You need to run the article through a ROT13 filter, followed by the Bible Code decoder and finally the Redneck filter, to get the URL of the real article. This encryption technique was developed to prevent the real server being slashdotted.
Pricing complexities are why multicast is taking so long to reach the home, even though it has been enabled clear across the entire backbone up to the local ISP level for over a decade. The virtual circuits costing issue is presumably part of why MPLS is also somewhat of a rarity. Of course, this does raise some questions, one of which is why - when the early Internet and IPSS were Government-funded, mostly Government-run, intended to be fault-tolerent and suitable for military use - cost was a factor at all. Big business did not enter the X.25 or TCP/IP markets until very late in the game, and most initially used gateways off their own internal network protocol. The Internet's native protocols should have had no impact at that time.
So why is it normal for the immaterial to matter more than the significant? It is normal, but it is also irrational and nonsensical.
They're "minders" (trans: heavies involved in gruntwork and bodyguard duties), and I guess the mental exercises involved in their legal landmines could be considered a mindfield (sic).
I was meaning that all non-human primates use things that they find (sticks, stones, etc) as extensions of themselves, that virtually all animals do that. You see chimpanzees pick up sticks and use them to collect termites, or pick up stones to break open nuts. This is what I would call a "proto-tool" - something that is utilized but not designed with a specific purpose in mind. However, a quick scan of the literature suggests that many in the natural sciences don't consider such objects to be really tools at all, merely something that was handy, convenient and nearby that could be used directly, as-is. Any object that had roughly the right properties would be as good as any other and used in roughly same way, with no attempt to improve on what's available or exploit anything special about the object.
In the case of the crow at Cambridge, it bent a piece of wire into a hook, to fish stones out of a container in order to get at the water in the container. This was interesting because it was indirect. Something that was not immediately usable, not particularly nearby and certainly not convenient was converted into something specialized that would solve a problem that was not a part of objective but which needed to be solved for the objective to be reached. The properties of the wire (the ability to be modified, yet hold a shape well enough to lift things) were most definitely used precisely to improve on what was available. Humans manufacture tools in much the same way - to do one thing, in order to accomplish something else.
And herein lies my puzzlement. The first case goes from problem to object to result, with no other steps involved. It is very direct, brute-force and immediate. The second case requires some sort of inference that one problem can be solved (getting to the water) by solving a different but directly connected problem (removing the stones) by solving yet another, not-so-connected problem (getting something to pick up stones) by solving another problem still (making something that can pick up stones). You now have a whole chain of problems, which must be solved in a specific order, which are indirect (to a degree) and require some measure of either lateral or logical deduction.
Evolution of ideas and methods is gradual, although I will insist that true invention (the creation of something new, with no immediate precursor) is possible at some level. Whether or not I'm right in that, though, giant leaps just don't happen. Steps are small and gradual. So gradual that hundreds of thousands of years passed during the early Stone Age in Europe with no measurable change in technology, art or culture. Yet even the earliest stone and bone implements known (axes, knives, spear points, the Atlatl, etc) were every bit as indirect and reason-based as the crow's hook, if not more so.
Going from a two-step rote-learned direct sequence to a multiple-step inference-driven deductive sequence requires multiple changes to take place. If these steps evolved, then past or present examples of an animal using something between these extremes should exist. Micro-scale evolution prohibits so many changes happening simultaneously, and our knowledge of the early Stone Age implies changes took place reluctantly and slowly. All the better, as this dramatically increases the odds of either a modern or ancient find of an intermediate step. So far, though, I don't know of any intermediate steps, either with humans or any other form of life. I may have missed something, I probably have, but if I am correct, then the entire switch in thinking occured as a single event. If so, then this switch is what is truly important when it comes to using tools, the extension of the body is merely the remnants of two-step thinking which also works with n-step thinking.
The Atlatl - a spear-throwing device that probably pre-dates human migration from Africa - is really not much more than third segment to the arm. A flint scraper not only fits neatly in the hand, but the edge is about where the fingernails would be if you weren't holding on to something.
Look back even further. Anthropologists have long dismissed the 2001-concept of primitive man suddenly discovering tools, preferring to suggest that there was no real "start" to the use of tools, that they merely evolved into being something recognizably manufactured. That being the case, one might well ask if the concept of a "tool" has much meaning, if it can (in principle) be traced back by continuous lineage to non-intelligent utilization of objects in their natural state.
On the other hand, we should consider whether that is always true. Are all tools manufactured by humans today merely descendants - direct but heavily evolved - of objects utilized by sea urchins (shell fragments for camouflage) or birds (just about anything to make nests)?
This is not a trivial question. We know crows can manufacture tools, we have extremely well-documented evidence under (quite literally) laboratory conditions. If we assume all tools have evolved from simpler tools, how do we explain the fact that even close relatives to the crows have only the vastly simpler proto-tools? Manufacturing is definitely not something we see a lot of in the avian world. Utilization, yes, manufacturing, no. This clearly isn't from a lack of intelligence, as studies on African Grey parrots show the avian brain to be quite capable of an impressive level of thought, including the abstract.
