That doesn't serve the purpose of steganography, though. If someone is clued in to the possibility that you might be sending messages by posting them on Slashdot, it's fairly easy to check and find out that yes, in fact, you are sending messages. The idea behind steganography is not to make the message unrecoverable from the cover data, but to make it so that nobody detects that any communication is even going on.
The person to whom you're replying said that people are paid to lie on television. You say that they're just paid to do whatever it is that they do, and that what they do is lie. (Well, you don't say that they actually lie, but you equally don't say that they don't. We'll leave it as it is.) The distiction is rather fine.
This is a rather more extreme example, but I think the analogy is somewhat fitting. Suppose I hire an assassin to ensure that my mother-in-law no longer nags me. Now, I don't tell him to kill her, but I know that he's an assassin. In fact, I brought up the matter with a friend of mine, and he warned me that the man was a killer. If it just so happens that my mother-in-law turns up dead, they catch the assassin, and he mentions me. What do you suppose my chances are that a jury will believe that I didn't pay him to kill my mother-in-law?
There's a big distinction between a journalist and a commentator. However, I'm not a journalist, so I'm not really capable of going into depth on it with any kind of righteous fury. Certainly people have the capacty to record what is happening without significant bias -- take the AP news. Furthermore, if they write an article reporting the news, even if it shows some bias (which it probably will), that doesn't necessarily make it commentary. Saying that "all journalists turn out to be commentators of some kind" hardly justifies the kind of shoddy journalism that many major news networks now produce.
To be fair, people like O'Reilly and Hannity are not reporters. However, they mix commentary with biased news reporting to give the illusion of journalism. (O'Reilly, in fact, claims to be the "no-spin zone", which implies that his show is free of bias. This couldn't be further from the truth.) I can't recall the name of the program off-hand, but one Fox program does mix news reporting with commentary. (The commentary is, to an extent, "sectioned off" from the rest of the show, but not enough for me to consider it ethical journalism.)
Don't let people stick it to you about Fox News though. The real problem isn't that they're providing biased opinions. I might have a problem with them labelling it "news", and I definitely have a problem with its popularity, but Fox still has a right to air what it chooses to. The real problem is the extent to which biased journalism permeates all major news. It's not just the right-wing bias of Fox. We have a real problem with pro-institutional bias. That is, news networks will tell us what the Pentagon or the FDA is doing, primarily by reporting on their press releases, but they won't agressively look into what's going on themselves and present any contrary or omitted news and evidence. There's a lot of news out there pertinent to the American people that goes unreported. If important issues go unreporter, how exactly are we supposed to make informed democratic decisions that keep our government in check and doing what we want it to do?
I'd like to correct an error I made here. My apologies to all Slashdot writers and editors. What I intended to write was that "Slashdot writers (and editors) are still a lot better than spammers..." Instead I wrote the opposite!
Just to clarify, spammers are worse than Slashdot editors and writers. You didn't need me to tell you that.
Thank you. I, too, am apparently clueless, though. I was notified of this message being posted and not of its parent (or so it seems to me). So I thought, "Why am I being clueless?" I started looking for posters named "grandparent". Eventually it all sort of worked itself out. Perhaps I need more coffee.
Yes, I intentionally repeated the apostrophe misuse that I accuse the Slashdot editor/writer of making. In retrospect, I should have put [sic] after "Writers'" so that at least this little conversation could have included what "sic" means.
Slashdot Writers' Learn Punctuation
on
Spammers' Upend DNS
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
Slashdot writers (and editors) are still a lot worse than spammers, but their punctuation has some room for improvement.
I'm aware that it's quite possible. However, I don't think bacteria have something along the lines of "sexual incompatibility". This is certainly true among the animals, but I don't know if there's actually evidence of speciation in animals, other than fossil records. (The plants would probably be a good place to look, I'd think.)
No, they're certainly not. The populations adapt and become different. But two populations having different characteristics does not make them absolutely new species.
Take, for example, the differing physical characteristics of populations of humans on Earth that (presumably) have been created because of previous environmental pressures. We're still members of the same species.
