Most simple schemes people come up with to address this are perfectly doable with a free sound program. Play some music, record the area while you're playing the music, then try your great idea. Like, you might think you can start out with inverting the source file and feeding it into the recording with a delay and modified amplitude. If you're really curious about this problem, this is a better way to learn about the difficulties then reading people on the internet, as, in my experience, you're quite likely to be skeptical about the explanations anyhow. The best (and in some sense, only true) explanations involve a lot of math.
I can offer you this meta-rule, though: If it were so easy, it would already have been done. Many things that I see people posting on Slashdot about "Why don't they just do this thing?" are covered by this rule.
I wouldn't support the government banning them, because they are ultimately not much different than advertising many other products, especially since they are already required to read off the list of side effects. Free speech is important.
But I would support a social movement to make them socially unacceptable. In general, I don't see ads for products that you are literally incapable of safely determining if you need them as a good thing in a world where half the population has below-median IQ.
Ultimately, the harm of these ads is limited as long as doctors correctly do their jobs. To the extent that doctors are not correctly doing their jobs, ah, now there is a place for the government to step in. A social campaign to encourage doctors to use generics as applicable would also be good on many levels, and you might actually be able to get somewhere with this with a reasonable amount of effort, by targetting the insurance companies.
All books have to try to sell you on what they are writing about. It doesn't mean the marketing is true. It is true that threading has gotten two or three times easier, but shared-state threading multiplies in complexity geometrically in the best case, exponentially in the worse. (It's related to how much state is being shared amongst the threads.) A factor of two improvement means one more thread, at best. It doesn't mean you can use those primitives to write a Java program that can actually use 64 cores, and we're likely to see such machines on consumer desktops before the multithreaded programming world works itself out. (Unless they start holding back on cores artificially.)
It's like the marketing for Mozilla-based app development; all roses and revolution, until you notice five years later it doesn't do much more than it did five years ago, all the promises still ring hollow, and you still can't do anything more than write a Firefox extension. But you can still find the marketing material.
Speed and resource consumption. It is currently completely impractical to architect a program as several hundred or thousand processes communicating with each other, whereas Erlang works like this all the time. Simply creating several thousand threads with modern threading libraries often bogs down, and that's before they are even doing anything.
Other than that, the only difference is the difference between using OO in C++ and using OO in C, in that there's little to nothing you can't do in C (taking away C++ templates), but it's a different experience; a sufficiently large quantitative difference becomes a qualitative difference.
Couldn't the programs inherit the benefits of a multi-core system if the APIs they call are written to distribute the work to the cores? I know this probably isn't optimal but there must be some benefits from this.
In a word, no.
The more complicated answer is "Yes, in rare cases".
The problem is that programs written in your normal languages (C, C++, Java, C#, basically anything you've ever heard of) are totally synchronous; you can not proceed on to the next statement until the previous one completes.
Thus, trying to parallelize something at the API is virtually worthless. I don't win anything if my "drawWindow" or "displayMPEGFrame" function flies off to another processor to do its work, if I still have to wait for it to complete before I can move on.
(This can be helpful if you have two types of processors, so in fact 3D graphics APIs can be looked at as working just this way. But we already have that.)
You might say, "But there are some operations that I can do that with, like loading a webpage!" We already can do that. It's called asynchronous IO; you fire your IO request, the hardware (with software assist) does its thing, and you get the results later. You might even fire off a lot of things and process them in the non-deterministic order they come back. UNIX has been doing that for about as long as it has been UNIX, via the select call.
The easy stuff has been done. To write programs that actually fill a multi-core CPU's capacity is going to require a paradigm change. Shared-memory threading isn't looking very good (too complex for any human to correctly implement). There are several candidate paradigms, but there is no clear winner at the moment, some of them may never work, and they all have one thing in common: They look nothing like current coding practices with threads (because, as I said, that's looking pretty useless if we can't get it working in the decades we've had to play with it).
The claims I've seen so far:
Erlang-style concurrency: This is a ton of little threads that communicate solely through message passing, no shared state. On the plus side, it's got a working implementation that you can use today. On the down side (and this is my personal opinion), I'm not sure you really need the "functional" part of Erlang to use it (I think you just need threads that share nothing, and if you did that in a more conventional OO language it'd be fine), and Erlang's still quite short on libraries for anything outside of its core competency of network programming.