Nor do we see much evidence of tool manufacture in Chimpanzees. Studies appear to have shown rudimentary culture and primitive belief systems. We know Neanderthals had discovered stone tools and had gone at least as far as discovering music and the octave scale, long before anything recognizably human evolved. We know that chimps and gorillas are capable of learning sign language, so understand communication to a fairly advanced level. But neither has ever been seen to manufacture anything. Use, yes. Chimps use sticks to get at food all of the time, but using something that already exists is quite different from making something that would not otherwise have ever existed.
Are these evidence of a break in the chain? Evidence that there are actual leaps forward that must be made in their entirety or not at all? If so, then what these researchers have found is not enough. It's important, but it isn't enough. There is a gap, a gap between using and making that distinguishes the very few animals that have tools from everything else. That gap is what distinguishes tools from merely being an extension to the body, which all animals seem to be aware of and capable of using. If you don't explain the gap, then you have not really explained the human use of tools, you have merely explained the multi-cellular use of tools. A very different problem.
Which is why I said that it does indeed happen. It really does. Government activities, especially, tend to be highly secretive and Governments around the world have all been guilty of crimes. The British Government last year admitted to torturing and murdering German civilians in an undisclosed prison in London shortly after World War II. Notice the "after" bit. At least one political refugee in London has been killed by a poisoned needle on an umbrella. The South African Government provided a journalist's children with poison-soaked t-shorts. (Rest in peace, Donald Woods.) Then there's the drug-dealing that was used to help fund the arms-for-Iran fiasco.
The idea that a cyber-attack, whether a worm against individuals or an attack on infrastructure, could be Government-based is not therefore absurd. Clearly, Governments do very nasty things, have very few scruples and are not as accountable as they like to claim. But is it reasonable to blame them?
Not necessarily. Russia is run as much by crime syndicates as by the Government there. Big businesses can hire all kinds of people most would not want to associate with. We can't be sure where the worm comes from - the American Government has admitted it mistook an NMap probe for a Russian attack one time, why should we trust this "knowledge" any more than any of the claims we now know were totally false? And even if the origin was correctly identified, is that the origin of the worm, the hosting country for some zombies, or where someone ssh'ed into?
Even if someone 'fesses up, the number of exaggerated and fraudulent claims made to boost reputations is countless. We can't trust an admission and more than enough time has passed for someone to reverse-engineer the code, so even asking someone to duplicate the worm wouldn't prove a damn thing other than the person has a good memory... or the interrogator ensured the right answer was given. Easy to do, with subtle hints and the careful application of pain.
In short, we will never know the truth of the matter. Consensual reality is the only "reality" we can ever be certain of, including the fact that we can be certain that it's not (objectively) real.
Does it even matter, though? Not really. Better host-level and network-level security would significantly reduce the risks of any future problems. There are plenty of intrusion detection systems that look for abnormal activity and plenty of active HIDS/NIDS that can shut a firewall on an intrusion being detected. Plenty of other ways to keep worms out (or isolate an infected machine).
...are always a little suspicious. Either the person/gang is pretty obviously a very minor fish in a pond filled with Megalodon sharks, or the person/gang is conveniently impossible to reach. Not that this won't happen, but it's pretty much public knowledge that international gangs operate in the US and Europe with impunity. The odds that this one gang only exists in this one place doesn't fit what is known about Russian gangs or, indeed, what is known about cyber organizations of any kind. This sounds far too much like a call to inaction, a bid to avoid doing anything serious.
(Besides, if a minimum level of computer security was mandated, and critical machines were kept off public networks, cybercrime, worms and viruses would be reduced in quantity and effectiveness. The Government has a position open for Internet Czar - why is it not filled and why isn't it being used to push the importance of network security? Hell, I'd put in for the job if I thought I'd have a whelk's chance in a supernova of either getting it or getting heard afterwards.)
Neither the Sumerians nor the Semitic people who founded Babylon were indigenous. The Semitic peoples, who later also founded Ur and other major cities in the area, basically ripped the Sumerians a new one, keeping only the technologies of writing (they borrowed the Sumerian "alphabet"), mythology and some technology, but destroyed pretty much everything else. The Sumerians had been raided for centuries by nomads, some of whom conquered Sumeria for a while, so genetically speaking the Sumerians weren't even (biologically) Sumerians by the time of the rise of Babylon.
I dunno. If you supplied private information to the British Government, it might take centuries for anyone to filter it out from everything else that's getting accidently released.
