ONLY MSN blocks it. Just as likely, wmconnect.com refuses incoming mail from any server that identifies itself as msn.com or hotmail.com (or at least without a valid reverse lookup) as an 'anti-spam' measure. And for certain, AOL is not going to cooperate with MSN to make sure that they are using an inter-operable standard.
You probably got the IP address of someone who had been using gnutella
Undoubtedly. But being bombarded by connection attempts (syn packets which were not answered) for around 3 hours from literally hundreds of different hosts - almost saturating a 28.8K connection - is NOT the normal pattern when this happens. This particular flood did not stop or even appear to be lessening off until I disconnected the modem temporarily and was assigned a new IP address. I have no idea how long this flood would have taken to die out if I had not disconnected.
Normally, when I inherit an IP address previously used by a gnutella user, there are requests from perhaps 10 or 20 hosts, mostly all in the first 20 minutes, and never any after an hour has elapsed.
So, I still wonder if this was part of the RIAA's new campaign.
I don't run gnutella or any other fileswap program. But my dial-up line was almost saturated for about 3 hours last night by attempts from multiple machines to connect to port 6346 - That's gnutella, isn't it?
How are these people going to make sure that the machines that they are trying to DDOS aren't somebody who just happened to be assigned the same dynamic IP address as somebody they actually targeting?
And for that matter, how are they targeting them? The variety of IP addresses the 'attack' came from was high and seemed to be all private users. Are they doing some sort of 'cache poisoning' to the gnutella database so that all requests for certain files are routed to a single slow dialup or something? So that they can effectively turn every gnutella user into a DDoS zombie machine?
It would certainly explain my logs from last night.
Ok - so someone's really decided there needs to be separate categories for "Atheist" and "None".
I took the time to look at the 'Official List' that the census bureau will record the responses with.
Of interest to note is that the numbers given by the census bureau for 'None', 'Atheist', 'Heathen', and 'Jedi Knight' are in a group all of their own relegated to the 890s - far away from the under 400 listed 'beliefs' (which I note includes Wicca and Pagan), not even grouped with 'Other Religions'.
However, I suspect that the person that picked the number 899 for 'None' may have been been punning in German - "Achhht! Nein! Nein!"
Since, as far as I know, no one is even remotely close to building plane-engine-type hydrogen-powered engines (fuel cells are about as close as its gotten) discussion about relative safety is all going to be wild speculation.
Actually, jet engines as used in aircraft would require very little modification to use hydrogen as a fuel. The basic engine mechanism itself is completely independent of the material combusted - the biggest problem is in keeping it burning, and hydrogen is easier to keep burning than JetA.
It could only explode if it were mixed with oxygen correctly
Unfortunately for this argument, 'correctly' for hydrogen is any percentage from 5% to 95% - all of those possible mixtures would explode. And given the mixing generated by crashing an airplane fueled by liquid hydrogen, an explosion (and further mixing) is pretty much guaranteed.
No, it would not explode as violently as a stochastic mixture - but it would explode.
As a further item, it's very difficult to keep hydrogen from leaking out of tanks of any kind - and most aircraft have tanks inside the pressure skin - and it doesn't take much of a leak of LH2 to get to the 5% level. Not only would knives need to be forbidden on the airplanes, but it's also likely that on a hydrogen fooled aircraft, they would need to confiscate cigarette lighters or anything that could cause a spark.
I wonder what kind of use the data gathered from this experiment will have for computer scientists studying neural networks. By studying mechanisms of connection formation in the real thing, maybe we could improve the performance of computer neural networks. Of course, the opposite should hold as well, where we could better model the living brain in computers. Unfortunately, I would guess that the optical camera can't pick up on patterns of electrical activity, so we wouldn't gain insight into firing patterns as the network operates. IANA computer scientist, though; does anyone know how practical this would be?
I don't know if they have some other method of determining the electrical activity not mentioned in the article, but it should certainly help in determining how the brain learns to recognize patterns. Does it actually grow new neural connections, or does it just change the behaviour of an existing connection?
Presumably, they are watching an area of neurons whose function has been at least generally determines - the part of the cortex that recognizes parallel lines and similar geometric relationships perhaps - and can apply stimuli that would load or change the behaviour of that area.
For that matter, maybe the brain starts out fully connected and the learning process doesn't grow new connections, just destroys the ones that it seem to provide the wrong answers? This might even explain some politicians.........
Ok, following myself up here, the link to 'Nature' is the link to the article, and the link to 'reports' is on Yahoo.
So I didn't look at both of them.:(
But even the Nature front page is vague (and I can't access the full article) - though it does add the information that there are two cesium gas samples - similar to that in a cesium clock? - that were entangled, but my comment about how did they determine there was entanglement still stands. There needs to be more information before I can even tell if this was anything more than a two-cavity laser effect.
The article has such an astounding lack of detail that it makes me wonder if this is another case of Yahoo News hacked to provide a story.