Pure functional programming: Pure functional programming has the idea of no mutable state, which allows you to do certain things out-of-order automatically without fear of the system behaving non-deterministically. A lot of people are still making bold claims about this one, but I tend to agree with the papers that show the amount of implicit parallelism in real-world programs is fairly minimal; you're going to need to tell the system where the parallelism for the forseeable future.
Stream programming: Probably ultimately a special case of Erlang-style processes, and only useful in certain domains (like sound processing).
And of course, I'd be remiss to not mention the "suck it up and use threads" school of thought, but my feeling is that if programmers in general haven't gotten it right after 20 years, the claim that programmers are especially stupid becomes less plausible, and "the technology is uselessly complex in practice" must be the right answer.
This isn't exhaustive, it's off the top of my head, and there are endless variations on each of those themes.
If I had to lay money down, I'd go with "a language that used threadlets like Erlang and rigidly enforced no sharing, in an OO environment" winning, which does not really exist yet. (Probably the closest you get today would be Stackless Python with a manual enforcement of sending only immutables across t
There are a couple of WiFi chips that had Linux drivers written in this way, and now have much better OpenBSD drivers written by a combination of reverse engineering and examining the Linux code. Some of these drivers have been ported to FreeBSD and, I believe, back to Linux again.
Taking this point in another direction, can anybody point to one example of this resulting in the sort of IP leak that these companies claim to be so worried about?
What drivers, other than 3D graphics, really have some sort of fantastic IP in them?
There's a world of difference between "ignoring link structure and becoming like the pre-Google search engines", which is what I was responding to, and "detecting Googlebombs and selectively ignoring the links", which is what both you and I think is going on. Had the OP made it sound more like the latter than the former, I never would have replied.
I thought "<a href="http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01 /27/147243&tid=109">controversial patent application</a>" covered the bases pretty well, it's both shorter and more informative than even your suggestion. (Well, without the space.)
(Links on the web aren't an incidental thing, they are a vital part of what is being communicated.)
With all due respect, a couple of sentences from Google are not enough to uniquely identify how they've changed their algorithms. Just because the only idea you could come up with is "ignoring link structure" doesn't mean that's what they went with. I'd expect that they came up with a way of characterizing Google-bombs and figured out how to discount that, which probably fixes some other SEO tricks too. I've got some guesses on how that could look, but none of them are informed enough to share, so I won't.
I had an HP-48G in high school, as did several of my class mates.
Probably the biggest advantage is the programming language, which is able to be closer to a macro language than the TI calculators.
There was one thing where I could generally work about twice as fast as anyone else though: When learning about resistors, you commonly get a problem with some resistors in series and in parallel, in complicated circuits, and you have to give the total resistance. The ability to smack the "1/x" button and just have the inverted resistance was a powerful advantage over traditional entry systems, where most people were manually working out sub-expressions or balancing a lot of parenthesis if they were brave enough to try to do it in one shot.
That was the exception, though.
Nowadays, I'd be somewhat less excited about the 48 than I was then, because nowadays I'd download Python and program away. At the time, it was my only real programming outlet. (How I wish I'd known where to find the right tools!) It does have the advantage of letting you program during class, if the class is boring you.
(Preview seems borken at the moment, so if you're reading this, cut me some slack.:) )
Ultima - Died thanks to EA who could'nt do anything right with it
Naw, Ultima died because every time technology advanced in capability by a factor of 2, Richard Garriot's ambitions increased by a factor of 5. In the end we were left with a tech demo.
Ultima 7 had to be split into two parts because it was too ambitious initially, but it was worthwhile. The program itself is notoriously hacky because of its custom memory management, but it mostly works. (And Exult means it works on modern machines, better than ever.)
Ultima 8 was too ambitious and while pretty, a lot was cut from the final game, including much of the fun.
Ultima 9 is almost the definition of an over-ambitious game. So much time spent on the tech that there wasn't much game left, and the story is just atrocious.