Before that, the USA was arming Iraq to fight Iran. Some time prior to that, Iraq went through numerous coups, a British invasion, two monarchies and a partridge in a pear tree. Prior to the pear tree, Iraq was owned by the British. Actually, two distinct regions (Basra and Baghdad) were owned by the British. To save on ink, when drawing maps, they called the group "Iraq". Before that was the Ottoman Empire, who - ultimately - can be blamed quite reasonably for most of the current blood-feuds in Europe and the Middle East. Before that were the Mongols, who can be blamed for just about everything else. Before that, the Islamic forces of Khalid ibn al-Walid decimated the area and took it out of Persian control, who in turn invaded before they even became Persians. Nothing like getting ahead of themselves! Some time before that, Alexander the Great made a royal mess of the area. Before that, there were endless wars between the Assyrians, the Akkadians, the Sumerians (who were largely obliterated), assorted other nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes, and whatever culture lived there first of which there is almost no trace left.
In other words, there is no meaningful "first", unless you want to go back around 10,000 years. Almost everything that happened after that point was in direct retribution to what had happened before. That's one reason it will take a lot of effort to calm the region down - ten thousand years is a long time to build up grdudges and resentments -- and don't think a single one of them has been forgotten.
Getting back to the main topic, just as an aside, this is why societies can't survive for very long on a diet of paranoia, fear and resentment. Sooner or later, you'll get people who hate each other less than they hate some imagined collective enemy, and the shit will hit the fan at a speed approaching mach 2. I'm surprised that this sort of thing doesn't happen more often - students get an even rawer deal than most, even at the best of times, naturally form into groups, and generally have significant combined intellect and skills. This is probably the worst group to infuriate and should really be the first group to focus on getting support from.
There is some degree of truth to that. For example, the exact effects of a new drug aren't always clear until there have been several years of study - even after approval. It would not be particularly hard to use tracer isotopes in early pre-approval testing, and then use well-established imaging techniques to determine exactly what component of a drug affected what and how. I would not be at all surprised if this was already being done in some cases. You'd then obviously also need to use the same imaging techniques on the patient to determine what underlying mechanisms were responsible for the symptoms being observed.
A set of symptoms may have many, many causes (which is why there are many, many medications for "bipolar disorder") and ultimately it is meaningless to treat a symptom. A visible symptom is measurable, yes, but it has no independent existence, and not all symptoms are going to be outwardly visible. If you treat what is outwardly seen, then there may be all kinds of damage being done that won't be visible until much later. If you treat the problem at a much lower level, you also treat what you can't see.
In principle, genetic studies could reduce the problems and costs involved in imaging. If you know a specific gene impacts specific things, then corruption on that gene will impact (at least) that same set of things. It must. The impact could be broader, but it can't be narrower. With time and knowledge, it should be possible to link some specific types of damage to specific impacts to the components within the body. Since sequencing specific segments of DNA should be cheaper and quicker than using the very high-resolution imaging systems, it aught to be possible to get as good results (at best) more reliably and for more people.
In the case of, say, "bipolar", this is extremely important. Different treatments for bipolar will work with specific individuals but not for others. At present, doctors just try the different treatments more-or-less at random until something works or your brain explodes. (Ok, not literally, although I did lose colour vision for a while with one treatment, and another caused my blood pressure to sky-rocket temporarily.) I simply do not - and will not - believe that this is a viable approach to medicine in the long-term. If there is a way of using genetics to severely limit the options and have a good idea of what is most likely to work, then it should be pursued. To me, diagnosis of the symptoms is immaterial, it is diagnosis of the cause that allows one to speak meaningfully of a "cure", and perhaps of much more exact cures that don't try to solve over-broad ranges of problems that might look the same on the surface but be entirely unrelated mechanistically.
It also opens up the possibility of understanding why early attempts at gene therapy were only partially successful (and partially disastrous), maybe find ways of tailoring such cures to minimize risks, maybe find ways of quantifying what those risks are for different individuals. Let's face it, using a retrovirus to embed a full replacement gene or chromosome into DNA is going to be a bit of a sledgehammer method in some cases. If you can identify what those cases are and what alternatives would be subtler and safer, that would obviously be helpful.
Now, the parent post mentioned the animal kingdom. This would be the same animal kingdom that includes the Tasmanian Devil, which is at grave danger from going extinct due to a cancer-like growth that seems to be water-borne. The growth doesn't seem to affect any other organism. There is (currently) no known treatment. Once infected, death is pretty much guaranteed to follow soon after. Better biotech capability would lead to a better understanding of the agent, which the survivors could be protected against and maybe treated for. Better understanding of genetics could lead to understanding what made the Tasmanian Devil (and nothing else) susceptible, which could lead to a way to immunize all future populations by tweaking the genes. At prese
I'm not convinced it's coincidental that Google's research space was announced shortly before this project. I suspect Google is/was thinking along very similar lines. BLAST may be adequate for many things, but GoogleBLAST would be about what it would take to crunch any significant collection of entire human genomes.
