Unless of course you consider that the only problems that are worth solving on DNA computers are ones that are massively parallelizable.
You're wrong.
Specifically, you're wrong in the assumption that I haven't considered it.
Read the paper. If you don't understand it (I basically did, I have the background for it), well, you feel free to believe whatever you like, but have you got the science?
Amoung the other points made in that paper, parallelism isn't free; consult the paper for details. A well-designed, real world super-computer of today, and a commodity computer of tommorow, will beat any feasible DNA computer, no matter how perfect the problem is for DNA computing... and the paper even grants DNA computing its theoretical max capabilities given that the "soup" is already set up which is exceedingly unrealistic.
I compare the maximum possible performance of proposed DNA computers from the literature with current commodity electronic computers, and conclude that diffusion-driven, DNA hybridization based computers cannot exceed the performance of current electronic computers by more than a factor of 40,000, and probably by much less.
This doesn't speak to using DNA as a construction scaffolding, which I am not skeptical of, but DNA computing has never impressed me, and this gives rigorous arguments backing up my intuition, and based on my reading, I think he's not even discussing the setup time necessary for complicated chemical computing, just the processing time. Check out pages 70ish-77ish.
Using the discussion on page 76 in section 4.2 as a jumpoff, my problem with DNA computing is that it can never beat properly-designed electronic or optical computing, because DNA can never match the speed of the "molecules" used for information transport in such systems, electrical impulses or photons respectively, with that last one being rather firmly unbeatable. It isn't that DNA computing is impossible, it is that it can't be better than current or certainly feasible future systems (not even counting optical) for any computational problem. (It has, on the other hand, proven a certain utility for storing data in an organic system, but DNA doesn't so much compute in the body, as have computation done on it...)
It was strange watching A Charlie Brown Christmas last night, which is in large part a polemic against the commercialization of Christmas... from 1965.
It was immediately followed by an ad for Kohl's Christmas sale, Mervyn's (I think) Christmas sale, and a Christmas sale at a local car dealership. (Along with a couple of other commercials that weren't Christmas.)
I'm not sure I'd really want to advertise my Christmas specials during or immediately following the airing of A Charlie Brown Christmas.
Accounting isn't about "real cash" and hasn't been for a while. What you say is literally true, but in accounting terms, there was a real change to your assets, assuming of course that the $10 and $6 were commitments and not just some Slashdot guy saying something for a demonstration (because then the assets are $0 and $0, and no change of any kind takes place):-)
I've had to learn some accounting to implement accounting systems, and the disconnection from real money is on the one hand powerful; it gives a better view of the functioning of the business than the bottom line "how much did we make or lose?" But it is, as usual with power, correspondingly more dangerous, if you start believing the numbers are too real; the phrase "bottom line" has entered our vernacular for a reason.
In double-entry bookkeeping, you change in promise would cause a debit for us (and the corresponding credit for you), causing a drop in our assets of $4. Our cash wouldn't budge an inch, but the accounting changes.
It's worth looking into (google "double-entry bookkeeping"); I find it similar in some ways to physics, in the way that it is sort of based on a "conservation of assets & liabilities" law. Treated properly it will improve your understanding of money. Misunderstood and it will make it worse.
Re:Okay, I need to come out and say this..
on
Bad Science Awards
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· Score: 5, Informative
And we came up with a mix of different therapies.
So which one was it?
To what degree was each responsible?
Might one of them have still been a negative, and be better off without it?
Might the entire improvement be entirely attributable to one factor? Perhaps not one even listed?
Might the improvement even been due to none of these things at all, but would have come regardless?
Let me answer those questions for you: "You don't know, you don't know, you don't know, you don't know, you don't know", and yes, "you don't know".
I don't laugh, I don't deny the results, I'm glad he's doing so well. But you are in absolutely no position to be making any claims about the cause of his improvement. Even if his actions are responsible, which you don't know, you changed so many variables at once that even the statement "If you do these 24 things, your AIDS might improve. After all, this one person I know's did." is still nearly bereft of information. I mean, just being "a fighter" has been shown to be helpful almost across the board!
(Remember, one of the ways of measuring information is "the extent to which a fact is a surprise"; no surprise, no information. "Eating a pound of popcorn a day cures AIDS" is a surprise. "If you do a lot of stuff, and also improve your lifestyle in several ways at the same time, you'll be healthier" isn't much of a surprise for anyone who has been paying attention to health science, or, well, much of anyone else either.)
This in no way belittles your Uncle's accomplishments. Moreover, he may even be right and maybe he's sitting on the perfect treatment; it has happened before. But you aren't in any position to know. The plural of anecdote is not "data"... and you haven't even reached the "plural" part.
That is what science is about. Not denying that certain things have benefit, but testing and verifying and quantifying so we know, and in knowing become stronger and more capable. The reason herbal remedies are so often despised is that so many of them, when actually put to the test, fail miserably, not that they are herbal. Proof? Why, when the tests succeed, they are swiftly coopted... one can hardly list all the medicines that started out as herbal remedies. Obviously science hasn't got an intrinsic problem with such things, and anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something.