Ultima is almost the canonical example of why I don't really like the obsession with 3D; it becomes a design straitjacket. Anything you can't do in spectacular 3D isn't done at all. (My canonical example: Imagine a full 3D Nethack for the PS3, with no compromises whatsoever, full Nethack gameplay represented in glorious 3D. Good luck with that.) That really hurt Ultima because of all the details that were the spirit of it, most of which had to be cut in a full 3D world. Ultima 7 was the story apex, and Ultima 6 was the combat apex; combat was especially hosed by 3D. All solutions I've ever seen for running a full party of adventurers in 3D is a joke. (I haven't tried FFXII yet; waiting for a price drop while I play the many other AAA games I've missed. But in some ways I still bet it's a joke. Closest thing to an exception: Grandia 2 and 3.)
Article 51. The exercise by citizens of the People's Republic of China of their freedoms and rights may not infringe upon the interests of the state, of society and of the collective, or upon the lawful freedoms and rights of other citizens.
And guess who decides what interests the state?
For all the bitching about the United States you see on Slashdot, at least our government actually has to try to subvert the Constitution, and we have ways of fighting back. The US Constitution doesn't have an "Oh, and everything we promised you you have, you don't have." escape hatch built in. Technically, we have the exact opposite, whatever our dear Attorney General may think. (The closest thing to an all-purpose escape hatch is the Commerce Clause, and that's not without controversy, nor is it total; the Supreme Court has interpreted it more broadly than I'd like but they have rejected some uses of it.)
Something was lost between the SNES/Genesis days and the polygonal era that followed.
Personally, I think it's because the control schemes available for 3D games have enforced the same basic mediocrity of control onto all 3D games. We didn't notice because we didn't have anything better to compare with. As a result, there's a certain sameness.
Despite what you may think, this post isn't about a Wii, which I've only spent about 5 minutes with (on Excite Truck, no less) anyhow. It's about the difference between interacting with the real 3D world and the computer world; the differences are so large you almost can't see them anymore. The Wii may be a step in the right direction, but it's still just a step.
One example: I don't care how stupid your new real-world Army recruits are, even the ones that manage to blow themselves up never spent two minutes running full speed into the nearest wall while looking nearly straight down or straight up. But that's a normal part of learning a first person shooter. It shouldn't be.
On the other hand, a traditional gamepad maps into a 2D space quite well. Up => Up... what more could you ask for?
Doesn't "collectively selfish" strike you as a bit oxymoronic?
I'm perfectly happy with altruism stemming from a wise recognition that you are affected by the people and society around you. It's quite clear a lot of people aren't that wise and we all suffer for it; that they also suffer doesn't make it any more or less moral.
In fact, I'd reject the implied definition of altruism you (and several Slashdot posters) seem to be offering, which seems to be some sort of self-harming action that helps nobody and can't possibly be good for you in any way. That's not altruism, that's just plain evil, full stop.
Or, put another way, if you're going to stretch the word "selfish" that far, you've rendered the word meaningless and you are no longer allowed to use the moral connotations of the word to condemn any behavior since you've removed the foundation the moral connotations were built on. (Word games aren't morality.)
I consider it a distinct possibility that that is actually the end-game of these spams, and it will eventually kill them.
If a couple of people do what you describe, they will be feeding from the same trough as the image spammers, taking the same profits, scamming the same people. This will decrease the utility to the image spammers, because they'll be doing all the work but only getting some fraction of the gains. Eventually, they're likely to give up.
It's entirely possible this will settle into a steady-state of "no stock spam", since it will cease to be a big gain for any particular person and anybody can get in on the fun.
I'm in no hurry because even disregarding legality issues, some or all of these people will eventually be burned. But it might work for a bit.
Actually, we don't even have to show a zero-negative effect.
At this point, we can fairly safely put an upper bound on any negative effects of magnetic fields. If they were, for instance, instantly fatal, we'd know. If they increased your bone cancer chances by 1000 times, we'd know. The maximum negative effect must be pretty small, or we wouldn't be sitting here arguing about it, we'd be pointing to the 99.9%-confidence studies.
Meanwhile, we have very real benefits from the devices generating these fields. Refrigeration alone saves an unbelievable number of lives every year, and that's just one example.
The upper bound of negative effects of magnetic fields is certainly well under the benefits of the things that cause those fields, and at this point, most likely below the noise floor of any negative effects we could determine. And "below the noise floor" is as good a definition of "no negative effect" as any.