How did they determine that there was any quantum entanglement? Once you've got enough atoms, the average properties of both are going to be the same anyway:)
For that matter, what was the setup? And how come the slashdot article says the report is in 'Nature', but the link takes you to Yahoo?
If they really wanted to see if they could detect steganography being used in images, they should have just created a newsgroup crawler. Just search the alt.binaries groups for pr0n.
Not only are there multiple anonymous posters to the groups, I suspect that there are lots of people who won't admit to downloading them.
On the other hand, images like that are strictly forbidden in most muslim countries.......
Or you can use a commercially available CD of images (there are LOTS of 'stock image' CDs available) - all that needs to be done to distribute the reference images is to agree on their source.
Their report indicates one of three possible explanations for this
Perhaps we could add:
4. They are detecting simple watermarks generated by normal image processing tools such as Photoshop.
Is this a fourth possibility? After all, the watermarks are effectively embedded using steganographic methods, and the 'encrypted content' would simply be the creator's identification.
Although the study notes that watermarking is similar to steganography, but is generally embedded in a 'more robust manner', nowhere does it imply that they tried to determine whether the their detection tools were falsely detecting normal watermarking, or if they were allowing for the 'random bits' that would be created by watermarking. Indeed, they admit that a watermark will affect many of the same things that steganographic content will.
Nowhere in the study does it imply that they actually tried to check for watermarking in order to allow for or eliminate the watermarked images, just checking for data that seemed to fit the format for 'released steganographic tools'.
In addition, they note that verifying that an image has hidden content requires attempting to decrypt the hidden content using one of the 3 tools that they were testing for - and failed on all of the tests - so I take this as further evidence that they didnt' check for simple watermarks.
And a lot of posters on ebay will simply grab an image from a manufacturers site - and those images may well be watermarked.
To me, this seems like a "feel good" story designed to put people at ease. It has little actual merit.
Considering the number of 'free' web site providers that already claim to have ownership, copyright, etc, to everything posted on their sites, 'data that MIGHT be stored on someone elses computer' is well worth worrying about.
Not to mention how you will be charged for the right to have your system's data assimilated.
As this is described in the article, you don't need to write a worm program to tie up the worlds resources - just fake world administrator access and run an RC5 type client.
Presto, the millenium system replicates it across all systems!
And every time you change a component on your system, you automatically get a new Bill bill.
Let's see - 320 cabinets, 2 nodes per cabinet, 8 processors per node gives 5120 processors. And the stated capacity is 40 teraflops - 40,000 gigaflops. So that's almost 8 gigaflops per processor.
Now I'm trying to figure out what processor can actually give 8 gigaflops. It's not 2GHz P4 or 1.6GHz Athlon, they're about half the power needed even at those clockspeeds. Itanium has multiple way issue, but the clock speed isn't there.
For that matter, with any of those, the power consumption would still be under 1KW per processor - and 5MW is NOT
a 'City sized power plant'.
Maybe the Alpha isn't dead - doesn't API have a new version being manufactured by a Japanese company that might meet this speed?
Or perhaps IBM's 4 processor on a chip Power series might be counted as a single processor by the people writing the article? (That would bring it down to 2 gigaflops per processor - which is in the right ballpark.)
If Nazis are citizens, they have free speach rights. If Muslims are citizens, the same.
Ok, I'm answering a troll, but...
Well, supposedly at this point, meaningful conversation has been finished - but - Not all Germans were Nazis, and not all Muslims are extremists.
As a matter of fact, making war on innocents, women, and children in such terrible attacks is a very NON-Muslim act, and and will be condemned by any Muslim who truly follows his or her religion.
Then again, there are many who claim to represent all Muslims ranting against the U.S.A. - but would you take Jerry Falwell's statements to be representative of all Christians? The problem isn't the religion - it's the extremism.
And one of the worst extremists - presumably at this point BinLaden, but don't rule out Saddam or the PFLP - wants to turn this into a holy war - The U.S. of A. vs. Islam, and is depending on being protected by extremist Muslim nations simply because he is an extremist Muslim, and if too many people in positions of influence fail to allow for this, he might succeed.
If there's one lesson to be learned from history, it's that NOBODY ever actually won a holy war.
(This should be a reply, but the slashcode doesn't seem to be handling a reply to the right parent post here at the moment.)
There's no provincial election this month (or year even), so our wonderful budget cutting premier Mike Harris isn't in danger of being dumped.
There IS a minor by-election to fill a single seat this month though - so maybe this wouldn't have been quite so loudly trumpeted without it.
(I'm sorry, but this provokes a different rant than against the Ontario government.)