There are a lot of good examples of genetic adaptation in populations. I don't know of a good example of actual speciation. (I'm also not familiar with what really constitutes a bacterial species.)
"If you made it to college, you were not left behind..."
That is, if you made it to college, then in terms of the goals of No Child Left Behind, you are a success. (NCLB covers grade school with the nominal goal of getting all US children to graduate from high school.)
"...and further attempts at monitoring citizens should be [left behind]."
Verb is implied from previous use, which makes this harder to decipher. Since you are a success (according to NCLB), there is not any reason to track your success any further, so there should be no further attempts to monitory you.
I had to reread that sentence once or twice myself to get it.
This shows evolution, yes, a drift in a population's genetic characteristics due to natural selection. It does not, to my knowledge, show speciation, which is the creation of a new species due to evolution. But then, I'm not a biologist, and I'm not familiar with how bacterial species are differentiated from one another.
This pretty much describes the situation if you install Fedora Core 3.
I should point out that there are some caveats, as you'd expect. Not all hardware is supported directly out of the box, but quite a lot of it is. (If you have an NVidia card, sadly, you'll need five minutes of a Linux user's help to get hardware acceleration.)
On the other hand, I happen to know from personal experience that this is just as true with Windows. I've put together a couple of computers now, and when you get cheap-ass components from China, sometimes you need to do a lot of searching on poorly-writted websites to find drivers to make the thing work. Frequently some random problem is only addressed in a single, obscure Usenet message and needs a driver update from a company that no longer exists. The tolerance to things just not working quite right simply appears to be higher among Windows users, perhaps because of lower expectations.
You seem to be interpreting "arbitrary" in one sense: "Determined by chance, whim, or impulse, and not by necessity, reason, or principle"
There is, however, a sense that is used much more frequently in scientific and technical fields: "Based on or subject to individual judgment or preference"
In other words, units (like a meter or second) are not fundamental. If you measure a particular energy, you can express it in kJ, hp*hr, btu, or what have you, the mapping of an actual physical measurement to some number with particular units is arbitrary (subject to personal choice). You could not, however, choose to express in in, say, meters, because dimensions are fundamental. Similarly, the choice of unit definitions is arbitrary. The particular choices that have been made (as in the SI system of units) were made for convenience. Thus they don't fit the first definition, but the fact that we can choose units that are convenient indicates that the more scientific second definition applies.
If that's what you wanted to ask, you probably shouldn't have brought up the matter of one "defined" year not exactly equalling an Earth year, et cetera.
The method you state of measuring accuracy is one way, the most simplistic. There are, however, others, depending on the amount of knowledge you have regarding the processes whose results you are measuring.
Just curious: How do you judge the accuracy of the most accurate clock in the world? It might be kinda boring, watching the dial for 6 million years, waiting for it to lose a second, and you couldn't exactly compare the clock to that Rolex you bought in Hong Kong. In fact, all those lofty error rates are not based on observation but rather on calculations reflecting physicists' understanding of the errors remaining. "Scientists are capable of evaluating the clocks and predicting error all by themselves, without referring it to something more accurate," says Collier Smith, a public affairs specialist at NIST. "By going back to first principles, they can determine what the uncertainties are."
That site also discusses various applications for high-accuracy clocks (or time measurement devices, since everyone seems to think clock = time on the wall only), for those who think that keeping wall time is the only function of timepiece.
It figures that I'd make a typographical error in correcting another language error.
Anyway, "precision is how much often the measurement is in agreement with the value" is definitely not the definition of precision.
A proper definition of precision is that it is the amount by which you can expect one measurement to deviate from the average of many measurements of the same quantity. Accuracy is the amount by which you can expect a measurement (or the average of many measurements) to deviate from the actual value measured. As such,
It's an awful point. When you build atomic clocks, you're not interested in measuring how long it takes the earth to go around the sun to great precision. You're not interested in actually keeping time for the next 30 billion years accurate to a second.
For that matter, if the talk I heard a year ago about the work at NIST on this very thing is still true, these atomic clocks can't maintain their accuracy for more than a week or so.
The "one second in 30 billion years" is a convenient extrapolation so that non-scientific persons get an idea of how accurate it is. It would be more correct to say that the atomic clock, in situations of normal operation, is accurate to one part in 10^18.