It literally is such a small concern that it wasn't worth my time to write this debunking. (However, I'm charging this time to "educating others", which is worth it; I have to live with the lunatics that insist on determining danger levels of things by whether or not your fear glands are spewing hormones into their bloodstream, rather than, say, actually finding out.)
When you lossfully compress an image, you are literally throwing away data. If you compress a 1MB image down to 100 KB, which with JPG is still very good quality, you are mapping many, many, many slightly different but ultimately very similar source images all onto the same compressed image.
Consumer cameras "waste" time starting from a full lossless image, and compressing it with JPG; the waste comes from collecting all of this data that has no bearing on the final result. (Anything that stores the.RAW of the image isn't doing this compression, it's storing the entire data set.)
The idea of this system is that by mixing the pixels together in a certain way, we can collect less information in the first place. For what would be a 1MB picture in a standard camera, you'd start off by only collecting 100KB of information, and then computing the image from your sequential numbers.
Two problems leap to mind:
I find it very, very hard to believe that "random" is the optimal approach. I would have thought there would be something much better than that for the bases, but I could be wrong. (There almost certainly is something better than "random" but it may not be better enough to justify the computational expense.)
JPG bases were carefully designed to match the human visual perception system and make it difficult for us to perceive the compression artifacts. The compression bases in this situation will have to be optimized for information gathering, which won't be the same as the human eye, which will result in somewhat inferior pictures, bit for bit. If you know what you're looking for, you can see it in their sample pictures; it's going to take a lot more bits to make that mosaic effect "go away" that it will to make JPG artifacts "go away".
A clever PhD may be able to solve both problems in one swipe, by using a clever mirror progression that happens to map better to the JPG standard. (You can't get it perfect though because you can't predict in advance how many bits go to one JPG block, that's computed dynamically.)
It works, and it's a clever algorithm, but I would definitely still question its practical usefulness over a conventional imaging system. I think the current trend of compression is temporary; the megapixel race should start to slow down (who needs 100megapixel pictures of their baby?) and then as cameras and storage continue to advance, we'll start getting uncompressed or losslessly compressed images instead. I could see this technology winning the race to be the first to produce a single camera that matches the image capturing power of the human eye, though; by manipulating the incoming light you may better be able to manage widely varying light levels.
(Finally, bear in mind before posting criticisms of how impossible this all is that they appear to have actually built a device that does this, which trumps skepticism.)
Oh, goodness yes, the Dreamcast as a whole is technically inferior to the PS2 as a whole.
The two interesting things are that the PS2 is nowhere near as superior as it was claimed to be when Sony was killing the Dreamcast with marketting, and the PS2 has some weird aspects where the Dreamcast is superior, particularly on the per-polygon quality, but really shouldn't have been. However, the PS2 can mostly make it up with more polygons, though I've always been stunned at how little graphical improvement Soul Calibur 2 shows over Soul Calibur 1, and SC1 honestly looks cleaner to me because of the superior per-polygon quality, even if there are fewer of them.
On the other hand, Katamari Damacy would probably have been much less fun on a Dreamcast, because it would have had far fewer objects most likely. The most detailed Dreamcast games don't really approach that.
The Dreamcast died prematurely, but it still wasn't going to be a winner in 2004, let alone 2006. It came out earlier, so that's not really a surprise anyhow.
The scale of offense available on the Internet, the abstractness of the attack, the inability to track it down to one person, all of these things differ, plus more I'm just not bothering to type.
What, you honestly think I've never seen the waitress metaphor? It hardly resembles the Internet at all.
(In fact, I almost never see an analogy that comes even close to capturing the issues of scale presented by the Internet.)
Why does our society insist on making women do things more like men?
To be fair, there's been a lot of the other way around, too.
The academics in question that push this sort of agenda do it because they work in disciplines that are so disconnected from reality that theories basically can't be tested. Then, through a normal human process of surrounding yourself with people who agree with you, these disciplines set up an echo chamber, and before you know it, they're all so busy congratulating each other that they never notice they've completely gone off the deep end.
The problems really begin when they get a position of power.