Science is far from perfect, but it beats the hell out of "I know this guy who sort of flailed around and tried a lot of things and one or more of them may or may not have had a significant impact on his disease", which is where you stand now. Again, it's great that he's doing well, but wouldn't you like to find out what actually contributed, and whether there might be something that works even better, so that others can actually benefit without potentially wasting time and money on things that are neutral or even harmful?
The way I get past the dunes and other modestly executed sfx shots is to think of it as a theatrical production--makes it much more palatable.
Oi, you beat me to it.
In fact, I am convinced this isn't just "the way to enjoy it", but "deliberately how they made it". The opening scenes clued me into this; the monologue by the Baron, well, "monologue" is just the right word and that's more a theatre thing. With that clue up front I quite enjoyed the series, plus I just watched it on DVD straight which usually helps.
But anyone who misses that or tries to watch it as a blockbuster movie is going to be very, very disappointed. I won't say whether it is right or wrong to demand that it be a "big" movie:-), but it is true that it is not one.
I thought of that, but everyone who flew on a large commercial jet today was told to shut off their cell phones, because it is unsafe, no? Cellphones of today can interfere less, but that doesn't seem to have changed the fear any.
So... what's changed to make it "safe" all of a sudden?
There are only three possibilities: One, since cell phones were invented and popularized, and it was realized that people would want to use them on planes, planes have been upgraded and/or redesigned so it is safe. As this is ferociously expensive and planes will last 30 years sometimes, I doubt this.
Two, the planes will be so upgraded and redesigned before deployment of the necessary support technology. Same objection.
Three, it was never unsafe and it was just a smokescreen for other issues, or perhaps no other issues at all, just baseless paranoia on par with being afraid of cellphone use while pumping gas.
I know which I've got my money on. Especially since if the planes were that fragile, accidentally turned on or left on cell phones, which almost certainly happens every day, would be taking down planes left and right.
But hey, you decide.
(I'm not a "trust no one" type, but I'm definately a believer in "trust, but verify".)
While what you say is true, I think you are partially missing the point, because what you say is part of the point.
None of the components included in the Python program are specifically P2P. But each of these components are common, powerful, and widely available; almost every, if not every, mainstream language you can think to name has each of these libraries easily available. This isn't news to Prof. Felten, it's an integral part of his point: These readily available libraries, for which no reasonable grounds can be come up with to eliminate them, are trivially combined into a P2P program.
It is not the same as "import webserver; webserver.run()".
Moreover, there is nothing XML-RPC or HMAC specific about the code, really, and you can't ban all RPC libraries, all hashing libraries, etc.
This isn't really a demonstration of the power of Python or anything, and I think Molester sort of misses that point, though turning it into a Perl Golf contest is cool and nerdy and all. (Besides, Pythonistas like me are generally not impressed with such hyper-concision, since one of the reasons we use Python is readability and maintainablity; as a game it is great fun though.) Prof. Felten's point needs to be understood more like an academic proof that a problem is intractable; reduce the problem to something like the halting problem with a 1-to-1 mapping, and you're done. Here, Ed Felten reduces "P2P" to (taking it generically) a language and OS (absolutely vital, can't be banned without banning computers entirely), networking/communication, a bit of string processing (re is convenient but any turing complete language can do that), and a hashing algorithm which probably isn't even vital to the process.
The point is to show that at the core, P2P can't be banned because there really isn't a "P2P" technology, it is an incredibly simple and straightforward application of the basic capabilities of a computer and a network connection. It has already been shown a rough equivalent can be written in Perl, and any number of others will probably pop up now. Languages like C++ or Java probably can't get down to 10 lines, but they will still be simple programs as programs in those languages go.
Vernor Vinge's Powers
on
The Year In Ideas
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· Score: 2, Interesting
In the "A Fire Upon The Deep" universe, the Powers of the higher computational zones are hypothesized to be able to perform powerful computations on minimal data.
The keyboard thing is a great example of that; with scanty data you can reverse engineer what keys are being tapped.
I'd bet with a bit more work you wouldn't even need to calibrate the device, just collect a lot of keypresses, classify them blind, and apply known probability distributions to the data. With that you could get a high probability analysis of the keypresses. (After all, if the two most probable passwords are "thebeatles" or "theb]atles", which do you think it is?)
A single picture or a short sound doesn't have a lot of data in it, but a long sound sample or video file has a lot of data in it. Expect this to be just the beginning.
Controls are slowly growing more sophisticated; as usual it takes a couple of generations to mature. I think the Dreamcast-style displays are going to come back with a vengence, with touchscreens.
In fact it is almost more exciting on a console than with the portable system. Sports, RPGs, FPSs, and innovative games would all greatly benefit.
Just a long-shot guess, but if the DS succeeds (and I now am pretty sure it will, though I'm still neutral on if it'll "beat" the PSP), I think we'll see it.
A hash is a derived work and in the case of a secure hash (such as are used in P2P networks) one that could not have been constructed without using the original work.
A hash is not copyrightable. It fails the creativity criterion, miserably. As such, even if it is a derived work in some sense (also highly questionable), it is not copyrightable.
I've played hundred of hours of first person shooters on computers. I've played several hours of first person shooters on XBox and the PS2. I played about a minute of Metroid Prime Hunters on a store demo, in an uncomfortably low position (I'm a tall person).
