he argues that chemical compounds which replicate begin evolution, even if they aren't something that one would consider to be "alive". If the chemical can make a copy of itself, that chemical will quickly become quite common. A few of the copies won't be perfect, and a few of these imperfect copies will be better (faster, more stable, etc.), and will thus make more copies than the original.
The "start of life" need be only the random coincidence of an amino acid, perhaps one which attracts matching atoms until it is full, at which point it splits into two copies of the original. If you allow that, (and I seem to recall it's been done in a lab, but I can't find a reference right now), evolution will proceed from there.
I have a funky 3M mouse, and it's nice, except that the buttons are too cheap. The first one I had, the buttons failed within two weeks. In particular, they could switch between open and closed without clicking, and without the finger moving any significant amount. I returned it to the store, got a new one; after about two months the same thing happened. I opened it up, removed the case of the switches, deformed the little bit of metal to push down a little harder, and it works fine.
I'm a little surprised, frankly; I would have thought that the switches would be more precisely manufactured, and that mashing them with pliers wouldn't help. :}
This is possible, yes, but only for AM radios. FM radios are considerably more complex. To make an AM radio you need only get an antenna, to pick up the signal, and a bandpass filter, to remove everything you don't want to hear (almost everything).
Some places use waste heat from industry for cooling. Remarkable stuff!
The Greeks are a bad choice of example. Here's what Plato had to say about a once fertile region, destroyed by the kind of irrigation now being heavily practiced in California, among other places:
What now remains compared with what then existed is like the skeleton of a sick man, all the fat and soft earth having wasted away.... Mountains which now have nothing but food for bees ... had trees not very long ago. [The land] was enriched by the yearly rains, which were not lost to it, as now, by flowing from the bare land into the sea; but the soil was deep, and therein received the water, and kept it in the loamy earth ... feeding springs and streams running everywhere. Now only abandoned shrines remain to show where the springs once flowed.
(Quoted in A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright. Go read it. A complete English translation of Critas is here.)
Has it never seemed strange to you that the area called the "Fertile Crescent", mostly Iraq and Israel, is now anything but fertile? It's that way because of too little long-term vision in farming practices. We have been stressing our environment for a long time.
Don't be so sure it will pass.
Canada has a minority government right now; at least two parties need to go for it, or it's dead.
(Yes, we have more than two parties --- it's a democracy! :P )
I used to use a mouse for the Gimp, Inkscape, or whatever; then recently I got a tablet PC with a Wacom tablet built in; it's amazing. It's not the same as paper; it's better in some ways, and worse in others, but it's much nicer than a mouse.
I have been told that one original purpose to do the "My Documents" thing was to force application writers to deal with spaces in the path. Since the user will usually save into the My Documents directory, the bug of not properly dealing with that path would come up quite readily.
As far as I know, there is no non-free networked object-oriented database. Relational databases are nice, flat files have their place, but OO databases are quite useful too; I've built a few webapps using this. Thanks, Pavel Curtis!
Several programming languages exist only in a free version, or the non-free versions are derivatives. Scheme, Squeak (Smalltalk based), Python, and Perl are just a few that come to mind. Perhaps this clown would say that these are all derivative works from Fortran, or somesuch, but it's a stretch.