For that matter, it doesn't hold a wall-clock type value, like saying it's exactly 22:04:17.832... Our choice of reference for time (say, when "noon" is), is difficult to measure and quite arbitrary. Instead, you're interested in, say, how long a particular process takes (light making a round trip, or atomic decay), measured to a very high degree of accuracy (and precision).
Of course units of time are arbitrary. All units are arbitrary. Dimensions (length, time, etc.) and fundamental constants are non-arbitrary, but don't have any "natural" expression in terms of the units we use. (The most natural system of units is arguably expressing everything in terms of fundamental constants.) Seconds, minutes, hours, and years have arbitrary definitions for our convenience, just like any other unit.
Firt, off "how much often" isn't a viable phrase in English as far as I know. At least not in the manner you've used it.
Accuracy is a measure of how close measured values are to the actual value. Precision is a measure of how close measured values are to one another. So a watch that is neither slow nor fast but just off by an hour is precise but not accuracy. A watch that sometimes runs fast and sometimes runs slow but, on average, has the right time is accuracy but not precise. The new atomic clocks have a high degree of both accuracy and precision.
As per our Constitution and system of government, states and local jurisdictions (in this case one school district) are free to make their own laws, as long as they do not conflict with federal laws.
We would, in a sense, be no more free if we had many strict federal laws that prevented, say, the use of RFID tags in tracking people.
I swear, one school district adopts a new system and a lot of people who don't even live there (or in this country) get in an uproar about OMG THEY'RE GOING TO TRACK OUR EVERY MOVEMENT WITH CHIPS IMBEDDED IN OUR FLESH WTF US SUCKS.
If you figure a 650 MB data CD put in the mail that takes 7 days to reach its destination (fairly slow for 1st-class mail), then that's 9 kb/sec for 37 cents (I figure you can send one CD by first-class mail), plus the cost of a CD.
That's over half a million dollars per user per year, if you figure 10 cents per CD and you want 10 Gb/sec.
True. But aside from widespread devestation, there aren't environmental effects from using antimatter weapons. Of course, if you don't want them to be used, this could be bad.
I would presume, perhaps incorrectly, that a stable form of storage would be required before we would attempt to store antimatter long-term.
Plutonium can touch the walls of the container it's held in, but at least antimatter couldn't release toxic chemicals. It wouldn't leak radiation, either, unless it leaked antimatter. (A leaky antimatter container, if it wasn't too leaky, should just contantly release gamma radiation. That stuff's nasty, but at least we could put it in, say, a thick lead room and suffer no ill effects.)
That's right. I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, except that you really need an antecedent.
When a particle and antiparticle collide, they annihlate and form high-energy photons. Subsequent collisions of the photons with other particles in the environment will produce secondary effects, like heat. ("Radiative heat" is a lie.)
Last I checked, and feel free to correct me, antimatter is not radioactive. Antiparticles are viable ground-state particles that do not spontenously decay, which is what radioactivity is.
Or perhaps you're thinking that antimatter would be an energy weapon, much like a thermonuclear device, that liberates large amounts of electromagnetic radiation.
Fortunately, the classic problems with radioactive materials -- particularly, long-term storage and environmental effects of their byproducts (whether in cannisters or in the form of fallout) -- should not exist with antimatter weapons.
It's quite possible to have terrorism-prevention tools without infringing civil liberties in the way that the Patriot act does.
Saying that "this is not the time" and that the Patriot act happens to have a positive use is no reason to keep it in its current form. Or to keep it at all. As far as I'm concerned, they can scrap it and start anew with something more reasonable.
We also could start by not doing the things that (a) we have no business doing and (b) cause terrorists to "rabidly hate us".
Of course, to play the tired card, prior to 9/11 we already had many useful tools to allow the FBI and other agencies to investigate potential terrorists. And they did so. They did not, however, have the manpower or political influence to make their abilities useful. How well are the new ones they've been given going to be used?