On the other hand, every time a new test or drug comes out that might help prevent a death, it gets promoted to many doctors (who often don't know the actual cost, nor does it cost them anything to recommend or prescribe it). The
test is then performed in a lab, that with Ontario's health system, is paid directly by the province of Ontario, so the patient never sees the bill either. (Even with the new drugs - the doctors often assume that someone has a drug plan - and most if you're on welfare, the government provides you with one). Meanwhile. the $3000/test pure profit seems to be typical of the return that's expected from these patents - and that they expect to be covered by the Ontario taxpayers.
Effectively, the combination of medical patents and government paid health care is allowing such companies to rewrite the laws of supply and demand in their favour, and can set the price arbitrarily high because (in theory at least, practice is yet to be decided by the courts) there is no other source of supply, and the demand is no longer dependent on the price.
And these companies can count on the idea that eventually (barring fatal accidents), we will all be old enough that some overpriced test or drug will be crucial in determining how long we can postpone our deaths.
If it was me, personally, having to pay for a necessary test, at the price difference given in the article, I'd buy the cheaper test, and ignore the patents - And the threatened lawsuit isn't about conducting the tests - it's about the government of Ontario not helping them make an obscene profit.
The patenting of existing genes is ridiculous by almost any non-governmental standard. Human genes can be discovered, or isolated, or better understood - but they are NOT an invention.
By all means let them patent a machine or technique for detecting those genes, and rule out even that if doesn't involve using something that's more of an invention than a trivial dependency on the gene itself (such as binding with the complementary sequence)- but the law that is being interpreted to allow patenting the gene itself needs to be revised or overidden.
Now let's see, there's a gene somewhere in the human genome that generates an enzyme that mediates creating ATP with the energy in glucose - If I can patent that gene, then can I sue anybody who uses that gene without paying me a royalty? Yes? Wonderful - That's going to cost everybody $10 a day for the right to eat, and I'll be as rich as Bill Gates in almost no time! (Or would as rich as Rambus Ink. be a better comparison?)
Re:How to manage popup windows in the new Mozilla
on
Mozilla 0.9.4 Released
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· Score: 1
I presume the bugzilla report is for adding UI configuration to the existing capability? Or is it broad enough to cover the new configuration item?
Meanwhile, I'd also like to be able to prevent launching a new window in an attempt to display an image from a site that has already been configured as 'never load images from this site':)
But the new configuration (when I get the phone line freed up for a few hours) should be an improvement in that it shouldn't NEED to have it's configuration tweaked for every new and annoying site.
Well, it wasn't intended that way - but then again, often anything that provokes a reaction may be read that way.:)
(Or am I responding to a subtle troll myself?)
You must know that most long distance telephone is digital these days and that the standard bandwidth for a voice line is 64Kbits/sec. That is why 56Kb modems are the end of the road.
Yep, assuming perfect transmission - and due to errors/corrections/noise most connections won't do better than about 43-46 Kbits. (And the signal power limit to 56Kb applies to US lines - European systems could run up the 64Kb figure you mention, and possibly Aussie systems also.)
There is, however, NO indication in the article to prove that their connection did, or did not, go through a digital channel. And if it was through a purely analog multiplexer on a very good system, then they might even have been able to use more than 256 analog levels for the data - in other words, although the bandwidth is limited, the symbol density might not have been, and the information transmission rate could be higher than the equivalent of 64Kb/sec - on that one particular circuit.
If these folks really did have a way to send more than 28.8Kb/sec over a modem connection they would be selling improved modems.
Provided that what is being sent can be quantified as 'bits' of data - but basically, you are quite correct in this.
My point, however, was that instead of using the limited bandwidth to send symbols - specific amplitude and phase information - at up to 8 bits per symbol, you directly encode chroma, intensity, and and efficient - chaos equation? - position data directly as the amplitude and phase signals, and gain efficiency by eliminating the 'digital wrapper' - link control, IP data, error correction, checksums etc. - layers of the format.
I simply don't believe your claims as to how modems work. All the modem drivers I have used involve a mapping to a serial port. In the old days they used to be a separate box connected to the com port. The PC is quite definitely not doing processing for the modem.
Again, you are correct that modems indeed often have their own firmware that converts between QAM/trellis coded symbols, and the binary data, and can appear to a computer as a simple bit pipe. But have you never downloaded a firmware update for your modem? I have several US Robotics 28.8 modems, some of which were upgraded with a firmware upgrade to 33.6, and others can be upgraded, again by firmware only, to X2 or V.90 operation. (But I never sent the $$ to USR to get the firmware do it, though.)
Even so, there are AT commands that can be sent to make the modem act as a simple analog to digital converter, at least in the modems that are 'voice enabled' - this is how they implement those 'turn your computer into an overpriced answering machine' programs.
Modems that are Windows only are very unusual.
If only that statement were true. Trying to buy a reasonably low cost modem for a linux box nowadays turns up all sorts of modems that are 'Windows only', and very few that are actual hardware modems. (Fortunately, the open source community has managed to come up with Linux drivers for some of the 'winmodems' - but this is exactly the sort of driver that I would expect them to modify to send their compressed video signal)
It is possible that the way the demo is cooked is to use a programmable modem of some sort. But there certainly isn't any way to get more than 28.8 kbits/sec of data to the vast majority users of legacy modems.