Gender studies is close to the canonical example of this, only as an extra bonus, what science there actually is on gender differences is completely ignored in favor of echo-chamber-based theories that range from the merely absurd to actively dangerous.
You want to learn about gender differences, go get a Psychology degree.
Computer networks aren't neighborhoods, superhighways, or libraries. Trying to shoehorn the metaphors onto a reluctant reality just means people endlessly argue about the metaphor and not the question at hand.
The question is, "is it illegal to disclose a web vulnerability?" You also ask "What are the boundaries of permitted probing?"
I don't have an answer, but I'll give you one aspect that is not covered by any real-world metaphor, yet is very important: If I go to a website and give it my credit card number, I have no assurance that they aren't doing stupid things with it. They aren't supposed to store it, but many sites, even large ones, have in the past and continue to do so. How much right do I have to poke around the website to at least try to gather some data about how secure the site is before (or after) I trust them with some of my most sensitive information?
That's an interesting question, but there's almost no real-world analog with modern credit card systems that don't have to record the full number. And please, don't try to shoehorn a metaphor onto this. Deal with the problem at hand, not a made up problem substituted for it, that "conveniently" happens to make the exact point you wanted to make...
Slashdot Mirror
The easiest answer to this question is, try it.
Most simple schemes people come up with to address this are perfectly doable with a free sound program. Play some music, record the area while you're playing the music, then try your great idea. Like, you might think you can start out with inverting the source file and feeding it into the recording with a delay and modified amplitude. If you're really curious about this problem, this is a better way to learn about the difficulties then reading people on the internet, as, in my experience, you're quite likely to be skeptical about the explanations anyhow. The best (and in some sense, only true) explanations involve a lot of math.
I can offer you this meta-rule, though: If it were so easy, it would already have been done. Many things that I see people posting on Slashdot about "Why don't they just do this thing?" are covered by this rule.
I wouldn't support the government banning them, because they are ultimately not much different than advertising many other products, especially since they are already required to read off the list of side effects. Free speech is important.
But I would support a social movement to make them socially unacceptable. In general, I don't see ads for products that you are literally incapable of safely determining if you need them as a good thing in a world where half the population has below-median IQ.
Ultimately, the harm of these ads is limited as long as doctors correctly do their jobs. To the extent that doctors are not correctly doing their jobs, ah, now there is a place for the government to step in. A social campaign to encourage doctors to use generics as applicable would also be good on many levels, and you might actually be able to get somewhere with this with a reasonable amount of effort, by targetting the insurance companies.
All books have to try to sell you on what they are writing about. It doesn't mean the marketing is true. It is true that threading has gotten two or three times easier, but shared-state threading multiplies in complexity geometrically in the best case, exponentially in the worse. (It's related to how much state is being shared amongst the threads.) A factor of two improvement means one more thread, at best. It doesn't mean you can use those primitives to write a Java program that can actually use 64 cores, and we're likely to see such machines on consumer desktops before the multithreaded programming world works itself out. (Unless they start holding back on cores artificially.)
It's like the marketing for Mozilla-based app development; all roses and revolution, until you notice five years later it doesn't do much more than it did five years ago, all the promises still ring hollow, and you still can't do anything more than write a Firefox extension. But you can still find the marketing material.
Speed and resource consumption. It is currently completely impractical to architect a program as several hundred or thousand processes communicating with each other, whereas Erlang works like this all the time. Simply creating several thousand threads with modern threading libraries often bogs down, and that's before they are even doing anything.
Other than that, the only difference is the difference between using OO in C++ and using OO in C, in that there's little to nothing you can't do in C (taking away C++ templates), but it's a different experience; a sufficiently large quantitative difference becomes a qualitative difference.
In a word, no.
The more complicated answer is "Yes, in rare cases".
The problem is that programs written in your normal languages (C, C++, Java, C#, basically anything you've ever heard of) are totally synchronous; you can not proceed on to the next statement until the previous one completes.
Thus, trying to parallelize something at the API is virtually worthless. I don't win anything if my "drawWindow" or "displayMPEGFrame" function flies off to another processor to do its work, if I still have to wait for it to complete before I can move on.
(This can be helpful if you have two types of processors, so in fact 3D graphics APIs can be looked at as working just this way. But we already have that.)