I'd rather play on the DS than the PS2 or XBox any day. It worked like a charm. I'm honestly flabbergasted that Nintendo was able to make it so I could just pick it up and pull of sophisticated shots; it took me far longer to adapt to the PS2 or XBox pads.
I'm still skeptical that the two screens will be a gimmick that is never fully utilized, but I am no longer a skeptic that the touchscreen is a useful input method for games, and I'd truly and honestly expect the generation after this next one (PS4, XBox3) to include touchscreens on the consoles. They are that cool. Wow.
My point, which on preview I almost lost, is that while the analog joystick is definately going to be cool, I think the touchscreen beats it.
I'm still reserving judgement until I see a PSP in person, but it's going to have to be damned cool to impress me as much in 30 for its usefulness in real games. (Graphics are cool, but they aren't everything.) Right now I totally can't afford either of them...
I honestly don't know what it is, and I want to explicitly say I'm not trying to draw global conclusions from this data. When I was doing this I was mostly concerned with getting it to work, not about why, if you know what I mean. I do know on a Windows box with 1.7.3 the timing was similar.
Researching this has been added to our "things to do when there is nothing else to do" list, but you know how often developers get there.
I'm conflicted; if there was an obvious speedup, I gotta think somebody would have noticed by now. But I also gotta think that even Mozilla, which needs a full-scale XML parser and does a lot of stuff with it, should be faster. Clearly, I'm wrong somewhere...
Interesting, a friend and I just stumbled across just this technique recently.
Some stats and info: I was actually sending a lot more data, on the order of 20-30KB. I tried Mozilla's built in RDF support, a customized mini-language parsed in javascript and retrieved with XMLHttpRequest, and a script loaded much like this (though I add some post-processing on the data).
Ignoring retrieval time, Mozilla's RDF parsing time was 2 seconds. My custom code took.4 seconds to parse my little language with one pass on the data (effectively optimal). (IMNSHO, there is something very, very wrong with Moz's XML handling in later versions, it is much, much slower than it should be, by at least an order of magnitude. It should not have lost to my pure JS solution, at least not that badly.) Sending down pure Javascript was parsed in.02 seconds, including post-processing. At this point I stopped trying to optimize, both because the timer resolution is only in milliseconds anyhow, and because the parsing was then swamped by the delay in XMLHttpRequest (which also seems a little slow in Mozilla... 400ms to retrieve something off of the local loopback interface? Here's a hint, do not use synchronous requests, that pushes the delay back up into the 2-second range, again, reasons unknown).
To confirm the numbers above are not typos, yes, sending JS parses a hundred times faster than RDF data (and is more flexible to boot, since you can use programmatic tricks, including easy-once-you-think-of-them tricks to simulate the ability to reference something you haven't loaded yet...).
All times are on Moz 1.7.3 on my lil' 500 MHz Duron laptop. Your milage will vary, but remember some of us still have crappy computers...
At this point, if you're doing RPC in the browser, I absolutely have to recommend doing what Google is doing. Nothing else comes even close; not only is it the fastest solution, it is very cross-platform, too. Just watch the escaping on the code that generates JS; JS allows octal constants for characters as a backslash followed by a number and I'm very conservative about what I convert.
Test, then irradiate. Fail the test, chuck the food. Expensive when the tests fail, but that's always true, and most of the time, the tests won't fail.
But that, of course, doesn't solve the real problem that feeding little Johnny radiated^H^H^H^Hoactive food will of course cause him to grow fifty feet tall and terrorize the neighborhood until the National Guard comes out and guns him down.
God, I wish the culture could just grow up about radiation issues. Maybe after the baby boomers who grew up on shitty B-movies die off we can have a reasonable national debate about it....
Umm... don't RSS files have a text summary of each webpage (usually the first paragraph), the URL to the file, and various other metadata?
Yes.
Don't you then go a retrieve that URL in your browser?
No.
You can, but it isn't automatic, nor is it even normal.
You still need to address the "versioning" and/or updating of the RSS on the P2P system.
A huge problem, completely (and correctly) unaddressed by BitTorrent.
You also still have the problems found with trackers today.
Only worse, because now you're using your trackers for no gain. RSS files are small. (Or they should be.)
It does offload the bandwidth for the individual pages to BT peers, so you could include larger images in your pages.
RSS does not have images embedded in them. Large images aren't the bandwidth problem, anyhow, it's the text getting hammered.
With all due respect, you don't know what you're talking about either. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but since you don't even understand the problem, why do you think you can solve it? Or criticising my explanation, no less?
BitTorrent works great for distributing media like ISOs. Folks, it can distribute "little" stuff, too.
No, it "can't". Or at least, it can't serve it with any benefit. Tracker overhead swamps any gains you might make. BitTorrent is unsuitable for use with small files, unless the protocol has radically changed since I last looked at it. In the limiting case, like 1K per file, it can even be worse or much worse than just serving the file over HTTP.
Inside the RSS file, users can try to get the webpage (and all its images, etc.) through the torrent first.
Oh, here's the problem, you don't know what you're talking about or how these technologies work. When an RSS file has been retrieved, there is nothing remotely like "get the webpage" that takes place in the rendering. The images are retrieved but those are typically too small to be usefully torrented too.
