It depends on how it's implemented. Remember, we're taking the actual eye and replacing it. You've got to first reproduce the existing signal, then you've got to figure out how to map any new signals we don't already send.
First, we have to throw out practical limitations on current technology and say we've reached a point where we can accurately reproduce the full resolution of human sight AND we have a sensor that can detect ten million discrete colors per pixel, and that we've found a way to tap into the brain's cortex and send all that data in realtime.
So let's say a specific rod or cone received values we mapped from -5,000,000 to +5,000,000 (I realize color is a lot more complex than that, because we have multiple hues intensities, but a linear scale is a lot easier to deal with for discussion).
Now we have to figure out how to make that receptor detect -20,000,000 to +20,000,000 to handle limited sections of the UV and IR spectra. The easiest way is to map 0-5 as 1, 6-10 as 2, etc. So we have the same actual number of possible color inputs, we're just making them less precise and spreading them out over a larger range of possible values. You'll "see" the same number of colors, but spread out over a much larger band.
Maybe our brains can handle more colors than our visual cortex can currently send. If so, there's a lot of dormant brain cells that are going to come on-line when this data comes in, because we have a lot more data to process to make an image. Either that or our brains will do what they do anyway - interpolate.
More likely, we'll have to map the new data to a somewhat-similar-to-current range so our brains can handle it.
Sure, though in the interests of disclosure I didn't say the virgins were particularly attractive, or even female. Just so you're adequately warned. I don't want to be accused of cheating anyone or misrepresenting my product, after all.
Yes, most people are. Try carrying a firearm 24/7 for a few decades. There's a significant chance you will lose one (or more) over the course of a career, no matter how careful you like to think you'll be.
We're human beings. We're flawed. We do that sort of thing. Some leave their coffees, their groceries, or even their CHILDREN on top of their cars when they drive off. Some forget to take the iron off the board when they leave and their house burns down. Some forget to put the bar in the window and their child falls out when the screen gives way. Some turn around to talk to their kid about some detail of the day and drift in front of a semi. And none of us are immune to this sort of thing. Some are a little better than others, but no one is perfect.
It's unfortunate, but there is no way any human being can remain utterly alert to a specific danger for days, much less decades. A moment of inattention when we are paying attention to something seemingly important, and something truly important gets missed. Fortunately, in most of these cases, nothing terribly bad happens. We miss a meeting, or drop our cell phone in the toilet, and we deal with it.
Most gun owners have the option of securing their firearms in a locked cabinet and only pulling them out when heading to the shooting range or to bag a critter for supper. Law enforcement doesn't have that option - they HAVE to have their firearm handy all the time. It's usually a job requirement. And that means some of them will get lost from time to time.
Actually, quite a lot, as long as we are willing to give up accurate color perception in the spectrum we see in now. The human visual system can differentiate, say, ten million colors (guesstimate). That's across a very small band of the spectrum we could make visible if we chose to. Index the new frequencies to perceived colors and we might be able to differentiate a few hundreds of thousands of colors in our currently-visual spectrum, but we'll also be able to differentiate various frequencies of ultraviolet and infrared light. So, for example anything in shades of blue represents UV light, and anything in shades of red represents IR, and the colors we see today are perceived as little more than shades of grey with a blue or red tint.
I, for one, would gladly give up the ability to differentiate eggshell from ecru if it meant I could see in the UV and IR spectra, though I strongly suspect the transition would be best done slowly. That much new unfamiliar input introduced all at once might have profoundly unfortunate effects on the human psyche...
The $50K is the upgrade to 12. The unit itself is $250,000 for the base model, and extra $10,000 if you want to specify the hair color of the virgins who rub the ebony (redheads tend to have brighter, harsher treble, for example).
Of course, you'll want one for each channel to avoid any crosstalk, and one of our technicians will happily walk you through the process of having a second power feed run to your house so you don't run both channels off the same power lines, because that would be just silly.
You'll never even know it until you get diagnosed with cancer 20 years later. That's right, folks, we gotta plug the analog hole because analog is radiation, and if there are holes in it it'll cause cancer.
I assume your two new TVs have HDMI inputs, right?
