Yeah, that could work. I'm just thinking if you vote wrong and see it on-screen before hitting COMMIT, then you don't have to have a voting officer come over and destroy the printout in a verifiable manner (so you don't hit REPRINT 100 times and get multiple votes).
Then if the receipt is wrong, you can still go up to a voting officer and demand the right for a re-vote before you put your ballot into the confirmed box, and the officer can destroy the original, delete the vote from the database, give you a receipt that the vote has been deleted (that you sign), and give you a new vote on the machine.
I should mod myself down for the parent post. SORRY!
I re-read the article, in which I had missed the part about the estimates that ARE added to mileage to account for the electricity consumed.
Still, the numbers used look very, very fishy. For one, is electricity really that cheap in Detroit? 40 cents for 10kWh means 4 cents a kWh. I'm paying 16 cents a kWh for my electricity. Of course, we don't have "peak" and "off-peak" electricity here in the hinterlands, so it'd probably be a little cheaper if we did (and if you could time the car to charge only off-peak). 10kWh also sounds pretty optimistic to carry a vehicle 40 miles.
MPG rating is meaningless when you can get some of your power from another, external, power source.
Though a 50MPG car isn't anything to sneeze at, claiming it can get 230 miles on a gallon of fuel is simply bullshit. It gets 230 miles on a gallon of fuel PLUS several recharges from an electrical outlet. When you compare this to an all-fuel car or a non-plugin hybrid, there isn't a valid basis for comparison. How much fuel was burned to make that electricity? When you combine the fuel the car actually burned plus the fuel used to make the electricity the car used, what's the REAL fuel mileage?
Multiple-fuel-source vehicles are harder to point to with a real standard for efficiency, but ideally the EPA standard should be some function of how much fuel AND electricity were put into the vehicle to go a given distance. Come up with a standard of how much energy or pollution or whatever goes into making the electricity, then add that equivalence to the numbers.
By EPA standards, I suppose my Jetta Diesel TDI gets INFINITE gasoline mileage. Because it burns Diesel, it uses, duh, no gasoline. But it does burn actual fuel.
I'm not criticizing the car, or even the idea of having a primarily-electric vehicle with enough of an onboard system for unlimited range without recharges. 50MPG is pretty darned good, and being able to use ALL electrics for the majority of driving is generally a good thing, since electricity can be produced using cleaner sources than internal combustion of dinofuels.
But even those of us who DO wear the "green" label somewhat proudly laugh at this kind of nonsense. Treating these numbers as anything more than bullshit is like trying to defend "The Day After Tomorrow" as an environmental statement. It simply makes environmentalism, or even those who casually try to increase their efficiency, look like the work of whack-job nutters.
I think the terminals themselves are pretty hard to hack. There's not a lot going on at the individual voting stations. It's once you have access to the vote collection/tabulation machine that things get ugly. "A few minutes alone" with the machine should ideally be impossible - the machine should be put up on a pedestal in the middle of the floor with a barricade around it so anyone can see someone approaching the machine, and should not be touched by anyone until it's finished transmitting the votes to the central server.
In reality, it's usually tucked into a back room somewhere with a guard (or guards) around it, if that, but "who guards the guards?"
Honestly, once you have access to the hardware, it's pretty much all over. Even an IBM i can be hacked if you have access to the machine itself, and that's a pretty secure piece of technology.
Every voting machine SHOULD put out a paper trail, that the voter is able to see. Once you confirm your vote on-screen, it can spit out a paper receipt (punched card? Printout? Whatever) with your vote on it, and you go and put that vote into a locked box.
Ideally that receipt would have a serial number on it that matches the vote in the database, and the user gets an extra copy with their serial number and their vote, and can go look up their vote on the interwebs later using that serial number (the serial number is NOT associated with the voter, but gives a unique identification for each ballot cast). That way, voters get anonymity but can also confirm that their personal vote was accurately counted.
Then, if the electronic votes are tabulated and fraud is suspected, count the receipts.
And if a user sees that their registered vote is different, they have their own paper receipt to back up their personal claim of voter fraud or mistabulation. A sufficient number of proven user reports of fraud could trigger a paper-record recount.
My apologies if my post was unclear. I not only read the summary but the article. And I do know how "XP Mode" in Windows 7 works, your summary of it by the way is very good.
What I meant (and obviously failed at expressing) was that Windows 7's XP Mode is one of many possible uses for HV. Some of the others may be non-Windows-7-XP-Mode VMware. Such software is commonly in use, for example, to run Windows and Linux on the same machine using virtual machines.
So if Sony were to get pressure from, say, Microsoft to disable all HV capabilities on the laptop, users couldn't load VMWare and try Linux out on the box.
My point was that Sony may very well have a legitimate security reason for disabling HV. However, there are also other uses for HV that other companies might want to prevent.
I'm sure Sony has a reason to disable hardware virtualization, but I'm not sure it has anything to do with Windows XP per se. It's quite possible that either Microsoft doesn't want HV running on the boxes because there's the possibility of loading up some form of VMware on the machine, leading to such evils as experimentation with Linux, or Apple doesn't want it there because no HV could help prevent the installation of MacOS.