Regretably, solving the bandwidth problem involves more than invoking some buzzwords; when you're talking about a tech scaling to potentially millions of users you really have to design carefully. Frankly, the best proof of my point is that it was as easy as you say it is, it'd be done now. But it's not, it's hard, and will probably require a custom solution... which is what the article talks about, coincidentally.
You're looking for Python and Ruby. Both are so easy to learn that the correct answer to which one is "both"; try the tutorials for both and you'll probably know pretty quickly. The thing to look for is which philosophy suits you better.
The only thing out of that list you might think is missing is "generic programming", but in general that's because both languages support it so naturally that it isn't even a seperate paradigm. I know Python has libraries for people who insist on the trappings of generic languages, or who really, really need completely seperate functions for the various combinations of args, but I don't know much about them because while I've looked at such things, I've never encountered a situation where the "correct" answer wasn't a slighty more careful API, YMMV.
Unless you're doing intensive numerical calculations that can not be expressed in terms of the various libraries for numerical calculation, or are really focused on embedded programming, both are plenty fast for normal programming.
(I don't know about Ruby but there is a lot of progress towards optimizing Python being made, although I don't know if we'll ever quite get to compilation to pure native code. See PyPy, for instance, which has recently been funded so it ought to stick around and produce something. I expect that within another couple of years, through one avenue or another, the speed penalties of Python will be gone for all practical purposes.)
Granted, neither of these may currently perfect... but holy cow, are they better than C++. Unbelievably better, for the vast majority of uses.
If you think Blue people are like the people portrayed on "Friends" and "Seinfeld", you must not leave your Red community very much.
I live in Blue country. I don't consider myself Red or Blue. Nobody lives in a sitcom, and nobody fits into a single pigeonhole (the overarching theme to nearly every political post I make to Slashdot), but the politics deeply embedded in the evening news does match up to a lot of people round here. I've even met the wild-eyed political lunatic who knows you for months, treats you well, and likes you, until suddenly he hates you for finding out you voted Bush, and he ends up sending you impenetrable screeds about how Bush is Hitler (uh, no) for a couple of weeks before his common sense kicks in and he sees you as a person again. Fortunately, I know better than to extrapolate anything from that person.
More Blue people on the Internet, but more growth in Red communities, means Bush's slim margins are doomed.
And again, it's hard to tell. For every "Red" who gets the internet and gets their first exposure to intelligent left-leaning thought (as opposed to the soundbites of the TV news), there is a "Blue" who is getting their first taste of intelligent right-leaning thought. I know plenty of people online who have gone from effectively Blue to effectively Red. Everyone likes to think the ideological migration is solely in their (enlightened) direction, but the evidence just doesn't bear that out. We're not migrating towards the One True Faith, be it left or right, we're exploding across the ideological landscape.
So I see it like this: As the dominance of the centralized news media collapses, the era of the leftist dominance is also collapsing. Bush's days are numbered, but even more numbered are the current Democrat's days. (And all you have to do to see this is open your eyes to the current news. Whatever the Democrats will be in ten years it won't be the same party of today.)
Which of us is right? I don't know, but I got a strong hunch which of "soon the reprobate Reds will see the error of their ways" and "ideological diversity in all directions will increase" contains less wishful thinking and more realism.
I'd like to see a graph of Red/Blue county "ratings" for TV vs. Internet. I'd bet that Blue counties favor the Net more than do the Red, in hours spent, as well as growth trends.
I'd lay money on the former (hours spent), but the latter is touchier.
Of course, the primary reason has nothing to do with intelligence or any reason to be self-congratulatory about being in the Blue. The primary reason is the Red correlates with Rural which extremely strongly correlates with poor connectivity.
My father, who isn't even out in the true boonies like the Montana wilderness, can't get anything beyond dialup, and even that isn't that good. DSL? Nope. Cable? Nope. Any kind of wireless? Not reasonably. Satellite is too expensive to be worthwhile. He'd pay for broadband, he'd probably pay twice what they'd charge (just not the absurd rates for satellite), but they won't bring it out.
Internet growth in Red communities will let Red people get around the monopoly old media (newspaper, radio, TV) that feeds them the Republican propaganda that lets them so strongly distrust the direction of the country, the state of the economy, the war in Iraq, yet reelect Bush.
Actually, the TV carries predominantly Democratic/left propoganda. The Red people mostly understand, or are at least aware of, the Blue people, which come into their living rooms every night to sum up their views on the current state of the world... and despite this maintain their own views, a process only mysterious to people who only know Blue.
The people who need to escape from propoganda is... wait for it... everybody. (A lot of them can't even get cable, so no Fox for you to pin the blame on.)
If you're watching television and you don't think it's view is at all skewed, you're dangerously underinformed... just as badly underinformed as the you think the people you think you're so much better than are.
(There are reasons to like Bush and there are reasons to not like him and people will judge the various reasons differently. But if you think every bad thing said about him is true... holy shit, you're a moron, just as much as someone who believes every good thing, and for the exact same reasons. Yeah, I'm extrapolating from your post a bit here, but even if you are more balanced than you appear I'm know this applies to others.)
Slashdot Mirror
*mouth drops*
*eyes boggle*
Pop quiz, a DNA molecule (I'll be sporting and add "the smallest one possible") contains how many electrons?
How does your universe work, where the fundamental information element of the universe is the "slot"?