Yes, but only some fraction of those will have both the genetic propensity and the symptoms of the condition. Some other fraction will have just the genetic propensity. Yet another fraction will have identical symptoms from an unrelated cause. If the overlap that has both is unknown, you have problems. If family history data indicates that it is likely to be one in ten, then the 0.993 drops to 0.0993. Of the fraction that have a genetic propensity, there may be N different possible genetic causes that have the same observable symptoms even though the mechanisms and pathways may be entirely different. So, rather than looking at 10 diseases, you are actually looking at 10 x N diseases. Even if you find someone who has both genetic cause and observable effect, I can't see any obvious way of either knowing this to actually be the case for that individual, as this experiment can have no control group, or any way of knowing which of the 10 x N diseases the person has, which is critical if this is to be useful in diagnosis.
TOSTOSTOS: The Open Sourceness Testing Open Source Tool for Openable Source Tarballs
ROSCROSC: ROSCROSC Open Source Checker Recursively Open Source Checks
YIARAFARACOSL: YIARAFARACOSL Is A Recursive Acronym For A Recursive Application Checking Open Source Licenses
P.S. SCO changed their copy. If the filename starts with linux-2.6, it prints "Owned By SCO" 250 times. I hear they plan to use their version when they appeal.
Why do biological names look like an explosion in an alphabet soup factory? At first, I thought this was because the classicist biologists had all learned Latin, but I think this vandalism, this hacking a branch off the tree of life reveals the true answer. The vandals ARE setting off explosions in an alphabet soup factory and writing down the words that form.
Yes, ultimately (no matter how the costs are nominally distributed) the whole of society is affected, either directly or indirectly, every time there is an attack via the vector of either privacy and/or security. "No man is an island" cuts both ways. As noted in this thread, any society, no matter how structured, is inherently highly inter-dependent or it is not a society. This makes each person's privacy and security (and, ultimately, mental and physical health, education and ability, as these directly impact what privacy and security is possible) the concern of society, at least to the point where society should do what is possible to maximize potential and the practicality of achieving that potential. It should be up to the individual as to what to do with that potential, hence the need for society to not just make it possible but also practical.
My knowledge of anthropology and sociology, the sciences of society, and of psychology, the science of the individual, are too limited to say how you'd go about maximizing the potential security and privacy of society as a whole, or how to get individuals to then take the time to effectively make use of that potential. I can say, with a high level of certainty, that it requires superior education. Knowledge is power, and power is key to turning a possibility into a reality. (This was noted by Plato, in his essay on democracy, which he says can only function correctly in an educated society.)
I can also say with moderate certainty that it also requires that common concerns have a common solution, and that paranoia (on the part of individuals or by authorities) is a part of the problem, NOT a part of the solution. Pessimizing produces less efficent results in science and engineering and risks introducing flaws, so it is reasonable to conclude that pessimizing a society will do likewise. That, however, requires better interfaces and better error management, just as it would in science and engineering.
Of course, none of this is free, and society ends up footing the bill for any of the better alternatives. However, one might argue that a better-functioning society will end up producing more useful work, so ends up covering (or even exceeding) the costs of self-improvement. Although everyone pays regardless, some solutions produce a return that makes it worth paying for. Question is, who decides what solution is worth it, and how? The self is at the core of American culture, for example, but this is a society-wide problem requiring an efficient societal solution. You can't change a culture just to fix one problem, even if it's not obvious if you could fix the (very significant) problem without doing so.
My preference would be to bite the bullet, invest in better quality (and more extensive) education for a much larger percentage of society, invest in social solutions to common problems (such as universal healthcare but to an equal or superior standard to the private healthcare that currently exists), and see what people do as a result. Absolutely no sane person would ever consider giving me the authority or the resources to try this, and I can't blame them. I sure as hell wouldn't vote for me, even if my ideas would work.
A loss of privacy could indeed lead to a loss of security, but a scam can equally well have the effect of you spending time to correct things (ie: it spends your time) and costing others - such as banks - money. Your security ends up unaffected, but only as a result of a transfer of the damage to time and money. Because the numbers can (almost) always be shifted around, I would argue that there can't be a direct correlation between any two variables, because that can never capture how your actions after and your safeguards before affected things. There's only a correlation if all the other parameters have fixed values, and the nature of that relationship will depend on what those values are fixed at.
(If all other parameters are set to zero, then security will be equal to privacy. If the sophistication of a transaction is great enough, security is inversely proportional to privacy, which is clearly an unstable arrangement, which is why security should always follow a KIS approach.)
Likewise, if you want both security and privacy, you can indeed have both but it can't be free. Increasing both must produce some overhead somewhere in the system. This might be perfectly acceptable, and indeed should be in most cases. (Most? Well, have you installed IPSec? User-side SSL certificates? Host and Network Intrusion detection software? No? Then you've sacrificed some measure of security and/or privacy to save yourself time, money, effort, or whatever. That may be reasonable, sure, but it means you're willing to compromise on privacy or security at some level.)