On the other hand, it is quite possible that the features in hardware virtualization could be used to compromise the system more easily. I'm not sure if I buy into that argument, but it does increase the number of possible vectors for malware, I guess.
Thanks for the tip. If I had mod points, I'd mod you up, sadly I don't.
However, a tip of the hat for "Exalead", it looks like a nice search engine. A little graphic-heavy, but I searched for something and it started giving me subcategories of the search based on the contents of the page. That was surprisingly slick.
Everyone brings a wireless laptop, and game moderators look for interesting action from either an individual player's perspective, some shots of actual gamers playing, and/or some "camera angles" so you can see large scenes within the game. Could easily be a 3-way splitscreen with a little of each.
You can come to watch the big screen (and pay), or participate in the actual game (and pay a lower fee or get in for free - maybe even get some love in the form of free concessions or something). Gamers play for some sort of prize at the end, and their picture up on a big effing theater screen holding their prize at the end.
Everyone who comes to participate has to buy a legal copy of the game. The movie theater only has to maintain a network and server and have a couple of people acting as mods/"directors". The theater probably doesn't have to pay licensing fees, since the game publishers are happy that the theater is encouraging people to buy legit copies of the game. In fact, the publishers would probably chip in for the servers. So the theater could probably have people pony up $5 a head for viewers and say $2 a head for gamers, offer a free pre-release copy of the next iteration of the game, and make decent money at the concessions to boot.
It's like reality TV, except all the "stars" are locals, they work basically for free (or may even pay a little for it), there's plenty of action and mayhem, and you never know what's going to happen in a particular showing.
I have no idea if it would work, but it's an intriguing blend of Hollywood and Gaming.
You write me a check for $1000. I cash it, as is, for the agreed-upon $1000 face value. I wait a couple of weeks for the check to clear, then destroy the check.
When your statement arrives, you call your bank, feigning offense, and claim that the check was for $100 and that I've obviously altered the check or the image before submitting it. Since I destroyed the original check, I have no way of proving that you wrote the check for $1000 originally.
Which is why I'd be sure to keep the original check in my grimy paws if I ever decided to use an application like this.:)
I was involved in a conversion to "Check Imaging" (take a picture of all of the checks, so you don't have to physically sort all of the originals into customer statements) back in the 90's. Now some banks are going a step past that and having the customer take the image.
I wonder how much "reverse fraud" is possible with this? I take a picture of a $1000 check, and the person who wrote the check says "hey, wait a minute! I only wrote that check for $100, the person who cashed it faked that image!"
I think if I ever cashed checks that way, I'd keep the originals in my firebox for a couple of months so I could produce the original check if there were any questions.
I honestly doubt this will "expose them to ideas they would not have otherwise considered", at least not in a way that they might actually critically examine those ideas. Remember, they are told to go out and choose "hostile" websites. The school is already setting a tone whereby the student is EXPECTING that everyone else on the website will instantly reject their ideas. There is no expectation that the student will actually read, examine, and refute the criticism they are told to expect, just to post on a site where they can expect it. They'll get shot down, and feel persecuted, and the exercise will have its intended effect.
It appears to me that the school is just sending them to websites where they will feel persecuted. Nothing feeds religious fervor more effectively than the feeling that "the sinful world" is out to get your religion. This is a very small brick in a very large wall of "the unRighteous are out to get you".
The retention issue is a good one. I don't know how long the retention time is, or if the memory location can simply be "refreshed" with the same data rather than overwritten (with less damage)
Keep in mind, though, the major difference between "lazy" and "active" maintenance (which is really a matter of degree, not an absolute) is how early you reclaim garbage sectors. If you take a sector that's nearly full of good data, then you have to "use up" an erase of almost a full sector to reclaim just a bit of empty space.
Eventually, more of each sector should become garbage, so if you wait, you'll find sectors that have a higher percentage of garbage. So if you wait until you have ten sectors that are 90% garbage, you're only "using up" one sector to move the data off ten sectors that can now be reused.
It's the moving of the good data that makes garbage collection accelerate the wear of the drive.
Yup. Ideally, they'd have a slider you could set that indicates how aggressively you want to do data collection, with the warranty tied to where you set that slider.:)
But it really depends on how much you use the drive (for writes/updates, I mean). Put a swap partition on SSD, and the drive's going to get burned up faster than an OS drive.
Right, but recall that SSD can only be erased in large blocks, though it can be written to in smaller ones. Erases are what eventually kill a block.
So if I take a block that has only 25% garbage and I want to wipe it, I have to copy the good data over to another block somewhere before I can do that. So I've written 3/4 of a wipable sector's worth of data to a new sector to get rid of the 25% of garbage. Do that a lot, and you do a lot of unnecessary erases and the drive dies faster.
If, instead, you take a sector that is 90% garbage, you only have to use 10% of a new sector to move off the good stuff before you can wipe it. So if you want the drive to last as long as possible, do garbage collection only when absolutely necessary.
But allow garbage to grow too high, and you'll have to tell the operating system to wait while you rearrange data to make room when a write request comes in for a large file.