Unless of course you consider that the only problems that are worth solving on DNA computers are ones that are massively parallelizable.
You're wrong.
Specifically, you're wrong in the assumption that I haven't considered it.
Read the paper. If you don't understand it (I basically did, I have the background for it), well, you feel free to believe whatever you like, but have you got the science?
Amoung the other points made in that paper, parallelism isn't free; consult the paper for details. A well-designed, real world super-computer of today, and a commodity computer of tommorow, will beat any feasible DNA computer, no matter how perfect the problem is for DNA computing... and the paper even grants DNA computing its theoretical max capabilities given that the "soup" is already set up which is exceedingly unrealistic.
The Slashdot-relevant portion of the abstract:This doesn't speak to using DNA as a construction scaffolding, which I am not skeptical of, but DNA computing has never impressed me, and this gives rigorous arguments backing up my intuition, and based on my reading, I think he's not even discussing the setup time necessary for complicated chemical computing, just the processing time. Check out pages 70ish-77ish.
Using the discussion on page 76 in section 4.2 as a jumpoff, my problem with DNA computing is that it can never beat properly-designed electronic or optical computing, because DNA can never match the speed of the "molecules" used for information transport in such systems, electrical impulses or photons respectively, with that last one being rather firmly unbeatable. It isn't that DNA computing is impossible, it is that it can't be better than current or certainly feasible future systems (not even counting optical) for any computational problem. (It has, on the other hand, proven a certain utility for storing data in an organic system, but DNA doesn't so much compute in the body, as have computation done on it...)
Oops, I seem to have missed on the reply link. This was intended to go under this message, which actually says something about commercialization :-)
It was strange watching A Charlie Brown Christmas last night, which is in large part a polemic against the commercialization of Christmas... from 1965.
It was immediately followed by an ad for Kohl's Christmas sale, Mervyn's (I think) Christmas sale, and a Christmas sale at a local car dealership. (Along with a couple of other commercials that weren't Christmas.)
I'm not sure I'd really want to advertise my Christmas specials during or immediately following the airing of A Charlie Brown Christmas.
Accounting isn't about "real cash" and hasn't been for a while. What you say is literally true, but in accounting terms, there was a real change to your assets, assuming of course that the $10 and $6 were commitments and not just some Slashdot guy saying something for a demonstration (because then the assets are $0 and $0, and no change of any kind takes place) :-)
I've had to learn some accounting to implement accounting systems, and the disconnection from real money is on the one hand powerful; it gives a better view of the functioning of the business than the bottom line "how much did we make or lose?" But it is, as usual with power, correspondingly more dangerous, if you start believing the numbers are too real; the phrase "bottom line" has entered our vernacular for a reason.
In double-entry bookkeeping, you change in promise would cause a debit for us (and the corresponding credit for you), causing a drop in our assets of $4. Our cash wouldn't budge an inch, but the accounting changes.
It's worth looking into (google "double-entry bookkeeping"); I find it similar in some ways to physics, in the way that it is sort of based on a "conservation of assets & liabilities" law. Treated properly it will improve your understanding of money. Misunderstood and it will make it worse.
And we came up with a mix of different therapies.
So which one was it?
To what degree was each responsible?
Might one of them have still been a negative, and be better off without it?
Might the entire improvement be entirely attributable to one factor? Perhaps not one even listed?
Might the improvement even been due to none of these things at all, but would have come regardless?
Let me answer those questions for you: "You don't know, you don't know, you don't know, you don't know, you don't know", and yes, "you don't know".
I don't laugh, I don't deny the results, I'm glad he's doing so well. But you are in absolutely no position to be making any claims about the cause of his improvement. Even if his actions are responsible, which you don't know, you changed so many variables at once that even the statement "If you do these 24 things, your AIDS might improve. After all, this one person I know's did." is still nearly bereft of information. I mean, just being "a fighter" has been shown to be helpful almost across the board!
(Remember, one of the ways of measuring information is "the extent to which a fact is a surprise"; no surprise, no information. "Eating a pound of popcorn a day cures AIDS" is a surprise. "If you do a lot of stuff, and also improve your lifestyle in several ways at the same time, you'll be healthier" isn't much of a surprise for anyone who has been paying attention to health science, or, well, much of anyone else either.)
This in no way belittles your Uncle's accomplishments. Moreover, he may even be right and maybe he's sitting on the perfect treatment; it has happened before. But you aren't in any position to know. The plural of anecdote is not "data"... and you haven't even reached the "plural" part.
That is what science is about. Not denying that certain things have benefit, but testing and verifying and quantifying so we know, and in knowing become stronger and more capable. The reason herbal remedies are so often despised is that so many of them, when actually put to the test, fail miserably, not that they are herbal. Proof? Why, when the tests succeed, they are swiftly coopted... one can hardly list all the medicines that started out as herbal remedies. Obviously science hasn't got an intrinsic problem with such things, and anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something.
Science is far from perfect, but it beats the hell out of "I know this guy who sort of flailed around and tried a lot of things and one or more of them may or may not have had a significant impact on his disease", which is where you stand now. Again, it's great that he's doing well, but wouldn't you like to find out what actually contributed, and whether there might be something that works even better, so that others can actually benefit without potentially wasting time and money on things that are neutral or even harmful?