Because if they don't, you'd better buy some extra BluRay players in the next couple of years. After that, any new BluRay players may come with analog component ports, but they'll only be able to put out low-definition video.
If they do, then you're probably all set. Until the industry decides that HDMI isn't secure any more and you need to upgrade to HDMI2 in 2015 to run the new GreenRay standard.
This is just the first time they've removed the old standard by legal caveat, rather than simple obsolescence.
Component can easily handle very high definition, but it won't be allowed because (snicker) of course it's only possible to (chortle) copy video if you (guffaw) have access to an analog data stream of it. (HA HA HA !!!!! snort)
I mean, it's just not going to be possible (tee hee) to make an unlocked copy (ha ha) of the video at its full resolution.
BWAAHAHAH!!!!! Sorry, sometimes I kill myself.
Don't you worry none, as soon as BluRay turns on this flag there'll be an MKV extractor and you won't have to fret about this silly flag nonsense.
Then you need gold-pressed-latinum plated HDMI cables, and our specially-crafted power strip made of ebony hand-rubbed to a sheen by naked virgins. It softens the zeros and rounds the ones ever so slightly. There's even a knob hand-carved from a Unicorn horn that stretches a bit of snipegut and can adjust the pointiness to a great level of precision. The dial even goes to 11, and there's a 12 setting available for a small extra fee of $50,000.
Right, agreed. But he wasn't talking about using a known seed (in fact, it's no longer a "random" number sequence if you can reproduce it using a known seed, it's a deterministic number set, with the seed as the true encryption key).
The hot exhaust-laden air has made me rather parched. What beverage might I consume that would relieve such thirst? I do believe I've seen the name of one such product very recently? Battery acid? No. Horse urine? Nope. Oh, yeah, an only slightly more revolting beverage - printed on the billboard hovering 10 feet above my head - Coca Cola.
Nah, I think I'll just shoot down the leader and all the others will follow. Then I'll go have a glass of water and retain the integrity of my skeletal structure.
No worries, just put your geek card in the shredder and we'll call it even. When you leave the geekosphere and emerge into the social world again, the first girlfriend who dumps you is punishment enough.
Sorry, given the disproportionate number of people who have never used a computer before who are of extremely advanced age, by the time you finished typing that it was 326.
Now it's 325.
Nope, 324.
Drat. By the time it goes to market, no one in the target audience will be alive to buy it.
It's a good thing you're only "pretty sure" about that, because (depending on what version of Windows you are referring to) you're utterly wrong .
In any Windows up to and including XP, deleting C:\WINDOWS and all subdirs is a trivial task. Windows is generally shipped with one user, and that user is an Administrative-level user. Windows Vista and Windows 7 have UAC, so at least the system will warn you at least once.
In every Linux distro I've ever worked with (Red Hat, Fedora, SuSE, Ubuntu, Mint, Knoppix, and a few others) your default user is a limited user account. If you went to any system-critical file and tried to delete it, you'd have to go through the extra step of escalating your permissions (log out and log back in as root, invoke su, or run the command through sudo). All three methods require that you enter a password of some sort.
So, for the vast majority of computers out there, your statement is the complete reverse of the reality involved.
Ah, so it was YOU I went to college with. You should have known when we all warned you about it, but the failing grade on your final really should have clued you in.
Seriously, I went to college with a kid who proposed an encryption method that involved taking the ASCII value of each letter in the string to be encrypted, and multiplying each one by a unique randomly-generated 8-digit number. When asked how you decrypted it, he stated that all you needed to do was DIVIDE each character of the encrypted string by a series of freshly-generated 8-digit pseudorandom numbers.
Needless to say, though the code was well-written in and of itself, he never did get it running for finals, and about a dozen of us spent several hours each attempting to explain to him why.
All operating systems allow bad software to run, but the difference is how those applications have been developed for that platform over the years.
Back in the earlier days of DOS/Windows, the concept of limiting what a user (or their account) could do was pretty much at odds with the whole concept of having a "Personal Computer". The whole idea of a PC was that the person sitting behind the keyboard was in control of what happened on that computer, and the operating system should deny them nothing.