You might say, "But there are some operations that I can do that with, like loading a webpage!" We already can do that. It's called asynchronous IO; you fire your IO request, the hardware (with software assist) does its thing, and you get the results later. You might even fire off a lot of things and process them in the non-deterministic order they come back. UNIX has been doing that for about as long as it has been UNIX, via the select call.
The easy stuff has been done. To write programs that actually fill a multi-core CPU's capacity is going to require a paradigm change. Shared-memory threading isn't looking very good (too complex for any human to correctly implement). There are several candidate paradigms, but there is no clear winner at the moment, some of them may never work, and they all have one thing in common: They look nothing like current coding practices with threads (because, as I said, that's looking pretty useless if we can't get it working in the decades we've had to play with it).
The claims I've seen so far:
This isn't exhaustive, it's off the top of my head, and there are endless variations on each of those themes.
If I had to lay money down, I'd go with "a language that used threadlets like Erlang and rigidly enforced no sharing, in an OO environment" winning, which does not really exist yet. (Probably the closest you get today would be Stackless Python with a manual enforcement of sending only immutables across t
What drivers, other than 3D graphics, really have some sort of fantastic IP in them?
There's a world of difference between "ignoring link structure and becoming like the pre-Google search engines", which is what I was responding to, and "detecting Googlebombs and selectively ignoring the links", which is what both you and I think is going on. Had the OP made it sound more like the latter than the former, I never would have replied.
I thought "<a href="http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01 /27/147243&tid=109">controversial patent application</a>" covered the bases pretty well, it's both shorter and more informative than even your suggestion. (Well, without the space.)
(Links on the web aren't an incidental thing, they are a vital part of what is being communicated.)
With all due respect, a couple of sentences from Google are not enough to uniquely identify how they've changed their algorithms. Just because the only idea you could come up with is "ignoring link structure" doesn't mean that's what they went with. I'd expect that they came up with a way of characterizing Google-bombs and figured out how to discount that, which probably fixes some other SEO tricks too. I've got some guesses on how that could look, but none of them are informed enough to share, so I won't.
I had an HP-48G in high school, as did several of my class mates.
:) )
Probably the biggest advantage is the programming language, which is able to be closer to a macro language than the TI calculators.
There was one thing where I could generally work about twice as fast as anyone else though: When learning about resistors, you commonly get a problem with some resistors in series and in parallel, in complicated circuits, and you have to give the total resistance. The ability to smack the "1/x" button and just have the inverted resistance was a powerful advantage over traditional entry systems, where most people were manually working out sub-expressions or balancing a lot of parenthesis if they were brave enough to try to do it in one shot.
That was the exception, though.
Nowadays, I'd be somewhat less excited about the 48 than I was then, because nowadays I'd download Python and program away. At the time, it was my only real programming outlet. (How I wish I'd known where to find the right tools!) It does have the advantage of letting you program during class, if the class is boring you.
(Preview seems borken at the moment, so if you're reading this, cut me some slack.
Ultima 7 had to be split into two parts because it was too ambitious initially, but it was worthwhile. The program itself is notoriously hacky because of its custom memory management, but it mostly works. (And Exult means it works on modern machines, better than ever.)
Ultima 8 was too ambitious and while pretty, a lot was cut from the final game, including much of the fun.
Ultima 9 is almost the definition of an over-ambitious game. So much time spent on the tech that there wasn't much game left, and the story is just atrocious.
Ultima is almost the canonical example of why I don't really like the obsession with 3D; it becomes a design straitjacket. Anything you can't do in spectacular 3D isn't done at all. (My canonical example: Imagine a full 3D Nethack for the PS3, with no compromises whatsoever, full Nethack gameplay represented in glorious 3D. Good luck with that.) That really hurt Ultima because of all the details that were the spirit of it, most of which had to be cut in a full 3D world. Ultima 7 was the story apex, and Ultima 6 was the combat apex; combat was especially hosed by 3D. All solutions I've ever seen for running a full party of adventurers in 3D is a joke. (I haven't tried FFXII yet; waiting for a price drop while I play the many other AAA games I've missed. But in some ways I still bet it's a joke. Closest thing to an exception: Grandia 2 and 3.)
It's like they went out of their way to pick the most vague word possible.
