The spectrum of human societies goes far beyond your narrow view which appears to be limited to the metropolitan West. Community rearing is sometimes found in small, hunter-gatherer and tribal societies. It seems to work fine.
There are even societies where monogamy is not the norm.
Actually, I think he's paraphrasing the Smoking Man from the X-Files:
"Life is like a box of chocolates. A cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift that nobody ever asks for. Unreturnable, because all you get back is another box of chocolates. So you're stuck with this undefinable whipped mint crap that you mindlessly wolf down when there's nothing else left to eat. Sure, once in a while there's a peanut butter cup or an english toffee but they're gone too fast and taste is fleeting. So you end up with nothing but broken bits of hardened jelly and teeth-shattering nuts. If you're desperate enough to eat those, all you got left is an empty box filled with useless brown paper wrappers."
Since the odds of survival for a human child with two parents is (or at least was) much higher than the odds of a single-parent child, it shouldn't be surprising that humans have a strong drive to forge lasting relationships. Natural selection in action, and all that.
Yeah, but a community-based social structure is also effective for child rearing. I suspect that the actual trigger for human monogamy was sexually transmitted disease, and that it's more of a social meme than a biological trait.
Although you may want to worry more about stray cosmic rays.
My boss used to design software and hardware for NASA spacecraft, including the shuttle. Apparently, cosmic rays (as well as other forms of radiation) are such a problem for onboard computers that the early systems were designed to reboot themselves every 10 milliseconds. That guarantees that, if the processor gets stuck in a bogus state, it won't stay that way for more than 10 milliseconds before recovery kicks in.
Imagine writing software with the requirement that all data must be loaded, processed, and stored back in protected memory within 10 milliseconds. Complex tasks are performed piece by piece as the system continually reboots itself.
I have no idea if current spacecraft computer systems have the same kind of limitations. ECC memory combined with better shielding probably eliminates most of the problems.
Funny, but... Russian really only has two letters that are drawn "backwards," R and N. Neither letter sounds anything like the English counterpart. The backward R sounds like "ya" and the backward N sounds like "ee."
My boss tells a story about one of his supervisors back in the 1960's who was terribly excited about the new emerging field of magnetic computation. It promised to be faster and more reliable than the current systems based on relays. There were solid-state systems available but they were prohibitively expensive.
This supervisor poured much time and effort into his team, investigating various concepts of magnetic computation. Then the integrated circuit came along and turned him into a ruined man.
So have we finally come full-circle now, back to magnetic computation? Call me conservative but I don't think it will fare any better this time around.
If the watermark is 'inaudible', then you can write over some garbage 'watermark', using the exact same method, and the result will be a file with no recognizable watermark, and with 'inaudible' differences.
I realize that it is possible to remove the watermark. The goal is to make that as difficult as it can be. Given the RIAA's track record with attempts at DRM technology, it will probably be defeated quickly. But cryptography/steganography continually advances and in the future it might be possible to place watermarks in ways that are far more difficult to remove.
One idea off the top of my head is to move from MP3 to some different lossy format where the watermark data becomes an integral part of the decoding process, so that removing it would make the file inoperable. This doesn't prevent somebody from simply transcoding the audio but it would be a step up.
Who says anything about using human senses to detect the watermark? If these watermarks are embedded by machine, I'm sure it won't be long until Watermark Bob creates a "cleanser" program to detect anything unusual, and maybe even remove it.
The purpose of making the watermark imperceptible isn't to trick the user. The user is fully aware that the music is watermarked. The reason it is done the way that it is, is because it is the only way to do it. There are really two requirements for the watermark. First, it must be intertwined with the actual data in order to make it non-trivial to remove. Simply sticking the watermark in a meta-information block would make removing it too simple. Second, because the watermark is intermixed with the audio data, it MUST be done in an imperceptible way in order to retain the quality of the recording.
So, making the watermark inaudible is not some attempt to pull one over on you. It's just the only realistic way it could be done.
well then, by that logic, then there is nothing wrong with sharing songs, because they are freely broadcast over the airwaves on the FM band.
But that's exactly what he's talking about, isn't it. He sees nothing WRONG with doing so. Whether it is illegal is a different matter.
I believe a great many things to be right, which are illegal in the country I live in. There are also things which I think are wrong which are legal. The two concepts are not equivalent.