Again, you are correct - I strongly suspect that the demo was cooked, and their transmissions could NOT be reproduced with any arbitrary modem.
What's more, if my suspicions are correct, their data can't even be transmitted over an internet connection - it would have to be a dial-up direct to the video provider.
"Just because he's using a modem doesn't mean that he's actually transmitting digital data over the phone line. What sort of video compression can be achieved when you don't need (or get) bit-perfect transmission, but rather encode video properties directly in the analog signal?"
Several reasons
The article stated it was a 28.8 modem which by definition takes a digital input from one end (the computer) and an analogue one at the other (the phone line).
I've got quite a few 28.8 modems around. All of them are capable of inputting the modem's ADC output to the computer directly, without attempting to decode the QAM data.
And the common 28.8 winmodems DEPEND on the computer doing the decoding - so just because they used a 28.8 modem doesn't mean they didn't do their own analog coding.
Essentially, all a modem is, is a digital to analog converter plua an analog to digital converter bundled up with an approved interface to the telephone system. Just because you normally use the built in software (or the software that the modem manufacturer grafted onto your operating system) to convert analog signal into bit-perfect data doesn't mean that it HAS to be used this way.
The phone system is digital from the point where the line to the house hits the exchange.
This is essentially irrelevant. The phone system does not decode and recode the QAM data coding, instead it passes the analog values as best it can. The errors introduced into the analog data will show up as noise - which I've already stated the system could be quite tolerant of.
Even when the system was analog there were multiplexing schemes in place to get the maximum out of the available signal cable. Phase division, time division, frequency division you name it. Long distance lines have not been simple wire connections since the earliest days of the telegraph.
But all these multiplexing and coding schemes are dedicated to reforming the original analog data. It's actually much easier to code analog data, whether digitally or by frequency or time domain multiplexing, transmit it uncompressed, and accurately reform the original analog signal - which is what all these technologies you mention do - than it is to encode bit-perfect digital data in an analog signal.
Admittedly, the bandwidth is constrained by all of these technologies - but I am hazarding the guess that using an encoding technique that encodes the compressed video parameters directly up to the bandwidth limit would be more efficient than having to encode data bits at a bandwidth limited symbol rate using QAM/trellis coding which then requires additional coding and decoding to represent an encoded video signal.
Additional efficiency can also be gained simply by the idea that it doesn't matter if the symbol is misinterpreted - because adjacent symbols would represent a closely related video parameter and still be usable - so the total number of symbols that can be used can be increased without worrying about decreasing the the overall rate due to error corrections. Aa I stated before, any bit errors - read this as symbol misinterpretation - would show up as noise in the reconstituted analog video data - and if the scheme encodes parameters directly into the symbol space as I suggest, then the errors would not be significant.
I've looked at the articles - and while it seems to be likely a scam (such as a 5GB player application), one possibility does not seem to have occured to any of the other posters.
Just because he's using a modem doesn't mean that he's actually transmitting digital data over the phone line. What sort of video compression can be achieved when you don't need (or get) bit-perfect transmission, but rather encode video properties directly in the analog signal? Errors then show up as slight inconsistencies from the original color or position - but on motion video, this would be irrelevant.
The compression would still need the common video codec functionallity to remove redundancy, and send the changed areas more frequently than static images, but if the modem link mapped QAM data directly to position and color signals, it might just be possible to paint a fairly high quality picture.
For that matter, some fractal compression techniques are quite tolerant of minor errors in their probability and/or mapping factors - combine this with sending color information as analog data, and now you might be able to have a link that is unidirectional (the whole audio bandwidth can be dedicated to the video stream without need for a reverse channel) and error tolerant (no re-transmit on error or dropouts due to transient line noise).
A resolution of 28 DPI sounds low until you figure that a typical display is only in the 72 to 100 dpi range, and is viewed from only about two feet away. A screen 18 feet wide by nine feet tall is unlikely to be looked at that closely -- It's more likeley to be viewed from about 10 feet or more away - any closer would effectively prevent someone from seeing the whole picture. And at that distance, that's the same apparent size per pixel, or better, than even high end monitors and displays.
As for brightness - as you get further away from a uniformly emitting planar surface, the brightness per unit angular area remais constant - merely the apparent total area decreases. If it's bright up close, it's bright enough at any distance at which it is a significant part of your field of view.
And with a fairly high powered cluster to generate the graphics, this can probably render animations of various problems (e.g. turbulent airflow over a surface) in real time on a 1:1 scale - not to mention 3d walkthroughs of complex structures and simulations of advanced weaponry.
< If...it was public record of which officer accessed the information>
Would the police department voluntarily specify such a requirement?
I can see that the two possible answers to this question reduce to either "No" or "Hell NO!!! No Fscking WAY!!!"