For all the bitching about the United States you see on Slashdot, at least our government actually has to try to subvert the Constitution, and we have ways of fighting back. The US Constitution doesn't have an "Oh, and everything we promised you you have, you don't have." escape hatch built in. Technically, we have the exact opposite, whatever our dear Attorney General may think. (The closest thing to an all-purpose escape hatch is the Commerce Clause, and that's not without controversy, nor is it total; the Supreme Court has interpreted it more broadly than I'd like but they have rejected some uses of it.)
Pray tell good sir, do you know where I might obtain funding to study this potential breakthrough in biology?
Despite what you may think, this post isn't about a Wii, which I've only spent about 5 minutes with (on Excite Truck, no less) anyhow. It's about the difference between interacting with the real 3D world and the computer world; the differences are so large you almost can't see them anymore. The Wii may be a step in the right direction, but it's still just a step.
One example: I don't care how stupid your new real-world Army recruits are, even the ones that manage to blow themselves up never spent two minutes running full speed into the nearest wall while looking nearly straight down or straight up. But that's a normal part of learning a first person shooter. It shouldn't be.
On the other hand, a traditional gamepad maps into a 2D space quite well. Up => Up... what more could you ask for?
Doesn't "collectively selfish" strike you as a bit oxymoronic?
I'm perfectly happy with altruism stemming from a wise recognition that you are affected by the people and society around you. It's quite clear a lot of people aren't that wise and we all suffer for it; that they also suffer doesn't make it any more or less moral.
In fact, I'd reject the implied definition of altruism you (and several Slashdot posters) seem to be offering, which seems to be some sort of self-harming action that helps nobody and can't possibly be good for you in any way. That's not altruism, that's just plain evil , full stop.
Or, put another way, if you're going to stretch the word "selfish" that far, you've rendered the word meaningless and you are no longer allowed to use the moral connotations of the word to condemn any behavior since you've removed the foundation the moral connotations were built on. (Word games aren't morality.)
I consider it a distinct possibility that that is actually the end-game of these spams, and it will eventually kill them.
If a couple of people do what you describe, they will be feeding from the same trough as the image spammers, taking the same profits, scamming the same people. This will decrease the utility to the image spammers, because they'll be doing all the work but only getting some fraction of the gains. Eventually, they're likely to give up.
It's entirely possible this will settle into a steady-state of "no stock spam", since it will cease to be a big gain for any particular person and anybody can get in on the fun.
I'm in no hurry because even disregarding legality issues, some or all of these people will eventually be burned. But it might work for a bit.
Actually, we don't even have to show a zero-negative effect.
At this point, we can fairly safely put an upper bound on any negative effects of magnetic fields. If they were, for instance, instantly fatal, we'd know. If they increased your bone cancer chances by 1000 times, we'd know. The maximum negative effect must be pretty small, or we wouldn't be sitting here arguing about it, we'd be pointing to the 99.9%-confidence studies.
Meanwhile, we have very real benefits from the devices generating these fields. Refrigeration alone saves an unbelievable number of lives every year, and that's just one example.
The upper bound of negative effects of magnetic fields is certainly well under the benefits of the things that cause those fields, and at this point, most likely below the noise floor of any negative effects we could determine. And "below the noise floor" is as good a definition of "no negative effect" as any.
It literally is such a small concern that it wasn't worth my time to write this debunking. (However, I'm charging this time to "educating others", which is worth it; I have to live with the lunatics that insist on determining danger levels of things by whether or not your fear glands are spewing hormones into their bloodstream, rather than, say, actually finding out.)
When you lossfully compress an image, you are literally throwing away data. If you compress a 1MB image down to 100 KB, which with JPG is still very good quality, you are mapping many, many, many slightly different but ultimately very similar source images all onto the same compressed image.
Consumer cameras "waste" time starting from a full lossless image, and compressing it with JPG; the waste comes from collecting all of this data that has no bearing on the final result. (Anything that stores the
The idea of this system is that by mixing the pixels together in a certain way, we can collect less information in the first place. For what would be a 1MB picture in a standard camera, you'd start off by only collecting 100KB of information, and then computing the image from your sequential numbers.