Slashdot Mirror
That doesn't serve the purpose of steganography, though. If someone is clued in to the possibility that you might be sending messages by posting them on Slashdot, it's fairly easy to check and find out that yes, in fact, you are sending messages. The idea behind steganography is not to make the message unrecoverable from the cover data, but to make it so that nobody detects that any communication is even going on.
The person to whom you're replying said that people are paid to lie on television. You say that they're just paid to do whatever it is that they do, and that what they do is lie. (Well, you don't say that they actually lie, but you equally don't say that they don't. We'll leave it as it is.) The distiction is rather fine.
This is a rather more extreme example, but I think the analogy is somewhat fitting. Suppose I hire an assassin to ensure that my mother-in-law no longer nags me. Now, I don't tell him to kill her, but I know that he's an assassin. In fact, I brought up the matter with a friend of mine, and he warned me that the man was a killer. If it just so happens that my mother-in-law turns up dead, they catch the assassin, and he mentions me. What do you suppose my chances are that a jury will believe that I didn't pay him to kill my mother-in-law?
There's a big distinction between a journalist and a commentator. However, I'm not a journalist, so I'm not really capable of going into depth on it with any kind of righteous fury. Certainly people have the capacty to record what is happening without significant bias -- take the AP news. Furthermore, if they write an article reporting the news, even if it shows some bias (which it probably will), that doesn't necessarily make it commentary. Saying that "all journalists turn out to be commentators of some kind" hardly justifies the kind of shoddy journalism that many major news networks now produce.
To be fair, people like O'Reilly and Hannity are not reporters. However, they mix commentary with biased news reporting to give the illusion of journalism. (O'Reilly, in fact, claims to be the "no-spin zone", which implies that his show is free of bias. This couldn't be further from the truth.) I can't recall the name of the program off-hand, but one Fox program does mix news reporting with commentary. (The commentary is, to an extent, "sectioned off" from the rest of the show, but not enough for me to consider it ethical journalism.)
Don't let people stick it to you about Fox News though. The real problem isn't that they're providing biased opinions. I might have a problem with them labelling it "news", and I definitely have a problem with its popularity, but Fox still has a right to air what it chooses to. The real problem is the extent to which biased journalism permeates all major news. It's not just the right-wing bias of Fox. We have a real problem with pro-institutional bias. That is, news networks will tell us what the Pentagon or the FDA is doing, primarily by reporting on their press releases, but they won't agressively look into what's going on themselves and present any contrary or omitted news and evidence. There's a lot of news out there pertinent to the American people that goes unreported. If important issues go unreporter, how exactly are we supposed to make informed democratic decisions that keep our government in check and doing what we want it to do?
I'd like to correct an error I made here. My apologies to all Slashdot writers and editors. What I intended to write was that "Slashdot writers (and editors) are still a lot better than spammers..." Instead I wrote the opposite!
Just to clarify, spammers are worse than Slashdot editors and writers. You didn't need me to tell you that.
Thank you. I, too, am apparently clueless, though. I was notified of this message being posted and not of its parent (or so it seems to me). So I thought, "Why am I being clueless?" I started looking for posters named "grandparent". Eventually it all sort of worked itself out. Perhaps I need more coffee.
Yes, I intentionally repeated the apostrophe misuse that I accuse the Slashdot editor/writer of making. In retrospect, I should have put [sic] after "Writers'" so that at least this little conversation could have included what "sic" means.
Slashdot writers (and editors) are still a lot worse than spammers, but their punctuation has some room for improvement.
I'm aware that it's quite possible. However, I don't think bacteria have something along the lines of "sexual incompatibility". This is certainly true among the animals, but I don't know if there's actually evidence of speciation in animals, other than fossil records. (The plants would probably be a good place to look, I'd think.)
No, they're certainly not. The populations adapt and become different. But two populations having different characteristics does not make them absolutely new species.
Take, for example, the differing physical characteristics of populations of humans on Earth that (presumably) have been created because of previous environmental pressures. We're still members of the same species.
There are a lot of good examples of genetic adaptation in populations. I don't know of a good example of actual speciation. (I'm also not familiar with what really constitutes a bacterial species.)
No Citizen Left Unwatched
Coming soon to a Congress near you! (Only available within the US.)
It's acceptable English, just kind of screwy.