You are right - This would require legislation to make such private database access publicly accessible. And given the track record of legislation as applied to anything in the least technical, it would likely be either ineffective or disastrous.
Slashdot Mirror
ONLY MSN blocks it.
Just as likely, wmconnect.com refuses incoming mail from any server that identifies itself as msn.com or hotmail.com (or at least without a valid reverse lookup) as an 'anti-spam' measure. And for certain, AOL is not going to cooperate with MSN to make sure that they are using an inter-operable standard.
Normally, when I inherit an IP address previously used by a gnutella user, there are requests from perhaps 10 or 20 hosts, mostly all in the first 20 minutes, and never any after an hour has elapsed.
So, I still wonder if this was part of the RIAA's new campaign.
I don't run gnutella or any other fileswap program. But my dial-up line was almost saturated for about 3 hours last night by attempts from multiple machines to connect to port 6346 - That's gnutella, isn't it?
How are these people going to make sure that the machines that they are trying to DDOS aren't somebody who just happened to be assigned the same dynamic IP address as somebody they actually targeting?
And for that matter, how are they targeting them? The variety of IP addresses the 'attack' came from was high and seemed to be all private users. Are they doing some sort of 'cache poisoning' to the gnutella database so that all requests for certain files are routed to a single slow dialup or something? So that they can effectively turn every gnutella user into a DDoS zombie machine?
It would certainly explain my logs from last night.
I took the time to look at the 'Official List' that the census bureau will record the responses with.
Of interest to note is that the numbers given by the census bureau for 'None', 'Atheist', 'Heathen', and 'Jedi Knight' are in a group all of their own relegated to the 890s - far away from the under 400 listed 'beliefs' (which I note includes Wicca and Pagan), not even grouped with 'Other Religions'.
However, I suspect that the person that picked the number 899 for 'None' may have been been punning in German - "Achhht! Nein! Nein!"
Since, as far as I know, no one is even remotely close to building plane-engine-type hydrogen-powered engines (fuel cells are about as close as its gotten) discussion about relative safety is all going to be wild speculation.
Actually, jet engines as used in aircraft would require very little modification to use hydrogen as a fuel. The basic engine mechanism itself is completely independent of the material combusted - the biggest problem is in keeping it burning, and hydrogen is easier to keep burning than JetA.
It could only explode if it were mixed with oxygen correctly
Unfortunately for this argument, 'correctly' for hydrogen is any percentage from 5% to 95% - all of those possible mixtures would explode. And given the mixing generated by crashing an airplane fueled by liquid hydrogen, an explosion (and further mixing) is pretty much guaranteed.
No, it would not explode as violently as a stochastic mixture - but it would explode.
As a further item, it's very difficult to keep hydrogen from leaking out of tanks of any kind - and most aircraft have tanks inside the pressure skin - and it doesn't take much of a leak of LH2 to get to the 5% level. Not only would knives need to be forbidden on the airplanes, but it's also likely that on a hydrogen fooled aircraft, they would need to confiscate cigarette lighters or anything that could cause a spark.
I wonder what kind of use the data gathered from this experiment will have for computer scientists studying neural networks. By studying mechanisms of connection formation in the real thing, maybe we could improve the performance of computer neural networks. Of course, the opposite should hold as well, where we could better model the living brain in computers. Unfortunately, I would guess that the optical camera can't pick up on patterns of electrical activity, so we wouldn't gain insight into firing patterns as the network operates. IANA computer scientist, though; does anyone know how practical this would be?
I don't know if they have some other method of determining the electrical activity not mentioned in the article, but it should certainly help in determining how the brain learns to recognize patterns. Does it actually grow new neural connections, or does it just change the behaviour of an existing connection?
Presumably, they are watching an area of neurons whose function has been at least generally determines - the part of the cortex that recognizes parallel lines and similar geometric relationships perhaps - and can apply stimuli that would load or change the behaviour of that area.
For that matter, maybe the brain starts out fully connected and the learning process doesn't grow new connections, just destroys the ones that it seem to provide the wrong answers? This might even explain some politicians.........
Ok, following myself up here, the link to 'Nature' is the link to the article, and the link to 'reports' is on Yahoo.
:(
So I didn't look at both of them.
But even the Nature front page is vague (and I can't access the full article) - though it does add the information that there are two cesium gas samples - similar to that in a cesium clock? - that were entangled, but my comment about how did they determine there was entanglement still stands. There needs to be more information before I can even tell if this was anything more than a two-cavity laser effect.
The article has such an astounding lack of detail that it makes me wonder if this is another case of Yahoo News hacked to provide a story.
:)
How did they determine that there was any quantum entanglement? Once you've got enough atoms, the average properties of both are going to be the same anyway
For that matter, what was the setup? And how come the slashdot article says the report is in 'Nature', but the link takes you to Yahoo?