Yes, computer science is massively dumbed-down, needlessly. Yes, this is to bolster numbers. Quite stupidly, as you could get the same results by making CS courses cheaper to take. Computer scientists make more money, so get taxed more, so some of that surplus could go back into funding the courses. Cheaper courses, more people taking them, even if they are hard. It's simple market forces.
The "no" is with regards to comp sci being for a certain kind of person. It's for a certain kind of perspective, but anyone can learn to see things from any perspective they choose. It's not equally easy for all people, so the more people you want to have that perspective, the more appealing you need to make it. But that is very different from changing the perspective, which is what fee-driven universities tend to do. No. Leave the perspective alone. Then how to make it more appealing? After all, everyone hates numbers, right? Wrong. In fact, up until about the ages of 11 or 12, you'll find something like two to three times as many people absolutely love numbers, algebra, equations, algorithms and problem solving. (This is based on the fact that the number of boys who like maths stuff remains unchanged, but girls go from outnumbering boys as geeks younger than that to being virtually non-existent soon after.) If you ask people (and I have) over the age of 18 about their experiences in learning maths or science, guess what! You rarely hear complaints about the subjects themselves - it's almost invariably the teachers.
So? So, if you want to double the number of CS students and revert to a tough, purist syllabus, all you need to do is replace all the middle school teachers with people who have an interest in the subject and a passion for educating the students, rather than an interest in the paycheck and a passion for the students. Doesn't seem too tough.
(Of course, it's easier if the teachers are payed a living wage, or better, so that you can recruit talent rather than whoever is on the scrapheap of life.)
There is simply no correlation between the two. There is no function or relationship that can map one onto the other, in either direction. There aren't enough parameters. It might be possible to define a function f() with the parameters of security, privacy, base cost, cost per incident, ease of implementation, time of implementation, ease of use, and latency, such that the function (which will not be linear) produces a constant. I don't guarantee it, though. Individuals are too variable, between each other and even between moments for the same individual, and an 8 dimensional non-linear topology is too simple to capture that. Even the sci-fi notion of psychohistory didn't work on individuals, but security and privacy is all about interactions between individuals.
Living in the United States has given me a disturbing impression of the use of social security numbers. They are used to track all kinds of things. Many stores require an SSN for store cards. More than a few stores (mostly for higher-value goods) require SSNs for even regular purchases. Social security numbers are often included on driver's licenses and State ID cards (unless you specifically remember to ask for an anonymous number - and not everywhere allows you to do tha). The USA doesn't seem to have anything similar to the UK's bank guarantee card, and they use driver's license or State ID instead - exposing your SSN.
(I'm dual-national, which makes things easier for me. I work in the US because the UK has been totally incompetent in the IT arena for many decades now and the pay is pathetic. The usual brain-drain reasons. I do not consider America to have any credible notion of privacy, security or welfare, but realism has to apply. Those three don't pay bills.)
Slashdot Mirror
You need to run the article through a ROT13 filter, followed by the Bible Code decoder and finally the Redneck filter, to get the URL of the real article. This encryption technique was developed to prevent the real server being slashdotted.
So why is it normal for the immaterial to matter more than the significant? It is normal, but it is also irrational and nonsensical.
They're "minders" (trans: heavies involved in gruntwork and bodyguard duties), and I guess the mental exercises involved in their legal landmines could be considered a mindfield (sic).
In the case of the crow at Cambridge, it bent a piece of wire into a hook, to fish stones out of a container in order to get at the water in the container. This was interesting because it was indirect. Something that was not immediately usable, not particularly nearby and certainly not convenient was converted into something specialized that would solve a problem that was not a part of objective but which needed to be solved for the objective to be reached. The properties of the wire (the ability to be modified, yet hold a shape well enough to lift things) were most definitely used precisely to improve on what was available. Humans manufacture tools in much the same way - to do one thing, in order to accomplish something else.
And herein lies my puzzlement. The first case goes from problem to object to result, with no other steps involved. It is very direct, brute-force and immediate. The second case requires some sort of inference that one problem can be solved (getting to the water) by solving a different but directly connected problem (removing the stones) by solving yet another, not-so-connected problem (getting something to pick up stones) by solving another problem still (making something that can pick up stones). You now have a whole chain of problems, which must be solved in a specific order, which are indirect (to a degree) and require some measure of either lateral or logical deduction.
Evolution of ideas and methods is gradual, although I will insist that true invention (the creation of something new, with no immediate precursor) is possible at some level. Whether or not I'm right in that, though, giant leaps just don't happen. Steps are small and gradual. So gradual that hundreds of thousands of years passed during the early Stone Age in Europe with no measurable change in technology, art or culture. Yet even the earliest stone and bone implements known (axes, knives, spear points, the Atlatl, etc) were every bit as indirect and reason-based as the crow's hook, if not more so.