Do you want the drive to be neatly optimized with no garbage all the time, or do you want the drive to last? I'm not saying one answer is more or less right than the other, but it's a tradeoff.
An SSD does have to collect garbage sometime, but waiting until an entire section is marked obsolete until you do the wipe is the cheapest/least wearing method. Remember - SSD can be written to in small increments, but only erased in large increments, and once an increment has been written to it must be erased to be written to again. And each increment can only be erased a certain number of times before it dies.
Let's say we have erasable blocks of 512K with 512 writable sectors of 1K each. A proactive algorithm might move data into unused blocks when, say, half the block has "garbage" and the other half has good data. So when we hit more than 256K of garbage in the sector, we move the good stuff off it and wipe it.
So we take the good data out of two blocks, and write it all to a single new block, then we can wipe both old blocks safely.
But in doing so, we've "used up" a fresh block for no good purpose except to free up space. A noble goal, but I presume it's pretty obvious that if we had waited until each block was down to 128K of good data, we could have copied the good data out of FOUR old blocks to a single block, thereby cutting the "maintenance wear" by half.
Garbage collection of an SSD drive is a continuous choice between:
- allowing the drive to get clogged up with junk data and being as lazy about maintenance as possible (which statistically will extend drive life, but will mean there are times when you have to wait to do a write because the drive has to find the most-garbagey chunks available and clear them to make room). If you put this task off as long as possible, when you DO wipe a block it's more likely to be mostly garbage, so you're moving good data around as little as possible.
and
- obsessively keeping all garbage data off the drive by moving all data from ANY partially-used sectors to new sectors so all garbage can be kept out (which optimizes continuous performance, but means you may wipe an entire block when only a small percentage of it was actual garbage, so you're moving a lot of data around frequently and burning out sectors faster). If you do this task quickly and frequently, you move a lot of good data around from place to place. But you do ensure that free blocks are always available.
The ideal is somewhere around the middle. You pick a point at which you consider a specific block to be "too garbagey" and you clean those up as you go. Where is that point? Depends on your needs, how full the drive really is, and your relative values on performance versus reliability or drive longevity.
SSD's can be written to in small increments, but can only be erased in larger increments. So, you've got a really tiny pencil lead that can write data or scribble an "X" in an area to say the data is no longer valid, but a huge eraser that can only erase good-sized areas at a time, but you can't re-write on an area until it's been erased. There's a good explanation for this that involves addressing and pinouts of flash chips, but I'm going to skip it to keep the explanation simple. Little pencil lead, big eraser.
Let's call the small increment (what you can write to) a "block" and the larger increment (what you can erase) a "chunk". There are, say, 512 "blocks" to a "chunk".
So when a small amount of data is changed, the drive writes the changed data to a new block, then marks the old block as "unused". When all the blocks in a chunk are unused, the entire chunk can then be safely wiped clean. Until that happens, if you erase a chunk, you lose some data. So as time goes on, each chunk will tend to be a mix of current data, obsolete data, and empty blocks that can still be written to. Eventually, you'll end up with all obsolete data in each chunk, and you can wipe it.
However, it's going to be rare that ALL the blocks in a chunk get marked as unused. For the most part, there will be some more static data (beginnings of files, OS files, etc) that changes less, and some dynamic data (endings of files, swap/temp files, frequently-edited stuff) that changes more. You can't reasonably predict which parts are which, even if the OS was aware of the architecture of the disc, because a lot of things change on drives. So you end up with a bunch of chunks that have some good data and some obsolete data. The blocks are clearly marked, but you can't write on an obsolete block without erasing it, and you can't erase a single block - you have to erase the whole chunk.
To fix this, SSD drives take all the "good" (current) data out of a bunch of partly-used chunks and write it to a new chunk or set of chunks, then marks the originals as obsolete. The data is safe, and it's been consolidated so there are fewer unusable blocks on the drive. Nifty, except...
You can only erase each chunk a certain number of times before it dies. Flash memory tolerates reads VERY well. Erases, not so much.
So if you spend all of your time optimizing the drive, you're moving data around unnecessarily and doing a LOT of extra erases, shortening the hard drive's life.
But if you wait until you are running low on free blocks before you start freeing up space (which maximizes the lifespan of the drive), you'll run into severe slowdowns where the drive has to make room for the data you want to write, even if the drive is sitting there almost empty from the user's perspective.
So, SSD design has to balance between keeping the drive as clean and fast as possible at a cost of drive life, or making the drive last as long as possible but not performing at peak all the time.
There are certain things you can do to benefit both, such as putting really static data into complete chunks where it's less likely to be mixed with extremely dynamic data. But overall, the designer has to choose somewhere on the continuum of "lasts a long time" and "runs really fast".
I wish I had Mod Points so I could crank the parent post up.
(1) This was introduced into an ALPHA, not to the general public. This was not in a full release, it was not in a Release Candidate, it was not in a Beta, this was in an early-version alpha release to test out the idea.