Two problems leap to mind:
- I find it very, very hard to believe that "random" is the optimal approach. I would have thought there would be something much better than that for the bases, but I could be wrong. (There almost certainly is something better than "random" but it may not be better enough to justify the computational expense.)
- JPG bases were carefully designed to match the human visual perception system and make it difficult for us to perceive the compression artifacts. The compression bases in this situation will have to be optimized for information gathering, which won't be the same as the human eye, which will result in somewhat inferior pictures, bit for bit. If you know what you're looking for, you can see it in their sample pictures; it's going to take a lot more bits to make that mosaic effect "go away" that it will to make JPG artifacts "go away".
A clever PhD may be able to solve both problems in one swipe, by using a clever mirror progression that happens to map better to the JPG standard. (You can't get it perfect though because you can't predict in advance how many bits go to one JPG block, that's computed dynamically.)It works, and it's a clever algorithm, but I would definitely still question its practical usefulness over a conventional imaging system. I think the current trend of compression is temporary; the megapixel race should start to slow down (who needs 100megapixel pictures of their baby?) and then as cameras and storage continue to advance, we'll start getting uncompressed or losslessly compressed images instead. I could see this technology winning the race to be the first to produce a single camera that matches the image capturing power of the human eye, though; by manipulating the incoming light you may better be able to manage widely varying light levels.
(Finally, bear in mind before posting criticisms of how impossible this all is that they appear to have actually built a device that does this, which trumps skepticism.)
It's a little clue for those "in the know" that the described benefits are entirely imaginary.
Oh, goodness yes, the Dreamcast as a whole is technically inferior to the PS2 as a whole.
The two interesting things are that the PS2 is nowhere near as superior as it was claimed to be when Sony was killing the Dreamcast with marketting, and the PS2 has some weird aspects where the Dreamcast is superior, particularly on the per-polygon quality, but really shouldn't have been. However, the PS2 can mostly make it up with more polygons, though I've always been stunned at how little graphical improvement Soul Calibur 2 shows over Soul Calibur 1, and SC1 honestly looks cleaner to me because of the superior per-polygon quality, even if there are fewer of them.
On the other hand, Katamari Damacy would probably have been much less fun on a Dreamcast, because it would have had far fewer objects most likely. The most detailed Dreamcast games don't really approach that.
The Dreamcast died prematurely, but it still wasn't going to be a winner in 2004, let alone 2006. It came out earlier, so that's not really a surprise anyhow.
The scale of offense available on the Internet, the abstractness of the attack, the inability to track it down to one person, all of these things differ, plus more I'm just not bothering to type.
What, you honestly think I've never seen the waitress metaphor? It hardly resembles the Internet at all.
(In fact, I almost never see an analogy that comes even close to capturing the issues of scale presented by the Internet.)
The academics in question that push this sort of agenda do it because they work in disciplines that are so disconnected from reality that theories basically can't be tested. Then, through a normal human process of surrounding yourself with people who agree with you, these disciplines set up an echo chamber, and before you know it, they're all so busy congratulating each other that they never notice they've completely gone off the deep end.
The problems really begin when they get a position of power.
Gender studies is close to the canonical example of this, only as an extra bonus, what science there actually is on gender differences is completely ignored in favor of echo-chamber-based theories that range from the merely absurd to actively dangerous.
You want to learn about gender differences, go get a Psychology degree.
Computer networks aren't neighborhoods, superhighways, or libraries. Trying to shoehorn the metaphors onto a reluctant reality just means people endlessly argue about the metaphor and not the question at hand.
The question is, "is it illegal to disclose a web vulnerability?" You also ask "What are the boundaries of permitted probing?"
I don't have an answer, but I'll give you one aspect that is not covered by any real-world metaphor, yet is very important: If I go to a website and give it my credit card number, I have no assurance that they aren't doing stupid things with it. They aren't supposed to store it, but many sites, even large ones, have in the past and continue to do so. How much right do I have to poke around the website to at least try to gather some data about how secure the site is before (or after) I trust them with some of my most sensitive information?
That's an interesting question, but there's almost no real-world analog with modern credit card systems that don't have to record the full number. And please, don't try to shoehorn a metaphor onto this. Deal with the problem at hand, not a made up problem substituted for it, that "conveniently" happens to make the exact point you wanted to make...