As the DOS/Windows model evolved, password-protecting the computer was added, and eventually levels of user access were developed. But the kicker was that most software was developed by people with administrative access to their computers, and given that the shipped default of all Microsoft OSes up to and including Windows XP was to have one user who was an Administrator, there was no significant penalty for writing software that required Administrator access.
I've tried to run Windows XP as a limited user, and it was a pain in the shorts. So much software out there simply won't run, requiring me to keep a pseudo-admin account so I could "run as..." or just give up and promote my user account to admin.
Enter Windows Vista, which as a security model was great - you could run as a limited user and "escalate" permissions for certain software that asked for it. It's almost a copy of "sudo" for Linux. It was a significant step in the right direction, and it started pushing the concept of developing applications with "minimum necessary" permissions (storing user defaults in user accounts or user sections of the registry rather than system folders or HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, etc).
The vast majority of Windows software authors (including shareware authors) really do design their software to run just fine on a limited account. But there's a good bit of Admin-required stuff out there. Enough that most people don't even try running XP as a limited account, and those that do tend to give up after a while.
----------------------
Compare that to the Linux world. Very few users run as root in Linux. The shipped default of most distros is either to have a separate admin account or (in the case of things like Ubuntu) to use a "pseudoroot" - a root account that does not really exist but that the default user is escalated to upon demand (similar to UAC in Windows).
As a result of this, most Linux applications are built based on a more limited permissions model - they tend to store their application data in the/home directory of the user rather than scattered out with c:\Program Files (which is read-only to a proper limited user account) for example. If the majority of your users cannot run your software without significant reconfiguration of their machines, they'll squawk about it and you'll tend to change your code to fit the default model.
So, while neither model FORCES good programming habits, a Linux developer is more likely to be testing his or her code under a limited account, because that's what most of his or her intended users will be using.
It's not that one OS is inherently more secure than the other, necessarily, but that the shipped default has been set securely for so many years that the developers on a Linux platform are just used to only being able to run in userland, so they're more likely to write apps that way. Windows developers have not (until relatively recently) suffered a penalty for writing things to protected areas.
With the advent of Vista and Seven, Microsoft raised the issue in terms of how many UAC boxes popped up. And this was the cause of much angst and gnashing of teeth among users. But that move is slowly showing Windows developers that they need to be taking userland permissions seriously too, and that's a good thing in the long run.
Of course, not all security threats happen outside userland. You can always install software in \My Documents or/home and run it.
This is an AMERICAN researcher. We routinely drive 5-mile trips at 80MPH in a 55MPH zone even though it will save, at most, less than a minute of actual drive time.
Because it's the only one they still know how to make money on?
Pay-for online access is still in its infancy in the news business, and free competition is rampant because papers have traditionally made their money off the print editions and offered online access as an also-ran. Now the paper subscriptions are dwindling and they are still losing money online, and based on the outrage you see every time one of the papers decides that they need to actually make money on their online offerings you can see why they might be afraid.
Yeah, why would the consumer want to cook? Or heat their house? Or want hot water?
Silly consumers, buying overpriced necessities from a monopoly! They should just pay $5000 and convert all their appliances over to run on energy provided by the local electric grid.
NYT has competition. There are still plenty of news sources out there, even if you're in the market for local news in New York City. If they set their price too high, people will choose others. They aren't a monopoly.
Comcast is a monopoly, at least in my area. If Comcast sets their price too high, I could still choose others, but no one else is authorized to use the cheapest means to reach my house (coaxial cable), so it's not competition in any real sense. I can't go to anyone else and get wired Internet for any price, and wireless options are either slower or more expensive (and usually both). The only other possible competitor is our somewhat-new local phone company (Fairpoint) and they are imploding at the moment, so I don't expect to see any new service offerings from them between now and their Chapter 7 declaration, which many of us are expecting any month now.
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It depends on how it's implemented. Remember, we're taking the actual eye and replacing it. You've got to first reproduce the existing signal, then you've got to figure out how to map any new signals we don't already send.