(2) Firefox (Ubuntu Alpha Flavor) is NOT SECRETLY WATCHING WHAT YOU DO. Sorry for the capsy-shouty bit there, but it just isn't. It's defaulting to opening to a Google search page instead of a blank page if you open a new tab. That's it. This is currently the default behavior for opening a new Window in Firefox, they are making it so Canonical Google Search opens by default in any new tabs that are open as well.
Background: Google allows you to offer "branded searches". They offer aggregated data about the searches performed from your page, which can be useful, but they don't give up IP addresses or user IDs. If you went to www.google.com, Google shares their aggregate data with no one but themselves. So Canonical is hoping you'll use their "branded" Google page so they get that data.
If you simply type in a URL in the URL box or follow a bookmark on your newly-opened tab, nothing is reported to anyone, because you never submitted a Google search, so no data goes anywhere.
If you should choose to use the Ubuntu Google search page, the same privacy rules apply whether you use Google.com or Canonical's branded page. Canonical simply appends their brand code to the Google request so Google gives them credit for the search.
The same thing happens when you use the existing "Google Search Box" in any flavor of Firefox (Linux, Windows, etc), by the way. Firefox submits the search to Google with a tag that says "by the way, the folks at Mozilla encouraged the user to use Google for this search." For that matter, IE and Opera both have search boxes that you can configure to submit your searches to Google (or the search engine of your choice). PLENTY of websites have "search the web with Google" boxes out there.
So, the question is.... is this TACKY? Absolutely! Having the Ubuntu-branded Google page thrown in your face every time you open a new tab is kinda tacky. Personally, I like browsers that open in a blank page and I'll decide where I want to go, thank you very much.
Is this advertising? Well, OK, sorta. Having the Google name tossed on your eyeballs every time you open a new tab is sorta kinda advertising-ish. At the least, it's tacky, but we covered that already.
Is this a privacy violation? Well, if you were going to do a Google search anyway, this is sending the same information to Google that you would have through Google.com. Except that aggregate data (data not specifically about you) is sent back to Canonical. This is data Google would have gladly sold anyway, but the quality is improved slightly because they can say "Ubuntu users tend to search for left-handed spanners 3% more often than IE users". So, no, I'd have to judge that it isn't, really.
Now, if you're rabidly anti-Google, or even mildly uncomfortable with them, then I can certainly see why having Google tossed in your face every time you open a "should have been blank" tab could be really, really, REALLY annoying. But if you don't do any Google searches with this new page (and let's face it, if you hate Google you're not going to use this new page, are you?) then you're as safe as you were before the change. You just have more annoying Google search pages you need to ignore.
IANAS (I Am Not A Scientist), but I'll pretend to know what I'm talking about enough to form an ignorance-based straw man...:)
So, yes, if this gene is twiddled on and prevents the virus from replicating, that's great. However, even if it successfully weakens HIV, what other GOOD things might also be weakened and what other BAD things (that are not HIV) could possibly be strengthened by this?
Only two possible issues:
1. Could this interference interfere with some other defense mechanism in the body that this new binding could be Very Bad News in some other way?
Example of a WAY off-the-wall theory - could HIV somehow mutate to use the "HIV Killer" to its advantage? I mean, the little bugger's mutated from a monkey virus to a human virus already. It's proven to be adaptable.
Example of a possibly less off-the-wall theory - could having this "attack and dismantle" mechanism floating around in the body somehow cause other unintended side effects?
2. If the "attack and dismantle" is not 100%, then we are simply selecting for those virii that have a "resistance" to the attack, right?
I don't think I've ever heard of anything in science that kills ALL bacteria or ALL virii. Again, IANAS so this could be very common - I've just never heard of a claim of 100% of anything being wiped out when bacteria or virii get talked about.
So if we're not whacking 100% of them, Darwinian forces assure us that anything that has a natural resistance to the defense is reproduced more often, meaning the population of resistant strains is more numerous and therefore the defense becomes ineffective over time. Antibiotics have proven that relatively clearly with the creation of "superbugs" out of once-simple staph infections. What could AIDS become?
Written down in earnest, referred to for the exam, then put in a drawer somewhere and never looked at again. You can't quite throw them away, because you put a lot of work into them. They don't have any current value, but some of the books contain some really good ideas (albeit discarded, but good ideas at the time) and some really BAD ideas.
Agreed. Flipping a few DIP switches in the DNA sequence might seem like a great idea, but this one is going to take a lot of research. Especially since the genes being flipped seem to be involved in cervicovaginal tissue (eg. baby factory). If that's the case, you may get protection against HIV, but you also may pass along a prominent eyebrow and tendency toward grunting to your kids.
Not to mention the possibility of an active immune response making something even stronger out of HIV, or weakening some other portion of the immune system.
Admittedly, most of these possibilities are somewhat remote, and maybe I'm just suffering from a heightened Frankenstein complex when it comes to twiddling with DNA, but...
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that could work. I'm just thinking if you vote wrong and see it on-screen before hitting COMMIT, then you don't have to have a voting officer come over and destroy the printout in a verifiable manner (so you don't hit REPRINT 100 times and get multiple votes).