Going from a two-step rote-learned direct sequence to a multiple-step inference-driven deductive sequence requires multiple changes to take place. If these steps evolved, then past or present examples of an animal using something between these extremes should exist. Micro-scale evolution prohibits so many changes happening simultaneously, and our knowledge of the early Stone Age implies changes took place reluctantly and slowly. All the better, as this dramatically increases the odds of either a modern or ancient find of an intermediate step. So far, though, I don't know of any intermediate steps, either with humans or any other form of life. I may have missed something, I probably have, but if I am correct, then the entire switch in thinking occured as a single event. If so, then this switch is what is truly important when it comes to using tools, the extension of the body is merely the remnants of two-step thinking which also works with n-step thinking.
Look back even further. Anthropologists have long dismissed the 2001-concept of primitive man suddenly discovering tools, preferring to suggest that there was no real "start" to the use of tools, that they merely evolved into being something recognizably manufactured. That being the case, one might well ask if the concept of a "tool" has much meaning, if it can (in principle) be traced back by continuous lineage to non-intelligent utilization of objects in their natural state.
On the other hand, we should consider whether that is always true. Are all tools manufactured by humans today merely descendants - direct but heavily evolved - of objects utilized by sea urchins (shell fragments for camouflage) or birds (just about anything to make nests)?
This is not a trivial question. We know crows can manufacture tools, we have extremely well-documented evidence under (quite literally) laboratory conditions. If we assume all tools have evolved from simpler tools, how do we explain the fact that even close relatives to the crows have only the vastly simpler proto-tools? Manufacturing is definitely not something we see a lot of in the avian world. Utilization, yes, manufacturing, no. This clearly isn't from a lack of intelligence, as studies on African Grey parrots show the avian brain to be quite capable of an impressive level of thought, including the abstract.
Nor do we see much evidence of tool manufacture in Chimpanzees. Studies appear to have shown rudimentary culture and primitive belief systems. We know Neanderthals had discovered stone tools and had gone at least as far as discovering music and the octave scale, long before anything recognizably human evolved. We know that chimps and gorillas are capable of learning sign language, so understand communication to a fairly advanced level. But neither has ever been seen to manufacture anything. Use, yes. Chimps use sticks to get at food all of the time, but using something that already exists is quite different from making something that would not otherwise have ever existed.
Are these evidence of a break in the chain? Evidence that there are actual leaps forward that must be made in their entirety or not at all? If so, then what these researchers have found is not enough. It's important, but it isn't enough. There is a gap, a gap between using and making that distinguishes the very few animals that have tools from everything else. That gap is what distinguishes tools from merely being an extension to the body, which all animals seem to be aware of and capable of using. If you don't explain the gap, then you have not really explained the human use of tools, you have merely explained the multi-cellular use of tools. A very different problem.
The idea that a cyber-attack, whether a worm against individuals or an attack on infrastructure, could be Government-based is not therefore absurd. Clearly, Governments do very nasty things, have very few scruples and are not as accountable as they like to claim. But is it reasonable to blame them?
Not necessarily. Russia is run as much by crime syndicates as by the Government there. Big businesses can hire all kinds of people most would not want to associate with. We can't be sure where the worm comes from - the American Government has admitted it mistook an NMap probe for a Russian attack one time, why should we trust this "knowledge" any more than any of the claims we now know were totally false? And even if the origin was correctly identified, is that the origin of the worm, the hosting country for some zombies, or where someone ssh'ed into?
Even if someone 'fesses up, the number of exaggerated and fraudulent claims made to boost reputations is countless. We can't trust an admission and more than enough time has passed for someone to reverse-engineer the code, so even asking someone to duplicate the worm wouldn't prove a damn thing other than the person has a good memory... or the interrogator ensured the right answer was given. Easy to do, with subtle hints and the careful application of pain.
In short, we will never know the truth of the matter. Consensual reality is the only "reality" we can ever be certain of, including the fact that we can be certain that it's not (objectively) real.
Does it even matter, though? Not really. Better host-level and network-level security would significantly reduce the risks of any future problems. There are plenty of intrusion detection systems that look for abnormal activity and plenty of active HIDS/NIDS that can shut a firewall on an intrusion being detected. Plenty of other ways to keep worms out (or isolate an infected machine).
(Besides, if a minimum level of computer security was mandated, and critical machines were kept off public networks, cybercrime, worms and viruses would be reduced in quantity and effectiveness. The Government has a position open for Internet Czar - why is it not filled and why isn't it being used to push the importance of network security? Hell, I'd put in for the job if I thought I'd have a whelk's chance in a supernova of either getting it or getting heard afterwards.)
After that, it was occupied by members of The B52's, who were in pursuit of the third pyramid.
Neither the Sumerians nor the Semitic people who founded Babylon were indigenous. The Semitic peoples, who later also founded Ur and other major cities in the area, basically ripped the Sumerians a new one, keeping only the technologies of writing (they borrowed the Sumerian "alphabet"), mythology and some technology, but destroyed pretty much everything else. The Sumerians had been raided for centuries by nomads, some of whom conquered Sumeria for a while, so genetically speaking the Sumerians weren't even (biologically) Sumerians by the time of the rise of Babylon.