If they really wanted to see if they could detect steganography being used in images, they should have just created a newsgroup crawler. Just search the alt.binaries groups for pr0n.
Not only are there multiple anonymous posters to the groups, I suspect that there are lots of people who won't admit to downloading them.
On the other hand, images like that are strictly forbidden in most muslim countries.......
Or you can use a commercially available CD of images (there are LOTS of 'stock image' CDs available) - all that needs to be done to distribute the reference images is to agree on their source.
Their report indicates one of three possible explanations for this
Perhaps we could add:
4. They are detecting simple watermarks generated by normal image processing tools such as Photoshop.
Is this a fourth possibility? After all, the watermarks are effectively embedded using steganographic methods, and the 'encrypted content' would simply be the creator's identification.
Although the study notes that watermarking is similar to steganography, but is generally embedded in a 'more robust manner', nowhere does it imply that they tried to determine whether the their detection tools were falsely detecting normal watermarking, or if they were allowing for the 'random bits' that would be created by watermarking. Indeed, they admit that a watermark will affect many of the same things that steganographic content will.
Nowhere in the study does it imply that they actually tried to check for watermarking in order to allow for or eliminate the watermarked images, just checking for data that seemed to fit the format for 'released steganographic tools'.
In addition, they note that verifying that an image has hidden content requires attempting to decrypt the hidden content using one of the 3 tools that they were testing for - and failed on all of the tests - so I take this as further evidence that they didnt' check for simple watermarks.
And a lot of posters on ebay will simply grab an image from a manufacturers site - and those images may well be watermarked.
To me, this seems like a "feel good" story designed to put people at ease. It has little actual merit.
I agree.
Considering the number of 'free' web site providers that already claim to have ownership, copyright, etc, to everything posted on their sites, 'data that MIGHT be stored on someone elses computer' is well worth worrying about.
Not to mention how you will be charged for the right to have your system's data assimilated.
As this is described in the article, you don't need to write a worm program to tie up the worlds resources - just fake world administrator access and run an RC5 type client.
Presto, the millenium system replicates it across all systems!
And every time you change a component on your system, you automatically get a new Bill bill.
Let's see - 320 cabinets, 2 nodes per cabinet, 8 processors per node gives 5120 processors. And the stated capacity is 40 teraflops - 40,000 gigaflops. So that's almost 8 gigaflops per processor.
Now I'm trying to figure out what processor can actually give 8 gigaflops. It's not 2GHz P4 or 1.6GHz Athlon, they're about half the power needed even at those clockspeeds. Itanium has multiple way issue, but the clock speed isn't there.
For that matter, with any of those, the power consumption would still be under 1KW per processor - and 5MW is NOT
a 'City sized power plant'.
Maybe the Alpha isn't dead - doesn't API have a new version being manufactured by a Japanese company that might meet this speed?
Or perhaps IBM's 4 processor on a chip Power series might be counted as a single processor by the people writing the article? (That would bring it down to 2 gigaflops per processor - which is in the right ballpark.)
If Nazis are citizens, they have free speach rights. If Muslims are citizens, the same.
Ok, I'm answering a troll, but...
Well, supposedly at this point, meaningful conversation has been finished - but - Not all Germans were Nazis, and not all Muslims are extremists.
As a matter of fact, making war on innocents, women, and children in such terrible attacks is a very NON-Muslim act, and and will be condemned by any Muslim who truly follows his or her religion.
Then again, there are many who claim to represent all Muslims ranting against the U.S.A. - but would you take Jerry Falwell's statements to be representative of all Christians? The problem isn't the religion - it's the extremism.
And one of the worst extremists - presumably at this point BinLaden, but don't rule out Saddam or the PFLP - wants to turn this into a holy war - The U.S. of A. vs. Islam, and is depending on being protected by extremist Muslim nations simply because he is an extremist Muslim, and if too many people in positions of influence fail to allow for this, he might succeed.
If there's one lesson to be learned from history, it's that NOBODY ever actually won a holy war.
(This should be a reply, but the slashcode doesn't seem to be handling a reply to the right parent post here at the moment.)
There's no provincial election this month (or year even), so our wonderful budget cutting premier Mike Harris isn't in danger of being dumped.
There IS a minor by-election to fill a single seat this month though - so maybe this wouldn't have been quite so loudly trumpeted without it.
(I'm sorry, but this provokes a different rant than against the Ontario government.)
On the other hand, every time a new test or drug comes out that might help prevent a death, it gets promoted to many doctors (who often don't know the actual cost, nor does it cost them anything to recommend or prescribe it). The
test is then performed in a lab, that with Ontario's health system, is paid directly by the province of Ontario, so the patient never sees the bill either. (Even with the new drugs - the doctors often assume that someone has a drug plan - and most if you're on welfare, the government provides you with one). Meanwhile. the $3000/test pure profit seems to be typical of the return that's expected from these patents - and that they expect to be covered by the Ontario taxpayers.