Then if the receipt is wrong, you can still go up to a voting officer and demand the right for a re-vote before you put your ballot into the confirmed box, and the officer can destroy the original, delete the vote from the database, give you a receipt that the vote has been deleted (that you sign), and give you a new vote on the machine.
I should mod myself down for the parent post. SORRY!
I re-read the article, in which I had missed the part about the estimates that ARE added to mileage to account for the electricity consumed.
Still, the numbers used look very, very fishy. For one, is electricity really that cheap in Detroit? 40 cents for 10kWh means 4 cents a kWh. I'm paying 16 cents a kWh for my electricity. Of course, we don't have "peak" and "off-peak" electricity here in the hinterlands, so it'd probably be a little cheaper if we did (and if you could time the car to charge only off-peak). 10kWh also sounds pretty optimistic to carry a vehicle 40 miles.
MPG rating is meaningless when you can get some of your power from another, external, power source.
Though a 50MPG car isn't anything to sneeze at, claiming it can get 230 miles on a gallon of fuel is simply bullshit. It gets 230 miles on a gallon of fuel PLUS several recharges from an electrical outlet. When you compare this to an all-fuel car or a non-plugin hybrid, there isn't a valid basis for comparison. How much fuel was burned to make that electricity? When you combine the fuel the car actually burned plus the fuel used to make the electricity the car used, what's the REAL fuel mileage?
Multiple-fuel-source vehicles are harder to point to with a real standard for efficiency, but ideally the EPA standard should be some function of how much fuel AND electricity were put into the vehicle to go a given distance. Come up with a standard of how much energy or pollution or whatever goes into making the electricity, then add that equivalence to the numbers.
By EPA standards, I suppose my Jetta Diesel TDI gets INFINITE gasoline mileage. Because it burns Diesel, it uses, duh, no gasoline. But it does burn actual fuel.
I'm not criticizing the car, or even the idea of having a primarily-electric vehicle with enough of an onboard system for unlimited range without recharges. 50MPG is pretty darned good, and being able to use ALL electrics for the majority of driving is generally a good thing, since electricity can be produced using cleaner sources than internal combustion of dinofuels.
But even those of us who DO wear the "green" label somewhat proudly laugh at this kind of nonsense. Treating these numbers as anything more than bullshit is like trying to defend "The Day After Tomorrow" as an environmental statement. It simply makes environmentalism, or even those who casually try to increase their efficiency, look like the work of whack-job nutters.
I think the terminals themselves are pretty hard to hack. There's not a lot going on at the individual voting stations. It's once you have access to the vote collection/tabulation machine that things get ugly. "A few minutes alone" with the machine should ideally be impossible - the machine should be put up on a pedestal in the middle of the floor with a barricade around it so anyone can see someone approaching the machine, and should not be touched by anyone until it's finished transmitting the votes to the central server.
In reality, it's usually tucked into a back room somewhere with a guard (or guards) around it, if that, but "who guards the guards?"
Honestly, once you have access to the hardware, it's pretty much all over. Even an IBM i can be hacked if you have access to the machine itself, and that's a pretty secure piece of technology.
Every voting machine SHOULD put out a paper trail, that the voter is able to see. Once you confirm your vote on-screen, it can spit out a paper receipt (punched card? Printout? Whatever) with your vote on it, and you go and put that vote into a locked box.
Ideally that receipt would have a serial number on it that matches the vote in the database, and the user gets an extra copy with their serial number and their vote, and can go look up their vote on the interwebs later using that serial number (the serial number is NOT associated with the voter, but gives a unique identification for each ballot cast). That way, voters get anonymity but can also confirm that their personal vote was accurately counted.
Then, if the electronic votes are tabulated and fraud is suspected, count the receipts.
And if a user sees that their registered vote is different, they have their own paper receipt to back up their personal claim of voter fraud or mistabulation. A sufficient number of proven user reports of fraud could trigger a paper-record recount.
My apologies if my post was unclear. I not only read the summary but the article. And I do know how "XP Mode" in Windows 7 works, your summary of it by the way is very good.
What I meant (and obviously failed at expressing) was that Windows 7's XP Mode is one of many possible uses for HV. Some of the others may be non-Windows-7-XP-Mode VMware. Such software is commonly in use, for example, to run Windows and Linux on the same machine using virtual machines.
So if Sony were to get pressure from, say, Microsoft to disable all HV capabilities on the laptop, users couldn't load VMWare and try Linux out on the box.
My point was that Sony may very well have a legitimate security reason for disabling HV. However, there are also other uses for HV that other companies might want to prevent.
I'm sure Sony has a reason to disable hardware virtualization, but I'm not sure it has anything to do with Windows XP per se. It's quite possible that either Microsoft doesn't want HV running on the boxes because there's the possibility of loading up some form of VMware on the machine, leading to such evils as experimentation with Linux, or Apple doesn't want it there because no HV could help prevent the installation of MacOS.
On the other hand, it is quite possible that the features in hardware virtualization could be used to compromise the system more easily. I'm not sure if I buy into that argument, but it does increase the number of possible vectors for malware, I guess.