I dunno. If you supplied private information to the British Government, it might take centuries for anyone to filter it out from everything else that's getting accidently released.
In other words, there is no meaningful "first", unless you want to go back around 10,000 years. Almost everything that happened after that point was in direct retribution to what had happened before. That's one reason it will take a lot of effort to calm the region down - ten thousand years is a long time to build up grdudges and resentments -- and don't think a single one of them has been forgotten.
Getting back to the main topic, just as an aside, this is why societies can't survive for very long on a diet of paranoia, fear and resentment. Sooner or later, you'll get people who hate each other less than they hate some imagined collective enemy, and the shit will hit the fan at a speed approaching mach 2. I'm surprised that this sort of thing doesn't happen more often - students get an even rawer deal than most, even at the best of times, naturally form into groups, and generally have significant combined intellect and skills. This is probably the worst group to infuriate and should really be the first group to focus on getting support from.
A set of symptoms may have many, many causes (which is why there are many, many medications for "bipolar disorder") and ultimately it is meaningless to treat a symptom. A visible symptom is measurable, yes, but it has no independent existence, and not all symptoms are going to be outwardly visible. If you treat what is outwardly seen, then there may be all kinds of damage being done that won't be visible until much later. If you treat the problem at a much lower level, you also treat what you can't see.
In principle, genetic studies could reduce the problems and costs involved in imaging. If you know a specific gene impacts specific things, then corruption on that gene will impact (at least) that same set of things. It must. The impact could be broader, but it can't be narrower. With time and knowledge, it should be possible to link some specific types of damage to specific impacts to the components within the body. Since sequencing specific segments of DNA should be cheaper and quicker than using the very high-resolution imaging systems, it aught to be possible to get as good results (at best) more reliably and for more people.
In the case of, say, "bipolar", this is extremely important. Different treatments for bipolar will work with specific individuals but not for others. At present, doctors just try the different treatments more-or-less at random until something works or your brain explodes. (Ok, not literally, although I did lose colour vision for a while with one treatment, and another caused my blood pressure to sky-rocket temporarily.) I simply do not - and will not - believe that this is a viable approach to medicine in the long-term. If there is a way of using genetics to severely limit the options and have a good idea of what is most likely to work, then it should be pursued. To me, diagnosis of the symptoms is immaterial, it is diagnosis of the cause that allows one to speak meaningfully of a "cure", and perhaps of much more exact cures that don't try to solve over-broad ranges of problems that might look the same on the surface but be entirely unrelated mechanistically.
It also opens up the possibility of understanding why early attempts at gene therapy were only partially successful (and partially disastrous), maybe find ways of tailoring such cures to minimize risks, maybe find ways of quantifying what those risks are for different individuals. Let's face it, using a retrovirus to embed a full replacement gene or chromosome into DNA is going to be a bit of a sledgehammer method in some cases. If you can identify what those cases are and what alternatives would be subtler and safer, that would obviously be helpful.
Now, the parent post mentioned the animal kingdom. This would be the same animal kingdom that includes the Tasmanian Devil, which is at grave danger from going extinct due to a cancer-like growth that seems to be water-borne. The growth doesn't seem to affect any other organism. There is (currently) no known treatment. Once infected, death is pretty much guaranteed to follow soon after. Better biotech capability would lead to a better understanding of the agent, which the survivors could be protected against and maybe treated for. Better understanding of genetics could lead to understanding what made the Tasmanian Devil (and nothing else) susceptible, which could lead to a way to immunize all future populations by tweaking the genes. At prese
I'm not convinced it's coincidental that Google's research space was announced shortly before this project. I suspect Google is/was thinking along very similar lines. BLAST may be adequate for many things, but GoogleBLAST would be about what it would take to crunch any significant collection of entire human genomes.
Or, in other words, Indy's companions are always arguing and therefore geeks.
Yes, but only some fraction of those will have both the genetic propensity and the symptoms of the condition. Some other fraction will have just the genetic propensity. Yet another fraction will have identical symptoms from an unrelated cause. If the overlap that has both is unknown, you have problems. If family history data indicates that it is likely to be one in ten, then the 0.993 drops to 0.0993. Of the fraction that have a genetic propensity, there may be N different possible genetic causes that have the same observable symptoms even though the mechanisms and pathways may be entirely different. So, rather than looking at 10 diseases, you are actually looking at 10 x N diseases. Even if you find someone who has both genetic cause and observable effect, I can't see any obvious way of either knowing this to actually be the case for that individual, as this experiment can have no control group, or any way of knowing which of the 10 x N diseases the person has, which is critical if this is to be useful in diagnosis.
That rules out discovering what causes some people to become lawyers.
P.S. SCO changed their copy. If the filename starts with linux-2.6, it prints "Owned By SCO" 250 times. I hear they plan to use their version when they appeal.