Effectively, the combination of medical patents and government paid health care is allowing such companies to rewrite the laws of supply and demand in their favour, and can set the price arbitrarily high because (in theory at least, practice is yet to be decided by the courts) there is no other source of supply, and the demand is no longer dependent on the price.
And these companies can count on the idea that eventually (barring fatal accidents), we will all be old enough that some overpriced test or drug will be crucial in determining how long we can postpone our deaths.
If it was me, personally, having to pay for a necessary test, at the price difference given in the article, I'd buy the cheaper test, and ignore the patents - And the threatened lawsuit isn't about conducting the tests - it's about the government of Ontario not helping them make an obscene profit.
In Ontario,
The patenting of existing genes is ridiculous by almost any non-governmental standard. Human genes can be discovered, or isolated, or better understood - but they are NOT an invention.
By all means let them patent a machine or technique for detecting those genes, and rule out even that if doesn't involve using something that's more of an invention than a trivial dependency on the gene itself (such as binding with the complementary sequence)- but the law that is being interpreted to allow patenting the gene itself needs to be revised or overidden.
Now let's see, there's a gene somewhere in the human genome that generates an enzyme that mediates creating ATP with the energy in glucose - If I can patent that gene, then can I sue anybody who uses that gene without paying me a royalty? Yes? Wonderful - That's going to cost everybody $10 a day for the right to eat, and I'll be as rich as Bill Gates in almost no time! (Or would as rich as Rambus Ink. be a better comparison?)
I presume the bugzilla report is for adding UI configuration to the existing capability? Or is it broad enough to cover the new configuration item?
:)
Meanwhile, I'd also like to be able to prevent launching a new window in an attempt to display an image from a site that has already been configured as 'never load images from this site'
But the new configuration (when I get the phone line freed up for a few hours) should be an improvement in that it shouldn't NEED to have it's configuration tweaked for every new and annoying site.
Your post appears to be a subtle troll.
:)
Well, it wasn't intended that way - but then again, often anything that provokes a reaction may be read that way.
(Or am I responding to a subtle troll myself?)
You must know that most long distance telephone is digital these days and that the standard bandwidth for a voice line is 64Kbits/sec. That is why 56Kb modems are the end of the road.
Yep, assuming perfect transmission - and due to errors/corrections/noise most connections won't do better than about 43-46 Kbits. (And the signal power limit to 56Kb applies to US lines - European systems could run up the 64Kb figure you mention, and possibly Aussie systems also.)
There is, however, NO indication in the article to prove that their connection did, or did not, go through a digital channel. And if it was through a purely analog multiplexer on a very good system, then they might even have been able to use more than 256 analog levels for the data - in other words, although the bandwidth is limited, the symbol density might not have been, and the information transmission rate could be higher than the equivalent of 64Kb/sec - on that one particular circuit.
If these folks really did have a way to send more than 28.8Kb/sec over a modem connection they would be selling improved modems.
Provided that what is being sent can be quantified as 'bits' of data - but basically, you are quite correct in this.
My point, however, was that instead of using the limited bandwidth to send symbols - specific amplitude and phase information - at up to 8 bits per symbol, you directly encode chroma, intensity, and and efficient - chaos equation? - position data directly as the amplitude and phase signals, and gain efficiency by eliminating the 'digital wrapper' - link control, IP data, error correction, checksums etc. - layers of the format.
I simply don't believe your claims as to how modems work. All the modem drivers I have used involve a mapping to a serial port. In the old days they used to be a separate box connected to the com port. The PC is quite definitely not doing processing for the modem.
Again, you are correct that modems indeed often have their own firmware that converts between QAM/trellis coded symbols, and the binary data, and can appear to a computer as a simple bit pipe. But have you never downloaded a firmware update for your modem? I have several US Robotics 28.8 modems, some of which were upgraded with a firmware upgrade to 33.6, and others can be upgraded, again by firmware only, to X2 or V.90 operation. (But I never sent the $$ to USR to get the firmware do it, though.)
Even so, there are AT commands that can be sent to make the modem act as a simple analog to digital converter, at least in the modems that are 'voice enabled' - this is how they implement those 'turn your computer into an overpriced answering machine' programs.
Modems that are Windows only are very unusual.
If only that statement were true. Trying to buy a reasonably low cost modem for a linux box nowadays turns up all sorts of modems that are 'Windows only', and very few that are actual hardware modems. (Fortunately, the open source community has managed to come up with Linux drivers for some of the 'winmodems' - but this is exactly the sort of driver that I would expect them to modify to send their compressed video signal)
It is possible that the way the demo is cooked is to use a programmable modem of some sort. But there certainly isn't any way to get more than 28.8 kbits/sec of data to the vast majority users of legacy modems.
Again, you are correct - I strongly suspect that the demo was cooked, and their transmissions could NOT be reproduced with any arbitrary modem.