Thanks for the tip. If I had mod points, I'd mod you up, sadly I don't.
However, a tip of the hat for "Exalead", it looks like a nice search engine. A little graphic-heavy, but I searched for something and it started giving me subcategories of the search based on the contents of the page. That was surprisingly slick.
Everyone brings a wireless laptop, and game moderators look for interesting action from either an individual player's perspective, some shots of actual gamers playing, and/or some "camera angles" so you can see large scenes within the game. Could easily be a 3-way splitscreen with a little of each.
You can come to watch the big screen (and pay), or participate in the actual game (and pay a lower fee or get in for free - maybe even get some love in the form of free concessions or something). Gamers play for some sort of prize at the end, and their picture up on a big effing theater screen holding their prize at the end.
Everyone who comes to participate has to buy a legal copy of the game. The movie theater only has to maintain a network and server and have a couple of people acting as mods/"directors". The theater probably doesn't have to pay licensing fees, since the game publishers are happy that the theater is encouraging people to buy legit copies of the game. In fact, the publishers would probably chip in for the servers. So the theater could probably have people pony up $5 a head for viewers and say $2 a head for gamers, offer a free pre-release copy of the next iteration of the game, and make decent money at the concessions to boot.
It's like reality TV, except all the "stars" are locals, they work basically for free (or may even pay a little for it), there's plenty of action and mayhem, and you never know what's going to happen in a particular showing.
I have no idea if it would work, but it's an intriguing blend of Hollywood and Gaming.
scaramouche, scaramouche, I cn haz fandango?
Right, I was referring to the following scenario:
You write me a check for $1000. I cash it, as is, for the agreed-upon $1000 face value. I wait a couple of weeks for the check to clear, then destroy the check.
When your statement arrives, you call your bank, feigning offense, and claim that the check was for $100 and that I've obviously altered the check or the image before submitting it. Since I destroyed the original check, I have no way of proving that you wrote the check for $1000 originally.
Which is why I'd be sure to keep the original check in my grimy paws if I ever decided to use an application like this. :)
I imagine so. That's why I'd file the original safely away until well after it has cleared, rather than voiding and/or destroying it immediately.
I was involved in a conversion to "Check Imaging" (take a picture of all of the checks, so you don't have to physically sort all of the originals into customer statements) back in the 90's. Now some banks are going a step past that and having the customer take the image.
I wonder how much "reverse fraud" is possible with this? I take a picture of a $1000 check, and the person who wrote the check says "hey, wait a minute! I only wrote that check for $100, the person who cashed it faked that image!"
I think if I ever cashed checks that way, I'd keep the originals in my firebox for a couple of months so I could produce the original check if there were any questions.
Infidel! Blasphemer! Un-Unbeliever!
I haven't made up my mind whether I want to be an agnostic or not...
I honestly doubt this will "expose them to ideas they would not have otherwise considered", at least not in a way that they might actually critically examine those ideas. Remember, they are told to go out and choose "hostile" websites. The school is already setting a tone whereby the student is EXPECTING that everyone else on the website will instantly reject their ideas. There is no expectation that the student will actually read, examine, and refute the criticism they are told to expect, just to post on a site where they can expect it. They'll get shot down, and feel persecuted, and the exercise will have its intended effect.
It appears to me that the school is just sending them to websites where they will feel persecuted. Nothing feeds religious fervor more effectively than the feeling that "the sinful world" is out to get your religion. This is a very small brick in a very large wall of "the unRighteous are out to get you".
The retention issue is a good one. I don't know how long the retention time is, or if the memory location can simply be "refreshed" with the same data rather than overwritten (with less damage)
Keep in mind, though, the major difference between "lazy" and "active" maintenance (which is really a matter of degree, not an absolute) is how early you reclaim garbage sectors. If you take a sector that's nearly full of good data, then you have to "use up" an erase of almost a full sector to reclaim just a bit of empty space.
Eventually, more of each sector should become garbage, so if you wait, you'll find sectors that have a higher percentage of garbage. So if you wait until you have ten sectors that are 90% garbage, you're only "using up" one sector to move the data off ten sectors that can now be reused.
It's the moving of the good data that makes garbage collection accelerate the wear of the drive.
Thanks for marking me as Foe, at least. It marks your comments so I can ignore them more easily.
Have a great day.
Yup. Ideally, they'd have a slider you could set that indicates how aggressively you want to do data collection, with the warranty tied to where you set that slider. :)
But it really depends on how much you use the drive (for writes/updates, I mean). Put a swap partition on SSD, and the drive's going to get burned up faster than an OS drive.
Right, but recall that SSD can only be erased in large blocks, though it can be written to in smaller ones. Erases are what eventually kill a block.
So if I take a block that has only 25% garbage and I want to wipe it, I have to copy the good data over to another block somewhere before I can do that. So I've written 3/4 of a wipable sector's worth of data to a new sector to get rid of the 25% of garbage. Do that a lot, and you do a lot of unnecessary erases and the drive dies faster.
If, instead, you take a sector that is 90% garbage, you only have to use 10% of a new sector to move off the good stuff before you can wipe it. So if you want the drive to last as long as possible, do garbage collection only when absolutely necessary.