The way I get past the dunes and other modestly executed sfx shots is to think of it as a theatrical production--makes it much more palatable.
:-), but it is true that it is not one.
Oi, you beat me to it.
In fact, I am convinced this isn't just "the way to enjoy it", but "deliberately how they made it". The opening scenes clued me into this; the monologue by the Baron, well, "monologue" is just the right word and that's more a theatre thing. With that clue up front I quite enjoyed the series, plus I just watched it on DVD straight which usually helps.
But anyone who misses that or tries to watch it as a blockbuster movie is going to be very, very disappointed. I won't say whether it is right or wrong to demand that it be a "big" movie
I thought of that, but everyone who flew on a large commercial jet today was told to shut off their cell phones, because it is unsafe, no? Cellphones of today can interfere less, but that doesn't seem to have changed the fear any.
So... what's changed to make it "safe" all of a sudden?
There are only three possibilities: One, since cell phones were invented and popularized, and it was realized that people would want to use them on planes, planes have been upgraded and/or redesigned so it is safe. As this is ferociously expensive and planes will last 30 years sometimes, I doubt this.
Two, the planes will be so upgraded and redesigned before deployment of the necessary support technology. Same objection.
Three, it was never unsafe and it was just a smokescreen for other issues, or perhaps no other issues at all, just baseless paranoia on par with being afraid of cellphone use while pumping gas.
I know which I've got my money on. Especially since if the planes were that fragile, accidentally turned on or left on cell phones, which almost certainly happens every day, would be taking down planes left and right.
But hey, you decide.
(I'm not a "trust no one" type, but I'm definately a believer in "trust, but verify".)
It's there, it allows birds/ants to communicate in a method that we can't detect. Is that possible?
Possible? Everything is. But who needs it when the things we can detect seem to run the gamut? See the original formulation of Occam's Razor.
In other words, I really couldn't run this from a DOS prompt, could I? So, it doesn't really count as a "program".
I hate to do this but: LOL.
You need to (metaphorically) get out more.
While what you say is true, I think you are partially missing the point, because what you say is part of the point.
None of the components included in the Python program are specifically P2P. But each of these components are common, powerful, and widely available; almost every, if not every, mainstream language you can think to name has each of these libraries easily available. This isn't news to Prof. Felten, it's an integral part of his point: These readily available libraries, for which no reasonable grounds can be come up with to eliminate them, are trivially combined into a P2P program.
It is not the same as "import webserver; webserver.run()".
Moreover, there is nothing XML-RPC or HMAC specific about the code, really, and you can't ban all RPC libraries, all hashing libraries, etc.
This isn't really a demonstration of the power of Python or anything, and I think Molester sort of misses that point, though turning it into a Perl Golf contest is cool and nerdy and all. (Besides, Pythonistas like me are generally not impressed with such hyper-concision, since one of the reasons we use Python is readability and maintainablity; as a game it is great fun though.) Prof. Felten's point needs to be understood more like an academic proof that a problem is intractable; reduce the problem to something like the halting problem with a 1-to-1 mapping, and you're done. Here, Ed Felten reduces "P2P" to (taking it generically) a language and OS (absolutely vital, can't be banned without banning computers entirely), networking/communication, a bit of string processing (re is convenient but any turing complete language can do that), and a hashing algorithm which probably isn't even vital to the process.
The point is to show that at the core, P2P can't be banned because there really isn't a "P2P" technology, it is an incredibly simple and straightforward application of the basic capabilities of a computer and a network connection. It has already been shown a rough equivalent can be written in Perl, and any number of others will probably pop up now. Languages like C++ or Java probably can't get down to 10 lines, but they will still be simple programs as programs in those languages go.
In the "A Fire Upon The Deep" universe, the Powers of the higher computational zones are hypothesized to be able to perform powerful computations on minimal data.
The keyboard thing is a great example of that; with scanty data you can reverse engineer what keys are being tapped.
I'd bet with a bit more work you wouldn't even need to calibrate the device, just collect a lot of keypresses, classify them blind, and apply known probability distributions to the data. With that you could get a high probability analysis of the keypresses. (After all, if the two most probable passwords are "thebeatles" or "theb]atles", which do you think it is?)
A single picture or a short sound doesn't have a lot of data in it, but a long sound sample or video file has a lot of data in it. Expect this to be just the beginning.
AC's got it.
Controls are slowly growing more sophisticated; as usual it takes a couple of generations to mature. I think the Dreamcast-style displays are going to come back with a vengence, with touchscreens.
In fact it is almost more exciting on a console than with the portable system. Sports, RPGs, FPSs, and innovative games would all greatly benefit.
Just a long-shot guess, but if the DS succeeds (and I now am pretty sure it will, though I'm still neutral on if it'll "beat" the PSP), I think we'll see it.
A hash is a derived work and in the case of a secure hash (such as are used in P2P networks) one that could not have been constructed without using the original work.
A hash is not copyrightable. It fails the creativity criterion, miserably. As such, even if it is a derived work in some sense (also highly questionable), it is not copyrightable.
The PSP has a perfectly fine analog joystick.
I've played hundred of hours of first person shooters on computers. I've played several hours of first person shooters on XBox and the PS2. I played about a minute of Metroid Prime Hunters on a store demo, in an uncomfortably low position (I'm a tall person).