"If you made it to college, you were not left behind..."
That is, if you made it to college, then in terms of the goals of No Child Left Behind, you are a success. (NCLB covers grade school with the nominal goal of getting all US children to graduate from high school.)
"...and further attempts at monitoring citizens should be [left behind]."
Verb is implied from previous use, which makes this harder to decipher. Since you are a success (according to NCLB), there is not any reason to track your success any further, so there should be no further attempts to monitory you.
I had to reread that sentence once or twice myself to get it.
Grammar, away!
This shows evolution, yes, a drift in a population's genetic characteristics due to natural selection. It does not, to my knowledge, show speciation, which is the creation of a new species due to evolution. But then, I'm not a biologist, and I'm not familiar with how bacterial species are differentiated from one another.
This pretty much describes the situation if you install Fedora Core 3.
I should point out that there are some caveats, as you'd expect. Not all hardware is supported directly out of the box, but quite a lot of it is. (If you have an NVidia card, sadly, you'll need five minutes of a Linux user's help to get hardware acceleration.)
On the other hand, I happen to know from personal experience that this is just as true with Windows. I've put together a couple of computers now, and when you get cheap-ass components from China, sometimes you need to do a lot of searching on poorly-writted websites to find drivers to make the thing work. Frequently some random problem is only addressed in a single, obscure Usenet message and needs a driver update from a company that no longer exists. The tolerance to things just not working quite right simply appears to be higher among Windows users, perhaps because of lower expectations.
You seem to be interpreting "arbitrary" in one sense: "Determined by chance, whim, or impulse, and not by necessity, reason, or principle"
There is, however, a sense that is used much more frequently in scientific and technical fields: "Based on or subject to individual judgment or preference"
In other words, units (like a meter or second) are not fundamental. If you measure a particular energy, you can express it in kJ, hp*hr, btu, or what have you, the mapping of an actual physical measurement to some number with particular units is arbitrary (subject to personal choice). You could not, however, choose to express in in, say, meters, because dimensions are fundamental. Similarly, the choice of unit definitions is arbitrary. The particular choices that have been made (as in the SI system of units) were made for convenience. Thus they don't fit the first definition, but the fact that we can choose units that are convenient indicates that the more scientific second definition applies.
(Both definitions are from Dictionary.com.)
If that's what you wanted to ask, you probably shouldn't have brought up the matter of one "defined" year not exactly equalling an Earth year, et cetera.
The method you state of measuring accuracy is one way, the most simplistic. There are, however, others, depending on the amount of knowledge you have regarding the processes whose results you are measuring.
From this website:
Just curious: How do you judge the accuracy of the most accurate clock in the world? It might be kinda boring, watching the dial for 6 million years, waiting for it to lose a second, and you couldn't exactly compare the clock to that Rolex you bought in Hong Kong. In fact, all those lofty error rates are not based on observation but rather on calculations reflecting physicists' understanding of the errors remaining. "Scientists are capable of evaluating the clocks and predicting error all by themselves, without referring it to something more accurate," says Collier Smith, a public affairs specialist at NIST. "By going back to first principles, they can determine what the uncertainties are."
That site also discusses various applications for high-accuracy clocks (or time measurement devices, since everyone seems to think clock = time on the wall only), for those who think that keeping wall time is the only function of timepiece.
It figures that I'd make a typographical error in correcting another language error.
Anyway, "precision is how much often the measurement is in agreement with the value" is definitely not the definition of precision.
A proper definition of precision is that it is the amount by which you can expect one measurement to deviate from the average of many measurements of the same quantity. Accuracy is the amount by which you can expect a measurement (or the average of many measurements) to deviate from the actual value measured. As such,
It's an awful point. When you build atomic clocks, you're not interested in measuring how long it takes the earth to go around the sun to great precision. You're not interested in actually keeping time for the next 30 billion years accurate to a second.
For that matter, if the talk I heard a year ago about the work at NIST on this very thing is still true, these atomic clocks can't maintain their accuracy for more than a week or so.
The "one second in 30 billion years" is a convenient extrapolation so that non-scientific persons get an idea of how accurate it is. It would be more correct to say that the atomic clock, in situations of normal operation, is accurate to one part in 10^18.