I think you are allowing your principles to blind you. If, in some parallel universe (since I really don't see it happening in this one) the RIAA companies actually started offering downloadable MP3s of their music, at a reasonable price, why would you care whether the music has been watermarked?
When I think DRM, I think of technologies that are meant to cripple my ability to use the content if I refuse to abide by the rules set by the copyright holders. That sort of stuff is crap, and I won't tolerate it either. My system is my own and my files are my own. But in this case, the watermark serves no purpose other than to enable the rights holder to determine whether somebody has leaked the file. It does nothing to prevent MY OWN use, in whatever way I see fit. Unless you plan on giving copies to all your friends, I don't see what your objection is. And if a system like this is all it takes to finally convince the rights holders that digital distribution is a good thing, then I'm COMPLETELY for it. In time, once the digital music market is firmly established, maybe THEN we can open a dialog with the rights holders about the watermarking technology.
Don't try to make some comparison with civil rights, e.g. "Why should I care about illegal search if I have nothing to hide." This is not at all the same thing. Watermark technology is not dangerous and cannot be used to repress or subjugate you.
Your error is that you lack an understanding of fusion. The desire is not heat, but in fact _energy_.
I understand fusion fine. You, apparently, do not understand what's being discussed. The OP stated that because the colliding particles have large kinetic energies, they are therefore "hot" and the moniker "cold fusion" is inappropriate.
whereas when they talk about all the particles they talk about temperature.
They do. But none of this has to do with whether or not this qualifies as "cold" fusion, which it clearly does.
Aside, I don't see why heat must be an aggregate of unordered motion, because the case in which all the particles move in the same direction is still within the subset of possible aggregate motions called 'random motion.'
As you criticize me, you forget the basic concept of relativity. An ensemble of particles moving all in the same direction in one frame of reference, is an ensemble of particles at rest in a different frame of reference. If their temperature was solely a function of their total kinetic energy, and not the relative motions, then different objects would have different temperatures for different observers. This is obviously not true.
Actually, yes. We schould teach our children to doubt and question absolutely everything.
No. We should teach our children to apply good judgment. Sometimes this means doubt, but not always. Do you actually think you should teach your children to "doubt and question" YOU, as a parent? Should they doubt and question your suggestion that they doubt and question everything? How about their own sanity, should they doubt and question that?
I'm not being pedantic here. Raising our children to be distrustful and paranoid serves no productive goal. Teaching them to ASCERTAIN and JUDGE the truth of what they see is of paramount importance.
Brought to you by the British campaign to eliminate idiotic American misuse of the word "comparable".
I think I like our meaning better. Your meaning is essentially useless. "Comparable" in the sense that two objects can be compared would imply that somewhere there exist two objects that can NOT be compared. Care to explain which objects those are, and why they can't be compared?
So we took a word that had a useless meaning and made it useful. What exactly is your point?
The energy translates into heat, are you saying that a bullet hitting a metal plate doesn't translate some of that kinetic energy into heat?
It does, but that energy wasn't heat BEFORE the bullet hit the target. If an object being in motion was equivalent to heat, then the temperature of objects would depend on their relative velocities to us. That is clearly an absurd concept.
No really, what is your point?
He asserted that because the colliding particles have lots of kinetic energy, they are therefore "hot" and calling this process "cold" fusion is therefore wrong. I corrected his error.
Speedy particles smashing into each other have a lot of kinetic energy in the center of mass inertial system. This is nothing different than 'heat'.
Wrong. Heat is random motion. If simple kinetic energy was all it took to have heat, then any gas cloud out in space with a large velocity relative to us would be extremely "hot." But we all know intuitively that things do not change temperature just because they speed up. The air in a moving car is not hotter than the air in a parked car. Heat is the random motion of particles with respect to each other. The collision of a few particles doesn't qualify.
When gas quickly depressurizes, it cools down. Ever wonder why? It's because as the gas escapes, the particles which are near each other tend to all move in the same direction (outward) and thus their random motions with respect to each other are decreased. Thus, the temperature drops. Or consider how a rocket nozzle works by focusing the molecular motions in a particular direction (by forcing the gas through a small opening to increase the pressure and then into a cone to suddenly decrease it), thereby converting the high pressure and heat of the exhaust gas into directed kinetic energy.