Only if you accept the hypothesis that the MPAA are comprised of humans. I favour the theory that they are, in fact, a consortium of daleks.
Why do biological names look like an explosion in an alphabet soup factory? At first, I thought this was because the classicist biologists had all learned Latin, but I think this vandalism, this hacking a branch off the tree of life reveals the true answer. The vandals ARE setting off explosions in an alphabet soup factory and writing down the words that form.
My knowledge of anthropology and sociology, the sciences of society, and of psychology, the science of the individual, are too limited to say how you'd go about maximizing the potential security and privacy of society as a whole, or how to get individuals to then take the time to effectively make use of that potential. I can say, with a high level of certainty, that it requires superior education. Knowledge is power, and power is key to turning a possibility into a reality. (This was noted by Plato, in his essay on democracy, which he says can only function correctly in an educated society.)
I can also say with moderate certainty that it also requires that common concerns have a common solution, and that paranoia (on the part of individuals or by authorities) is a part of the problem, NOT a part of the solution. Pessimizing produces less efficent results in science and engineering and risks introducing flaws, so it is reasonable to conclude that pessimizing a society will do likewise. That, however, requires better interfaces and better error management, just as it would in science and engineering.
Of course, none of this is free, and society ends up footing the bill for any of the better alternatives. However, one might argue that a better-functioning society will end up producing more useful work, so ends up covering (or even exceeding) the costs of self-improvement. Although everyone pays regardless, some solutions produce a return that makes it worth paying for. Question is, who decides what solution is worth it, and how? The self is at the core of American culture, for example, but this is a society-wide problem requiring an efficient societal solution. You can't change a culture just to fix one problem, even if it's not obvious if you could fix the (very significant) problem without doing so.
My preference would be to bite the bullet, invest in better quality (and more extensive) education for a much larger percentage of society, invest in social solutions to common problems (such as universal healthcare but to an equal or superior standard to the private healthcare that currently exists), and see what people do as a result. Absolutely no sane person would ever consider giving me the authority or the resources to try this, and I can't blame them. I sure as hell wouldn't vote for me, even if my ideas would work.
(If all other parameters are set to zero, then security will be equal to privacy. If the sophistication of a transaction is great enough, security is inversely proportional to privacy, which is clearly an unstable arrangement, which is why security should always follow a KIS approach.)
Likewise, if you want both security and privacy, you can indeed have both but it can't be free. Increasing both must produce some overhead somewhere in the system. This might be perfectly acceptable, and indeed should be in most cases. (Most? Well, have you installed IPSec? User-side SSL certificates? Host and Network Intrusion detection software? No? Then you've sacrificed some measure of security and/or privacy to save yourself time, money, effort, or whatever. That may be reasonable, sure, but it means you're willing to compromise on privacy or security at some level.)
The "no" is with regards to comp sci being for a certain kind of person. It's for a certain kind of perspective, but anyone can learn to see things from any perspective they choose. It's not equally easy for all people, so the more people you want to have that perspective, the more appealing you need to make it. But that is very different from changing the perspective, which is what fee-driven universities tend to do. No. Leave the perspective alone. Then how to make it more appealing? After all, everyone hates numbers, right? Wrong. In fact, up until about the ages of 11 or 12, you'll find something like two to three times as many people absolutely love numbers, algebra, equations, algorithms and problem solving. (This is based on the fact that the number of boys who like maths stuff remains unchanged, but girls go from outnumbering boys as geeks younger than that to being virtually non-existent soon after.) If you ask people (and I have) over the age of 18 about their experiences in learning maths or science, guess what! You rarely hear complaints about the subjects themselves - it's almost invariably the teachers.
So? So, if you want to double the number of CS students and revert to a tough, purist syllabus, all you need to do is replace all the middle school teachers with people who have an interest in the subject and a passion for educating the students, rather than an interest in the paycheck and a passion for the students. Doesn't seem too tough.
(Of course, it's easier if the teachers are payed a living wage, or better, so that you can recruit talent rather than whoever is on the scrapheap of life.)
There is simply no correlation between the two. There is no function or relationship that can map one onto the other, in either direction. There aren't enough parameters. It might be possible to define a function f() with the parameters of security, privacy, base cost, cost per incident, ease of implementation, time of implementation, ease of use, and latency, such that the function (which will not be linear) produces a constant. I don't guarantee it, though. Individuals are too variable, between each other and even between moments for the same individual, and an 8 dimensional non-linear topology is too simple to capture that. Even the sci-fi notion of psychohistory didn't work on individuals, but security and privacy is all about interactions between individuals.
(I'm dual-national, which makes things easier for me. I work in the US because the UK has been totally incompetent in the IT arena for many decades now and the pay is pathetic. The usual brain-drain reasons. I do not consider America to have any credible notion of privacy, security or welfare, but realism has to apply. Those three don't pay bills.)