First, we have to throw out practical limitations on current technology and say we've reached a point where we can accurately reproduce the full resolution of human sight AND we have a sensor that can detect ten million discrete colors per pixel, and that we've found a way to tap into the brain's cortex and send all that data in realtime.
So let's say a specific rod or cone received values we mapped from -5,000,000 to +5,000,000 (I realize color is a lot more complex than that, because we have multiple hues intensities, but a linear scale is a lot easier to deal with for discussion).
Now we have to figure out how to make that receptor detect -20,000,000 to +20,000,000 to handle limited sections of the UV and IR spectra. The easiest way is to map 0-5 as 1, 6-10 as 2, etc. So we have the same actual number of possible color inputs, we're just making them less precise and spreading them out over a larger range of possible values. You'll "see" the same number of colors, but spread out over a much larger band.
Maybe our brains can handle more colors than our visual cortex can currently send. If so, there's a lot of dormant brain cells that are going to come on-line when this data comes in, because we have a lot more data to process to make an image. Either that or our brains will do what they do anyway - interpolate.
More likely, we'll have to map the new data to a somewhat-similar-to-current range so our brains can handle it.
Sure, though in the interests of disclosure I didn't say the virgins were particularly attractive, or even female. Just so you're adequately warned. I don't want to be accused of cheating anyone or misrepresenting my product, after all.
Don't search for that on Google. Just... don't.
Yes, most people are. Try carrying a firearm 24/7 for a few decades. There's a significant chance you will lose one (or more) over the course of a career, no matter how careful you like to think you'll be.
We're human beings. We're flawed. We do that sort of thing. Some leave their coffees, their groceries, or even their CHILDREN on top of their cars when they drive off. Some forget to take the iron off the board when they leave and their house burns down. Some forget to put the bar in the window and their child falls out when the screen gives way. Some turn around to talk to their kid about some detail of the day and drift in front of a semi. And none of us are immune to this sort of thing. Some are a little better than others, but no one is perfect.
It's unfortunate, but there is no way any human being can remain utterly alert to a specific danger for days, much less decades. A moment of inattention when we are paying attention to something seemingly important, and something truly important gets missed. Fortunately, in most of these cases, nothing terribly bad happens. We miss a meeting, or drop our cell phone in the toilet, and we deal with it.
Most gun owners have the option of securing their firearms in a locked cabinet and only pulling them out when heading to the shooting range or to bag a critter for supper. Law enforcement doesn't have that option - they HAVE to have their firearm handy all the time. It's usually a job requirement. And that means some of them will get lost from time to time.
Actually, quite a lot, as long as we are willing to give up accurate color perception in the spectrum we see in now. The human visual system can differentiate, say, ten million colors (guesstimate). That's across a very small band of the spectrum we could make visible if we chose to. Index the new frequencies to perceived colors and we might be able to differentiate a few hundreds of thousands of colors in our currently-visual spectrum, but we'll also be able to differentiate various frequencies of ultraviolet and infrared light. So, for example anything in shades of blue represents UV light, and anything in shades of red represents IR, and the colors we see today are perceived as little more than shades of grey with a blue or red tint.
I, for one, would gladly give up the ability to differentiate eggshell from ecru if it meant I could see in the UV and IR spectra, though I strongly suspect the transition would be best done slowly. That much new unfamiliar input introduced all at once might have profoundly unfortunate effects on the human psyche...
If they achieve better than VGA resolution, it's a steady road to needing HDMI cables, and I'm not convinced they will fit. ;)
Silly boy! Everyone knows Dabo girls are just imaginary characters from a TV show.
The $50K is the upgrade to 12. The unit itself is $250,000 for the base model, and extra $10,000 if you want to specify the hair color of the virgins who rub the ebony (redheads tend to have brighter, harsher treble, for example).
Of course, you'll want one for each channel to avoid any crosstalk, and one of our technicians will happily walk you through the process of having a second power feed run to your house so you don't run both channels off the same power lines, because that would be just silly.
You'll never even know it until you get diagnosed with cancer 20 years later. That's right, folks, we gotta plug the analog hole because analog is radiation, and if there are holes in it it'll cause cancer.
I assume your two new TVs have HDMI inputs, right?