Learn more before making these kinds of proclamations.
I very much doubt that a biological brain works in AT ALL the same manner. Information in biological neural nets appears to be pulse and time coded, whereas a feedforward network operates independently of time and processes real-valued signals, not discrete activations. In fact, once trained, a feedforward network corresponds exactly to a nonlinear, continuous, differentiable function.
I also object to that characterization but not for your reasons. If, in fact, there were two possible tones for an email to take on (sarcastic and serious), and IF the prior probabilities for those tones were both 50% (both are equally likely), then I would agree that a person who guessed correctly around 50% of the time was pretty much "no better than chance."
However, there are more than two possible tones for an email to take, and the prior probabilities of those tones are more than likely not all equal to each other. Doing "the same as chance" means guessing each category right proportional to its prior probability. I highly doubt that 50% of messages are sarcastic and 50% are serious.
Slashdot Mirror
There are even societies where monogamy is not the norm.
"Life is like a box of chocolates. A cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift that nobody ever asks for. Unreturnable, because all you get back is another box of chocolates. So you're stuck with this undefinable whipped mint crap that you mindlessly wolf down when there's nothing else left to eat. Sure, once in a while there's a peanut butter cup or an english toffee but they're gone too fast and taste is fleeting. So you end up with nothing but broken bits of hardened jelly and teeth-shattering nuts. If you're desperate enough to eat those, all you got left is an empty box filled with useless brown paper wrappers."
Yeah, but a community-based social structure is also effective for child rearing. I suspect that the actual trigger for human monogamy was sexually transmitted disease, and that it's more of a social meme than a biological trait.
Maybe I got a joke other than the one he intended. Was he going for some kind of "In Soviet Russia pr0n watches you" or somesuch?
My boss used to design software and hardware for NASA spacecraft, including the shuttle. Apparently, cosmic rays (as well as other forms of radiation) are such a problem for onboard computers that the early systems were designed to reboot themselves every 10 milliseconds. That guarantees that, if the processor gets stuck in a bogus state, it won't stay that way for more than 10 milliseconds before recovery kicks in.
Imagine writing software with the requirement that all data must be loaded, processed, and stored back in protected memory within 10 milliseconds. Complex tasks are performed piece by piece as the system continually reboots itself.
I have no idea if current spacecraft computer systems have the same kind of limitations. ECC memory combined with better shielding probably eliminates most of the problems.
Funny, but... Russian really only has two letters that are drawn "backwards," R and N. Neither letter sounds anything like the English counterpart. The backward R sounds like "ya" and the backward N sounds like "ee."
This supervisor poured much time and effort into his team, investigating various concepts of magnetic computation. Then the integrated circuit came along and turned him into a ruined man.
So have we finally come full-circle now, back to magnetic computation? Call me conservative but I don't think it will fare any better this time around.
Have you considered that maybe he was going for Funny, not Insightful? Don't blame him for the moderators' stupidity.
I realize that it is possible to remove the watermark. The goal is to make that as difficult as it can be. Given the RIAA's track record with attempts at DRM technology, it will probably be defeated quickly. But cryptography/steganography continually advances and in the future it might be possible to place watermarks in ways that are far more difficult to remove.
One idea off the top of my head is to move from MP3 to some different lossy format where the watermark data becomes an integral part of the decoding process, so that removing it would make the file inoperable. This doesn't prevent somebody from simply transcoding the audio but it would be a step up.
You do know that Intel's logo no longer look like that, right?
The purpose of making the watermark imperceptible isn't to trick the user. The user is fully aware that the music is watermarked. The reason it is done the way that it is, is because it is the only way to do it. There are really two requirements for the watermark. First, it must be intertwined with the actual data in order to make it non-trivial to remove. Simply sticking the watermark in a meta-information block would make removing it too simple. Second, because the watermark is intermixed with the audio data, it MUST be done in an imperceptible way in order to retain the quality of the recording.
So, making the watermark inaudible is not some attempt to pull one over on you. It's just the only realistic way it could be done.
But that's exactly what he's talking about, isn't it. He sees nothing WRONG with doing so. Whether it is illegal is a different matter.
I believe a great many things to be right, which are illegal in the country I live in. There are also things which I think are wrong which are legal. The two concepts are not equivalent.