I'd rather play on the DS than the PS2 or XBox any day. It worked like a charm. I'm honestly flabbergasted that Nintendo was able to make it so I could just pick it up and pull of sophisticated shots; it took me far longer to adapt to the PS2 or XBox pads.
I'm still skeptical that the two screens will be a gimmick that is never fully utilized, but I am no longer a skeptic that the touchscreen is a useful input method for games, and I'd truly and honestly expect the generation after this next one (PS4, XBox3) to include touchscreens on the consoles. They are that cool. Wow.
My point, which on preview I almost lost, is that while the analog joystick is definately going to be cool, I think the touchscreen beats it.
I'm still reserving judgement until I see a PSP in person, but it's going to have to be damned cool to impress me as much in 30 for its usefulness in real games. (Graphics are cool, but they aren't everything.) Right now I totally can't afford either of them...
not-a-fanboy-of-either'ly yrs
I honestly don't know what it is, and I want to explicitly say I'm not trying to draw global conclusions from this data. When I was doing this I was mostly concerned with getting it to work, not about why, if you know what I mean. I do know on a Windows box with 1.7.3 the timing was similar.
Researching this has been added to our "things to do when there is nothing else to do" list, but you know how often developers get there.
I'm conflicted; if there was an obvious speedup, I gotta think somebody would have noticed by now. But I also gotta think that even Mozilla, which needs a full-scale XML parser and does a lot of stuff with it, should be faster. Clearly, I'm wrong somewhere...
Interesting, a friend and I just stumbled across just this technique recently.
.4 seconds to parse my little language with one pass on the data (effectively optimal). (IMNSHO, there is something very, very wrong with Moz's XML handling in later versions, it is much, much slower than it should be, by at least an order of magnitude. It should not have lost to my pure JS solution, at least not that badly.) Sending down pure Javascript was parsed in .02 seconds, including post-processing. At this point I stopped trying to optimize, both because the timer resolution is only in milliseconds anyhow, and because the parsing was then swamped by the delay in XMLHttpRequest (which also seems a little slow in Mozilla... 400ms to retrieve something off of the local loopback interface? Here's a hint, do not use synchronous requests, that pushes the delay back up into the 2-second range, again, reasons unknown).
Some stats and info: I was actually sending a lot more data, on the order of 20-30KB. I tried Mozilla's built in RDF support, a customized mini-language parsed in javascript and retrieved with XMLHttpRequest, and a script loaded much like this (though I add some post-processing on the data).
Ignoring retrieval time, Mozilla's RDF parsing time was 2 seconds. My custom code took
To confirm the numbers above are not typos, yes, sending JS parses a hundred times faster than RDF data (and is more flexible to boot, since you can use programmatic tricks, including easy-once-you-think-of-them tricks to simulate the ability to reference something you haven't loaded yet...).
All times are on Moz 1.7.3 on my lil' 500 MHz Duron laptop. Your milage will vary, but remember some of us still have crappy computers...
At this point, if you're doing RPC in the browser, I absolutely have to recommend doing what Google is doing. Nothing else comes even close; not only is it the fastest solution, it is very cross-platform, too. Just watch the escaping on the code that generates JS; JS allows octal constants for characters as a backslash followed by a number and I'm very conservative about what I convert.
Test, then irradiate. Fail the test, chuck the food. Expensive when the tests fail, but that's always true, and most of the time, the tests won't fail.
But that, of course, doesn't solve the real problem that feeding little Johnny radiated^H^H^H^Hoactive food will of course cause him to grow fifty feet tall and terrorize the neighborhood until the National Guard comes out and guns him down.
God, I wish the culture could just grow up about radiation issues. Maybe after the baby boomers who grew up on shitty B-movies die off we can have a reasonable national debate about it....
Umm... don't RSS files have a text summary of each webpage (usually the first paragraph), the URL to the file, and various other metadata?
Yes.
Don't you then go a retrieve that URL in your browser?
No.
You can, but it isn't automatic, nor is it even normal.
You still need to address the "versioning" and/or updating of the RSS on the P2P system.
A huge problem, completely (and correctly) unaddressed by BitTorrent.
You also still have the problems found with trackers today.
Only worse, because now you're using your trackers for no gain. RSS files are small. (Or they should be.)
It does offload the bandwidth for the individual pages to BT peers, so you could include larger images in your pages.
RSS does not have images embedded in them. Large images aren't the bandwidth problem, anyhow, it's the text getting hammered.
With all due respect, you don't know what you're talking about either. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but since you don't even understand the problem, why do you think you can solve it? Or criticising my explanation, no less?
BitTorrent works great for distributing media like ISOs. Folks, it can distribute "little" stuff, too.
No, it "can't". Or at least, it can't serve it with any benefit. Tracker overhead swamps any gains you might make. BitTorrent is unsuitable for use with small files, unless the protocol has radically changed since I last looked at it. In the limiting case, like 1K per file, it can even be worse or much worse than just serving the file over HTTP.
Inside the RSS file, users can try to get the webpage (and all its images, etc.) through the torrent first.