For that matter, it doesn't hold a wall-clock type value, like saying it's exactly 22:04:17.832... Our choice of reference for time (say, when "noon" is), is difficult to measure and quite arbitrary. Instead, you're interested in, say, how long a particular process takes (light making a round trip, or atomic decay), measured to a very high degree of accuracy (and precision).
Of course units of time are arbitrary. All units are arbitrary. Dimensions (length, time, etc.) and fundamental constants are non-arbitrary, but don't have any "natural" expression in terms of the units we use. (The most natural system of units is arguably expressing everything in terms of fundamental constants.) Seconds, minutes, hours, and years have arbitrary definitions for our convenience, just like any other unit.
Firt, off "how much often" isn't a viable phrase in English as far as I know. At least not in the manner you've used it.
Accuracy is a measure of how close measured values are to the actual value. Precision is a measure of how close measured values are to one another. So a watch that is neither slow nor fast but just off by an hour is precise but not accuracy. A watch that sometimes runs fast and sometimes runs slow but, on average, has the right time is accuracy but not precise. The new atomic clocks have a high degree of both accuracy and precision.
Data out of nowhere! Make it stop!
As per our Constitution and system of government, states and local jurisdictions (in this case one school district) are free to make their own laws, as long as they do not conflict with federal laws.
We would, in a sense, be no more free if we had many strict federal laws that prevented, say, the use of RFID tags in tracking people.
I swear, one school district adopts a new system and a lot of people who don't even live there (or in this country) get in an uproar about OMG THEY'RE GOING TO TRACK OUR EVERY MOVEMENT WITH CHIPS IMBEDDED IN OUR FLESH WTF US SUCKS.
You mean the guys on television don't tell you who's won based on predictions? What a warped system you have in the U.K.
If you figure a 650 MB data CD put in the mail that takes 7 days to reach its destination (fairly slow for 1st-class mail), then that's 9 kb/sec for 37 cents (I figure you can send one CD by first-class mail), plus the cost of a CD.
That's over half a million dollars per user per year, if you figure 10 cents per CD and you want 10 Gb/sec.
True. But aside from widespread devestation, there aren't environmental effects from using antimatter weapons. Of course, if you don't want them to be used, this could be bad.
I would presume, perhaps incorrectly, that a stable form of storage would be required before we would attempt to store antimatter long-term.
Plutonium can touch the walls of the container it's held in, but at least antimatter couldn't release toxic chemicals. It wouldn't leak radiation, either, unless it leaked antimatter. (A leaky antimatter container, if it wasn't too leaky, should just contantly release gamma radiation. That stuff's nasty, but at least we could put it in, say, a thick lead room and suffer no ill effects.)
That's right. I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, except that you really need an antecedent.
When a particle and antiparticle collide, they annihlate and form high-energy photons. Subsequent collisions of the photons with other particles in the environment will produce secondary effects, like heat. ("Radiative heat" is a lie.)
Sure, but that just makes it volatile, not radioactive.
Last I checked, and feel free to correct me, antimatter is not radioactive. Antiparticles are viable ground-state particles that do not spontenously decay, which is what radioactivity is.
Or perhaps you're thinking that antimatter would be an energy weapon, much like a thermonuclear device, that liberates large amounts of electromagnetic radiation.
Fortunately, the classic problems with radioactive materials -- particularly, long-term storage and environmental effects of their byproducts (whether in cannisters or in the form of fallout) -- should not exist with antimatter weapons.
It's quite possible to have terrorism-prevention tools without infringing civil liberties in the way that the Patriot act does.
Saying that "this is not the time" and that the Patriot act happens to have a positive use is no reason to keep it in its current form. Or to keep it at all. As far as I'm concerned, they can scrap it and start anew with something more reasonable.
We also could start by not doing the things that (a) we have no business doing and (b) cause terrorists to "rabidly hate us".
Of course, to play the tired card, prior to 9/11 we already had many useful tools to allow the FBI and other agencies to investigate potential terrorists. And they did so. They did not, however, have the manpower or political influence to make their abilities useful. How well are the new ones they've been given going to be used?