When I think DRM, I think of technologies that are meant to cripple my ability to use the content if I refuse to abide by the rules set by the copyright holders. That sort of stuff is crap, and I won't tolerate it either. My system is my own and my files are my own. But in this case, the watermark serves no purpose other than to enable the rights holder to determine whether somebody has leaked the file. It does nothing to prevent MY OWN use, in whatever way I see fit. Unless you plan on giving copies to all your friends, I don't see what your objection is. And if a system like this is all it takes to finally convince the rights holders that digital distribution is a good thing, then I'm COMPLETELY for it. In time, once the digital music market is firmly established, maybe THEN we can open a dialog with the rights holders about the watermarking technology.
Don't try to make some comparison with civil rights, e.g. "Why should I care about illegal search if I have nothing to hide." This is not at all the same thing. Watermark technology is not dangerous and cannot be used to repress or subjugate you.
I understand fusion fine. You, apparently, do not understand what's being discussed. The OP stated that because the colliding particles have large kinetic energies, they are therefore "hot" and the moniker "cold fusion" is inappropriate.
whereas when they talk about all the particles they talk about temperature.
They do. But none of this has to do with whether or not this qualifies as "cold" fusion, which it clearly does.
Aside, I don't see why heat must be an aggregate of unordered motion, because the case in which all the particles move in the same direction is still within the subset of possible aggregate motions called 'random motion.'
As you criticize me, you forget the basic concept of relativity. An ensemble of particles moving all in the same direction in one frame of reference, is an ensemble of particles at rest in a different frame of reference. If their temperature was solely a function of their total kinetic energy, and not the relative motions, then different objects would have different temperatures for different observers. This is obviously not true.
No. We should teach our children to apply good judgment. Sometimes this means doubt, but not always. Do you actually think you should teach your children to "doubt and question" YOU, as a parent? Should they doubt and question your suggestion that they doubt and question everything? How about their own sanity, should they doubt and question that?
I'm not being pedantic here. Raising our children to be distrustful and paranoid serves no productive goal. Teaching them to ASCERTAIN and JUDGE the truth of what they see is of paramount importance.
I think I like our meaning better. Your meaning is essentially useless. "Comparable" in the sense that two objects can be compared would imply that somewhere there exist two objects that can NOT be compared. Care to explain which objects those are, and why they can't be compared?
So we took a word that had a useless meaning and made it useful. What exactly is your point?
It does, but that energy wasn't heat BEFORE the bullet hit the target. If an object being in motion was equivalent to heat, then the temperature of objects would depend on their relative velocities to us. That is clearly an absurd concept.
No really, what is your point?
He asserted that because the colliding particles have lots of kinetic energy, they are therefore "hot" and calling this process "cold" fusion is therefore wrong. I corrected his error.
Whatever. I try to give somebody a helpful tip and get labelled "troll." Why would I expect anything less.
Wrong. Heat is random motion. If simple kinetic energy was all it took to have heat, then any gas cloud out in space with a large velocity relative to us would be extremely "hot." But we all know intuitively that things do not change temperature just because they speed up. The air in a moving car is not hotter than the air in a parked car. Heat is the random motion of particles with respect to each other. The collision of a few particles doesn't qualify.
When gas quickly depressurizes, it cools down. Ever wonder why? It's because as the gas escapes, the particles which are near each other tend to all move in the same direction (outward) and thus their random motions with respect to each other are decreased. Thus, the temperature drops. Or consider how a rocket nozzle works by focusing the molecular motions in a particular direction (by forcing the gas through a small opening to increase the pressure and then into a cone to suddenly decrease it), thereby converting the high pressure and heat of the exhaust gas into directed kinetic energy.
Learn more before making these kinds of proclamations.
Note to submitter: In English, saying something is "dated" usually means that it is out of date, i.e. obsolete.
It's only a dilemma because neither of your choices are the right answer. :-P
Also, the hunting of wild game, which is clearly an activity for small tots.
The biological brain is not just a function.
That's because on IRC there are only two tones: SillyStupid and Asshole.
However, there are more than two possible tones for an email to take, and the prior probabilities of those tones are more than likely not all equal to each other. Doing "the same as chance" means guessing each category right proportional to its prior probability. I highly doubt that 50% of messages are sarcastic and 50% are serious.