Oh, here's the problem, you don't know what you're talking about or how these technologies work. When an RSS file has been retrieved, there is nothing remotely like "get the webpage" that takes place in the rendering. The images are retrieved but those are typically too small to be usefully torrented too.
Regretably, solving the bandwidth problem involves more than invoking some buzzwords; when you're talking about a tech scaling to potentially millions of users you really have to design carefully. Frankly, the best proof of my point is that it was as easy as you say it is, it'd be done now. But it's not, it's hard, and will probably require a custom solution... which is what the article talks about, coincidentally.
You're looking for Python and Ruby. Both are so easy to learn that the correct answer to which one is "both"; try the tutorials for both and you'll probably know pretty quickly. The thing to look for is which philosophy suits you better.
The only thing out of that list you might think is missing is "generic programming", but in general that's because both languages support it so naturally that it isn't even a seperate paradigm. I know Python has libraries for people who insist on the trappings of generic languages, or who really, really need completely seperate functions for the various combinations of args, but I don't know much about them because while I've looked at such things, I've never encountered a situation where the "correct" answer wasn't a slighty more careful API, YMMV.
Unless you're doing intensive numerical calculations that can not be expressed in terms of the various libraries for numerical calculation, or are really focused on embedded programming, both are plenty fast for normal programming.
(I don't know about Ruby but there is a lot of progress towards optimizing Python being made, although I don't know if we'll ever quite get to compilation to pure native code. See PyPy, for instance, which has recently been funded so it ought to stick around and produce something. I expect that within another couple of years, through one avenue or another, the speed penalties of Python will be gone for all practical purposes.)
Granted, neither of these may currently perfect... but holy cow, are they better than C++. Unbelievably better, for the vast majority of uses.
If you think Blue people are like the people portrayed on "Friends" and "Seinfeld", you must not leave your Red community very much.
I live in Blue country. I don't consider myself Red or Blue. Nobody lives in a sitcom, and nobody fits into a single pigeonhole (the overarching theme to nearly every political post I make to Slashdot), but the politics deeply embedded in the evening news does match up to a lot of people round here. I've even met the wild-eyed political lunatic who knows you for months, treats you well, and likes you, until suddenly he hates you for finding out you voted Bush, and he ends up sending you impenetrable screeds about how Bush is Hitler (uh, no) for a couple of weeks before his common sense kicks in and he sees you as a person again. Fortunately, I know better than to extrapolate anything from that person.
More Blue people on the Internet, but more growth in Red communities, means Bush's slim margins are doomed.
And again, it's hard to tell. For every "Red" who gets the internet and gets their first exposure to intelligent left-leaning thought (as opposed to the soundbites of the TV news), there is a "Blue" who is getting their first taste of intelligent right-leaning thought. I know plenty of people online who have gone from effectively Blue to effectively Red. Everyone likes to think the ideological migration is solely in their (enlightened) direction, but the evidence just doesn't bear that out. We're not migrating towards the One True Faith, be it left or right, we're exploding across the ideological landscape.
So I see it like this: As the dominance of the centralized news media collapses, the era of the leftist dominance is also collapsing. Bush's days are numbered, but even more numbered are the current Democrat's days. (And all you have to do to see this is open your eyes to the current news. Whatever the Democrats will be in ten years it won't be the same party of today.)
Which of us is right? I don't know, but I got a strong hunch which of "soon the reprobate Reds will see the error of their ways" and "ideological diversity in all directions will increase" contains less wishful thinking and more realism.
I'd like to see a graph of Red/Blue county "ratings" for TV vs. Internet. I'd bet that Blue counties favor the Net more than do the Red, in hours spent, as well as growth trends.
I'd lay money on the former (hours spent), but the latter is touchier.
Of course, the primary reason has nothing to do with intelligence or any reason to be self-congratulatory about being in the Blue. The primary reason is the Red correlates with Rural which extremely strongly correlates with poor connectivity.
My father, who isn't even out in the true boonies like the Montana wilderness, can't get anything beyond dialup, and even that isn't that good. DSL? Nope. Cable? Nope. Any kind of wireless? Not reasonably. Satellite is too expensive to be worthwhile. He'd pay for broadband, he'd probably pay twice what they'd charge (just not the absurd rates for satellite), but they won't bring it out.
Internet growth in Red communities will let Red people get around the monopoly old media (newspaper, radio, TV) that feeds them the Republican propaganda that lets them so strongly distrust the direction of the country, the state of the economy, the war in Iraq, yet reelect Bush.
Actually, the TV carries predominantly Democratic/left propoganda. The Red people mostly understand, or are at least aware of, the Blue people, which come into their living rooms every night to sum up their views on the current state of the world... and despite this maintain their own views, a process only mysterious to people who only know Blue.
The people who need to escape from propoganda is... wait for it... everybody. (A lot of them can't even get cable, so no Fox for you to pin the blame on.)
If you're watching television and you don't think it's view is at all skewed, you're dangerously underinformed... just as badly underinformed as the you think the people you think you're so much better than are.
(There are reasons to like Bush and there are reasons to not like him and people will judge the various reasons differently. But if you think every bad thing said about him is true... holy shit, you're a moron, just as much as someone who believes every good thing, and for the exact same reasons. Yeah, I'm extrapolating from your post a bit here, but even if you are more balanced than you appear I'm know this applies to others.)