But allow garbage to grow too high, and you'll have to tell the operating system to wait while you rearrange data to make room when a write request comes in for a large file.
Do you want the drive to be neatly optimized with no garbage all the time, or do you want the drive to last? I'm not saying one answer is more or less right than the other, but it's a tradeoff.
An SSD does have to collect garbage sometime, but waiting until an entire section is marked obsolete until you do the wipe is the cheapest/least wearing method. Remember - SSD can be written to in small increments, but only erased in large increments, and once an increment has been written to it must be erased to be written to again. And each increment can only be erased a certain number of times before it dies.
Let's say we have erasable blocks of 512K with 512 writable sectors of 1K each. A proactive algorithm might move data into unused blocks when, say, half the block has "garbage" and the other half has good data. So when we hit more than 256K of garbage in the sector, we move the good stuff off it and wipe it.
So we take the good data out of two blocks, and write it all to a single new block, then we can wipe both old blocks safely.
But in doing so, we've "used up" a fresh block for no good purpose except to free up space. A noble goal, but I presume it's pretty obvious that if we had waited until each block was down to 128K of good data, we could have copied the good data out of FOUR old blocks to a single block, thereby cutting the "maintenance wear" by half.
Garbage collection of an SSD drive is a continuous choice between:
- allowing the drive to get clogged up with junk data and being as lazy about maintenance as possible (which statistically will extend drive life, but will mean there are times when you have to wait to do a write because the drive has to find the most-garbagey chunks available and clear them to make room). If you put this task off as long as possible, when you DO wipe a block it's more likely to be mostly garbage, so you're moving good data around as little as possible.
and
- obsessively keeping all garbage data off the drive by moving all data from ANY partially-used sectors to new sectors so all garbage can be kept out (which optimizes continuous performance, but means you may wipe an entire block when only a small percentage of it was actual garbage, so you're moving a lot of data around frequently and burning out sectors faster). If you do this task quickly and frequently, you move a lot of good data around from place to place. But you do ensure that free blocks are always available.
The ideal is somewhere around the middle. You pick a point at which you consider a specific block to be "too garbagey" and you clean those up as you go. Where is that point? Depends on your needs, how full the drive really is, and your relative values on performance versus reliability or drive longevity.
Simple. Well, not really, but...
SSD's can be written to in small increments, but can only be erased in larger increments. So, you've got a really tiny pencil lead that can write data or scribble an "X" in an area to say the data is no longer valid, but a huge eraser that can only erase good-sized areas at a time, but you can't re-write on an area until it's been erased. There's a good explanation for this that involves addressing and pinouts of flash chips, but I'm going to skip it to keep the explanation simple. Little pencil lead, big eraser.
Let's call the small increment (what you can write to) a "block" and the larger increment (what you can erase) a "chunk". There are, say, 512 "blocks" to a "chunk".
So when a small amount of data is changed, the drive writes the changed data to a new block, then marks the old block as "unused". When all the blocks in a chunk are unused, the entire chunk can then be safely wiped clean. Until that happens, if you erase a chunk, you lose some data. So as time goes on, each chunk will tend to be a mix of current data, obsolete data, and empty blocks that can still be written to. Eventually, you'll end up with all obsolete data in each chunk, and you can wipe it.
However, it's going to be rare that ALL the blocks in a chunk get marked as unused. For the most part, there will be some more static data (beginnings of files, OS files, etc) that changes less, and some dynamic data (endings of files, swap/temp files, frequently-edited stuff) that changes more. You can't reasonably predict which parts are which, even if the OS was aware of the architecture of the disc, because a lot of things change on drives. So you end up with a bunch of chunks that have some good data and some obsolete data. The blocks are clearly marked, but you can't write on an obsolete block without erasing it, and you can't erase a single block - you have to erase the whole chunk.
To fix this, SSD drives take all the "good" (current) data out of a bunch of partly-used chunks and write it to a new chunk or set of chunks, then marks the originals as obsolete. The data is safe, and it's been consolidated so there are fewer unusable blocks on the drive. Nifty, except...
You can only erase each chunk a certain number of times before it dies. Flash memory tolerates reads VERY well. Erases, not so much.
So if you spend all of your time optimizing the drive, you're moving data around unnecessarily and doing a LOT of extra erases, shortening the hard drive's life.
But if you wait until you are running low on free blocks before you start freeing up space (which maximizes the lifespan of the drive), you'll run into severe slowdowns where the drive has to make room for the data you want to write, even if the drive is sitting there almost empty from the user's perspective.
So, SSD design has to balance between keeping the drive as clean and fast as possible at a cost of drive life, or making the drive last as long as possible but not performing at peak all the time.
There are certain things you can do to benefit both, such as putting really static data into complete chunks where it's less likely to be mixed with extremely dynamic data. But overall, the designer has to choose somewhere on the continuum of "lasts a long time" and "runs really fast".
I wish I had Mod Points so I could crank the parent post up.