Because if they don't, you'd better buy some extra BluRay players in the next couple of years. After that, any new BluRay players may come with analog component ports, but they'll only be able to put out low-definition video.
If they do, then you're probably all set. Until the industry decides that HDMI isn't secure any more and you need to upgrade to HDMI2 in 2015 to run the new GreenRay standard.
This is just the first time they've removed the old standard by legal caveat, rather than simple obsolescence.
Component can easily handle very high definition, but it won't be allowed because (snicker) of course it's only possible to (chortle) copy video if you (guffaw) have access to an analog data stream of it. (HA HA HA !!!!! snort)
I mean, it's just not going to be possible (tee hee) to make an unlocked copy (ha ha) of the video at its full resolution.
BWAAHAHAH!!!!! Sorry, sometimes I kill myself.
Don't you worry none, as soon as BluRay turns on this flag there'll be an MKV extractor and you won't have to fret about this silly flag nonsense.
We're not. It's a very nice-looking cable.
We're mocking you.
Then you need gold-pressed-latinum plated HDMI cables, and our specially-crafted power strip made of ebony hand-rubbed to a sheen by naked virgins. It softens the zeros and rounds the ones ever so slightly. There's even a knob hand-carved from a Unicorn horn that stretches a bit of snipegut and can adjust the pointiness to a great level of precision. The dial even goes to 11, and there's a 12 setting available for a small extra fee of $50,000.
Sorry, I'm not going to Google any phrase containing the word "stripper". Not gonna do it. Wouldn't be prudent.
Right, agreed. But he wasn't talking about using a known seed (in fact, it's no longer a "random" number sequence if you can reproduce it using a known seed, it's a deterministic number set, with the seed as the true encryption key).
The hot exhaust-laden air has made me rather parched. What beverage might I consume that would relieve such thirst? I do believe I've seen the name of one such product very recently? Battery acid? No. Horse urine? Nope. Oh, yeah, an only slightly more revolting beverage - printed on the billboard hovering 10 feet above my head - Coca Cola.
Nah, I think I'll just shoot down the leader and all the others will follow. Then I'll go have a glass of water and retain the integrity of my skeletal structure.
No worries, just put your geek card in the shredder and we'll call it even. When you leave the geekosphere and emerge into the social world again, the first girlfriend who dumps you is punishment enough.
Sorry, given the disproportionate number of people who have never used a computer before who are of extremely advanced age, by the time you finished typing that it was 326.
Now it's 325.
Nope, 324.
Drat. By the time it goes to market, no one in the target audience will be alive to buy it.
323.
It's a good thing you're only "pretty sure" about that, because (depending on what version of Windows you are referring to) you're utterly wrong .
In any Windows up to and including XP, deleting C:\WINDOWS and all subdirs is a trivial task. Windows is generally shipped with one user, and that user is an Administrative-level user. Windows Vista and Windows 7 have UAC, so at least the system will warn you at least once.
In every Linux distro I've ever worked with (Red Hat, Fedora, SuSE, Ubuntu, Mint, Knoppix, and a few others) your default user is a limited user account. If you went to any system-critical file and tried to delete it, you'd have to go through the extra step of escalating your permissions (log out and log back in as root, invoke su, or run the command through sudo). All three methods require that you enter a password of some sort.
So, for the vast majority of computers out there, your statement is the complete reverse of the reality involved.
Ah, so it was YOU I went to college with. You should have known when we all warned you about it, but the failing grade on your final really should have clued you in.
Seriously, I went to college with a kid who proposed an encryption method that involved taking the ASCII value of each letter in the string to be encrypted, and multiplying each one by a unique randomly-generated 8-digit number. When asked how you decrypted it, he stated that all you needed to do was DIVIDE each character of the encrypted string by a series of freshly-generated 8-digit pseudorandom numbers.
Needless to say, though the code was well-written in and of itself, he never did get it running for finals, and about a dozen of us spent several hours each attempting to explain to him why.
PS: He also bought lottery tickets. :)
All operating systems allow bad software to run, but the difference is how those applications have been developed for that platform over the years.