What's more, if my suspicions are correct, their data can't even be transmitted over an internet connection - it would have to be a dial-up direct to the video provider.
"Just because he's using a modem doesn't mean that he's actually transmitting digital data over the phone line. What sort of video compression can be achieved when you don't need (or get) bit-perfect transmission, but rather encode video properties directly in the analog signal?"
Several reasons
The article stated it was a 28.8 modem which by definition takes a digital input from one end (the computer) and an analogue one at the other (the phone line).
I've got quite a few 28.8 modems around. All of them are capable of inputting the modem's ADC output to the computer directly, without attempting to decode the QAM data.
And the common 28.8 winmodems DEPEND on the computer doing the decoding - so just because they used a 28.8 modem doesn't mean they didn't do their own analog coding.
Essentially, all a modem is, is a digital to analog converter plua an analog to digital converter bundled up with an approved interface to the telephone system. Just because you normally use the built in software (or the software that the modem manufacturer grafted onto your operating system) to convert analog signal into bit-perfect data doesn't mean that it HAS to be used this way.
The phone system is digital from the point where the line to the house hits the exchange.
This is essentially irrelevant. The phone system does not decode and recode the QAM data coding, instead it passes the analog values as best it can. The errors introduced into the analog data will show up as noise - which I've already stated the system could be quite tolerant of.
Even when the system was analog there were multiplexing schemes in place to get the maximum out of the available signal cable. Phase division, time division, frequency division you name it. Long distance lines have not been simple wire connections since the earliest days of the telegraph.
But all these multiplexing and coding schemes are dedicated to reforming the original analog data. It's actually much easier to code analog data, whether digitally or by frequency or time domain multiplexing, transmit it uncompressed, and accurately reform the original analog signal - which is what all these technologies you mention do - than it is to encode bit-perfect digital data in an analog signal.
Admittedly, the bandwidth is constrained by all of these technologies - but I am hazarding the guess that using an encoding technique that encodes the compressed video parameters directly up to the bandwidth limit would be more efficient than having to encode data bits at a bandwidth limited symbol rate using QAM/trellis coding which then requires additional coding and decoding to represent an encoded video signal.
Additional efficiency can also be gained simply by the idea that it doesn't matter if the symbol is misinterpreted - because adjacent symbols would represent a closely related video parameter and still be usable - so the total number of symbols that can be used can be increased without worrying about decreasing the the overall rate due to error corrections. Aa I stated before, any bit errors - read this as symbol misinterpretation - would show up as noise in the reconstituted analog video data - and if the scheme encodes parameters directly into the symbol space as I suggest, then the errors would not be significant.
I've looked at the articles - and while it seems to be likely a scam (such as a 5GB player application), one possibility does not seem to have occured to any of the other posters.
Just because he's using a modem doesn't mean that he's actually transmitting digital data over the phone line. What sort of video compression can be achieved when you don't need (or get) bit-perfect transmission, but rather encode video properties directly in the analog signal? Errors then show up as slight inconsistencies from the original color or position - but on motion video, this would be irrelevant.
The compression would still need the common video codec functionallity to remove redundancy, and send the changed areas more frequently than static images, but if the modem link mapped QAM data directly to position and color signals, it might just be possible to paint a fairly high quality picture.
For that matter, some fractal compression techniques are quite tolerant of minor errors in their probability and/or mapping factors - combine this with sending color information as analog data, and now you might be able to have a link that is unidirectional (the whole audio bandwidth can be dedicated to the video stream without need for a reverse channel) and error tolerant (no re-transmit on error or dropouts due to transient line noise).
Maybe it isn't a scam.
A resolution of 28 DPI sounds low until you figure that a typical display is only in the 72 to 100 dpi range, and is viewed from only about two feet away. A screen 18 feet wide by nine feet tall is unlikely to be looked at that closely -- It's more likeley to be viewed from about 10 feet or more away - any closer would effectively prevent someone from seeing the whole picture. And at that distance, that's the same apparent size per pixel, or better, than even high end monitors and displays.
As for brightness - as you get further away from a uniformly emitting planar surface, the brightness per unit angular area remais constant - merely the apparent total area decreases. If it's bright up close, it's bright enough at any distance at which it is a significant part of your field of view.
And with a fairly high powered cluster to generate the graphics, this can probably render animations of various problems (e.g. turbulent airflow over a surface) in real time on a 1:1 scale - not to mention 3d walkthroughs of complex structures and simulations of advanced weaponry.
Quake, anyone?
< If...it was public record of which officer accessed the information>
Would the police department voluntarily specify such a requirement?
I can see that the two possible answers to this question reduce to either "No" or "Hell NO!!! No Fscking WAY!!!"
You are right - This would require legislation to make such private database access publicly accessible. And given the track record of legislation as applied to anything in the least technical, it would likely be either ineffective or disastrous.
It looks like Scott McNealy was right
Ok, That's who it was. Thanks.
Liquor