(1) This was introduced into an ALPHA, not to the general public. This was not in a full release, it was not in a Release Candidate, it was not in a Beta, this was in an early-version alpha release to test out the idea.
(2) Firefox (Ubuntu Alpha Flavor) is NOT SECRETLY WATCHING WHAT YOU DO. Sorry for the capsy-shouty bit there, but it just isn't. It's defaulting to opening to a Google search page instead of a blank page if you open a new tab. That's it. This is currently the default behavior for opening a new Window in Firefox, they are making it so Canonical Google Search opens by default in any new tabs that are open as well.
Background: Google allows you to offer "branded searches". They offer aggregated data about the searches performed from your page, which can be useful, but they don't give up IP addresses or user IDs. If you went to www.google.com, Google shares their aggregate data with no one but themselves. So Canonical is hoping you'll use their "branded" Google page so they get that data.
If you simply type in a URL in the URL box or follow a bookmark on your newly-opened tab, nothing is reported to anyone, because you never submitted a Google search, so no data goes anywhere.
If you should choose to use the Ubuntu Google search page, the same privacy rules apply whether you use Google.com or Canonical's branded page. Canonical simply appends their brand code to the Google request so Google gives them credit for the search.
The same thing happens when you use the existing "Google Search Box" in any flavor of Firefox (Linux, Windows, etc), by the way. Firefox submits the search to Google with a tag that says "by the way, the folks at Mozilla encouraged the user to use Google for this search." For that matter, IE and Opera both have search boxes that you can configure to submit your searches to Google (or the search engine of your choice). PLENTY of websites have "search the web with Google" boxes out there.
So, the question is.... is this TACKY? Absolutely! Having the Ubuntu-branded Google page thrown in your face every time you open a new tab is kinda tacky. Personally, I like browsers that open in a blank page and I'll decide where I want to go, thank you very much.
Is this advertising? Well, OK, sorta. Having the Google name tossed on your eyeballs every time you open a new tab is sorta kinda advertising-ish. At the least, it's tacky, but we covered that already.
Is this a privacy violation? Well, if you were going to do a Google search anyway, this is sending the same information to Google that you would have through Google.com. Except that aggregate data (data not specifically about you) is sent back to Canonical. This is data Google would have gladly sold anyway, but the quality is improved slightly because they can say "Ubuntu users tend to search for left-handed spanners 3% more often than IE users". So, no, I'd have to judge that it isn't, really.
Now, if you're rabidly anti-Google, or even mildly uncomfortable with them, then I can certainly see why having Google tossed in your face every time you open a "should have been blank" tab could be really, really, REALLY annoying. But if you don't do any Google searches with this new page (and let's face it, if you hate Google you're not going to use this new page, are you?) then you're as safe as you were before the change. You just have more annoying Google search pages you need to ignore.
IANAS (I Am Not A Scientist), but I'll pretend to know what I'm talking about enough to form an ignorance-based straw man... :)
So, yes, if this gene is twiddled on and prevents the virus from replicating, that's great. However, even if it successfully weakens HIV, what other GOOD things might also be weakened and what other BAD things (that are not HIV) could possibly be strengthened by this?
Only two possible issues:
1. Could this interference interfere with some other defense mechanism in the body that this new binding could be Very Bad News in some other way?
Example of a WAY off-the-wall theory - could HIV somehow mutate to use the "HIV Killer" to its advantage? I mean, the little bugger's mutated from a monkey virus to a human virus already. It's proven to be adaptable.
Example of a possibly less off-the-wall theory - could having this "attack and dismantle" mechanism floating around in the body somehow cause other unintended side effects?
2. If the "attack and dismantle" is not 100%, then we are simply selecting for those virii that have a "resistance" to the attack, right?
I don't think I've ever heard of anything in science that kills ALL bacteria or ALL virii. Again, IANAS so this could be very common - I've just never heard of a claim of 100% of anything being wiped out when bacteria or virii get talked about.
So if we're not whacking 100% of them, Darwinian forces assure us that anything that has a natural resistance to the defense is reproduced more often, meaning the population of resistant strains is more numerous and therefore the defense becomes ineffective over time. Antibiotics have proven that relatively clearly with the creation of "superbugs" out of once-simple staph infections. What could AIDS become?
"Junk DNA" = Evolution's college notes.
Written down in earnest, referred to for the exam, then put in a drawer somewhere and never looked at again. You can't quite throw them away, because you put a lot of work into them. They don't have any current value, but some of the books contain some really good ideas (albeit discarded, but good ideas at the time) and some really BAD ideas.
Agreed. Flipping a few DIP switches in the DNA sequence might seem like a great idea, but this one is going to take a lot of research. Especially since the genes being flipped seem to be involved in cervicovaginal tissue (eg. baby factory). If that's the case, you may get protection against HIV, but you also may pass along a prominent eyebrow and tendency toward grunting to your kids.
Not to mention the possibility of an active immune response making something even stronger out of HIV, or weakening some other portion of the immune system.
Admittedly, most of these possibilities are somewhat remote, and maybe I'm just suffering from a heightened Frankenstein complex when it comes to twiddling with DNA, but...