Back in the earlier days of DOS/Windows, the concept of limiting what a user (or their account) could do was pretty much at odds with the whole concept of having a "Personal Computer". The whole idea of a PC was that the person sitting behind the keyboard was in control of what happened on that computer, and the operating system should deny them nothing.
As the DOS/Windows model evolved, password-protecting the computer was added, and eventually levels of user access were developed. But the kicker was that most software was developed by people with administrative access to their computers, and given that the shipped default of all Microsoft OSes up to and including Windows XP was to have one user who was an Administrator, there was no significant penalty for writing software that required Administrator access.
I've tried to run Windows XP as a limited user, and it was a pain in the shorts. So much software out there simply won't run, requiring me to keep a pseudo-admin account so I could "run as..." or just give up and promote my user account to admin.
Enter Windows Vista, which as a security model was great - you could run as a limited user and "escalate" permissions for certain software that asked for it. It's almost a copy of "sudo" for Linux. It was a significant step in the right direction, and it started pushing the concept of developing applications with "minimum necessary" permissions (storing user defaults in user accounts or user sections of the registry rather than system folders or HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, etc).
The vast majority of Windows software authors (including shareware authors) really do design their software to run just fine on a limited account. But there's a good bit of Admin-required stuff out there. Enough that most people don't even try running XP as a limited account, and those that do tend to give up after a while.
----------------------
Compare that to the Linux world. Very few users run as root in Linux. The shipped default of most distros is either to have a separate admin account or (in the case of things like Ubuntu) to use a "pseudoroot" - a root account that does not really exist but that the default user is escalated to upon demand (similar to UAC in Windows).
As a result of this, most Linux applications are built based on a more limited permissions model - they tend to store their application data in the /home directory of the user rather than scattered out with c:\Program Files (which is read-only to a proper limited user account) for example. If the majority of your users cannot run your software without significant reconfiguration of their machines, they'll squawk about it and you'll tend to change your code to fit the default model.
So, while neither model FORCES good programming habits, a Linux developer is more likely to be testing his or her code under a limited account, because that's what most of his or her intended users will be using.
It's not that one OS is inherently more secure than the other, necessarily, but that the shipped default has been set securely for so many years that the developers on a Linux platform are just used to only being able to run in userland, so they're more likely to write apps that way. Windows developers have not (until relatively recently) suffered a penalty for writing things to protected areas.
With the advent of Vista and Seven, Microsoft raised the issue in terms of how many UAC boxes popped up. And this was the cause of much angst and gnashing of teeth among users. But that move is slowly showing Windows developers that they need to be taking userland permissions seriously too, and that's a good thing in the long run.
Of course, not all security threats happen outside userland. You can always install software in \My Documents or /home and run it.
This is an AMERICAN researcher. We routinely drive 5-mile trips at 80MPH in a 55MPH zone even though it will save, at most, less than a minute of actual drive time.
Because it's the only one they still know how to make money on?
Pay-for online access is still in its infancy in the news business, and free competition is rampant because papers have traditionally made their money off the print editions and offered online access as an also-ran. Now the paper subscriptions are dwindling and they are still losing money online, and based on the outrage you see every time one of the papers decides that they need to actually make money on their online offerings you can see why they might be afraid.
Yeah, why would the consumer want to cook? Or heat their house? Or want hot water?
Silly consumers, buying overpriced necessities from a monopoly! They should just pay $5000 and convert all their appliances over to run on energy provided by the local electric grid.
Oh, wait, that's usually another monopoly....
Different markets.
NYT has competition. There are still plenty of news sources out there, even if you're in the market for local news in New York City. If they set their price too high, people will choose others. They aren't a monopoly.
Comcast is a monopoly, at least in my area. If Comcast sets their price too high, I could still choose others, but no one else is authorized to use the cheapest means to reach my house (coaxial cable), so it's not competition in any real sense. I can't go to anyone else and get wired Internet for any price, and wireless options are either slower or more expensive (and usually both). The only other possible competitor is our somewhat-new local phone company (Fairpoint) and they are imploding at the moment, so I don't expect to see any new service offerings from them between now and their Chapter 7 declaration, which many of us are expecting any month now.