The difference between your standard financing of R&D and this is that with these bonds, you're getting your VC from potential customers, and so they're getting something for their money at the end. It's not some random company, and the profit stream is something the investor wants. It's a win-win situation!
One problem: There are enough geeks out there that care about their pay-cheques more than 48 hours of political activism that this wouldn't be superbly effective. Sad, but true.
If you go the page now, view the results of the survey, then repeatedly hit reload on your browser, you can see a real live slashdot effect.... one submission per second (approx). Very neat!!
Well, yes and no... most highways are ashphalt, not concrete... However, there may be uses in replacing the concrete that surrounds the ashphalt on bridges etc...
I'm currently a 2nd year CS Major at University of Waterloo. So far, there have been a number of good and bad things with the program here. I'm going to list 2 good, and 1 bad thing which stick out from the rest:
Good: The first few years are taught mostly by grad students. Grad students haven't had time to learn too much by becoming researchers, or become jaded by becoming teachers. Thay are some of the best profs I have ever had.
Good: They stop the "coding" classes early. By 2nd year, it's mostly assumed you know how to code. You're simply asked to apply it.
Bad: They teach Java first. Java is a good language for teaching OO... but don't start with it. People get confused then when they start learning C++ and start seeing pointers. Start with Pascal. Easy to use... has some OO... has pointers. The best of all worlds.
The art programs at my school require you to show them a portfolio. CS does not. So the CS classes are half coders like me and half people who never coded before.
University of Waterloo has a good solution for this. There are three starting points for CS. CS 120: you've never coded before; CS 130: You've coded, but not OO; CS 134: You know OO fairly well. You are required to submit some code with your application to prove you know what you're talking about, but people have to know the basics, but if you already know them, you can skip ahead. It tends to improve things.
I learn nothing from someone teaching me how to code.
If your CS program is someone teaching you how to code... you're in the wrong place.... I'm only in 2nd year and we've stopped taking "coding" classes (well, with one exception). It's all algorithms, DS and theory now...
I disagree. My first few CS courses were taught in Java, we're just learning C++ now... however there's a huge problem with that.
Although Java is a good language, it does one very bad thing from a pedagogical point of view: it doesn't have pointers. Sure, it has references... but they're implicit, not explicit like pointers are. Students are getting screwed because it's not an easy thing to grasp for the first time.
I'd recommend a language like Pascal (to start with) which has pointers, but also has a good, structured language, to make teaching easy. There exists OO in Pascal too... so you've got that base covered. Then, when students are ready, have them learn Java AND C++, because they're both very good languages.
I agree, the best example I have was way back when when Magic cards were only popular with the nerds (i.e. me). Then, once the "cool" kids started playing, we moved on to bigger and better things.
This article seems to insinuate that "anime" is by nature a violent "genre". This couldn't be farther from the truth. Anime is simply a style of drawing, not a genre.
In Japan, there are a number of shows which have no violence at all, but here would still be called "anime". Two examples that come to mind are Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou and Love Hina. While there are a few obviously comical violent moments in both of these shows... they're not "fight-oriented" at all. Both shows are (in very different ways), about growing up and dealing with things. This is the kind of stuff kids need to see.
I blame the north-american networks for bringing over only fight-oriented shows, and none of the anime which deals with social issues in a social manner. Perhaps if kids were shown a balanced TV diet, things would be better here.
Anyways, this article was very narrow in it's point of view, and the authour ovbiously doesn't know much about the shows in Japan, only what he sees when he turns on his boob tube.
Look at it from the point of grammer. One example would be "if-then" or "if-else" statements. In English the structure is "If X then Y". Not being multilingual, I can't say for sure that another language is structured differently, but I'd hazard a guess that it's the same. Messing around with a logical sentence structure like that isn't the same as putting adjectives in a different place.
Being quadrilingual (with a smattering of others), I can say for certain that that is certainly not the case. In most western european languages that is the case (English, German, French, Spanish, Italian), but if you consider the Oriental languages like Japanese and all the various dialects of Chinese, they have very different sentence structures.
The only reason an if-then-else structure seems solely logical is because you haven't had exposure to other languages. It's as much a cultural thing as anything else.
I've administered Unix (Linux), NT, and NetWare networks over the years, and I gotta say that NetWare is the best, hands down. Ecspecially when you consider NDS. Don't get me wrong, Linux is great... (and NT sucks...) but NetWare was easy to manage, easy to administer, and still gave me the flexibility I needed to do what had to be done.
I'm glad that Novell's going to be given another chance under Big Blue's umbrella. Go IBM.
Is that most anime shows deal with issues that most mainstream American shows won't go near. Now, I know that there are exceptions to the rule. But there is still an opinion in the States that cartoons are either for kids or have to be funny. This couldn't be further from the truth. Look at the old Sunday comics from the early days of press. Look at Dick Tracy. He wasn't funny. But he was cool, and the comic told great stories. Since then the comic/cartoon scene has degenerated into a series of jokes (pun intended).
To anyone who says that anime only fits certain molds, or that the plotlines are stupid, you're probably watching the thin slice of the pie that is displayed in the US of A. Look at "Shoujo Kakumei Utena" or "Rurouni Kenshin" or "Berserk" or "Neon Genesis Evangelion". These shows aren't funny on the whole, they tell stories. And really good ones at that. Sure, they have funny bits, but even the scariest movie has funny bits.
If all you've seen is Pokemon, Sailor Moon, and DragonBall Z... you haven't seen anime.
I donno, the exploits in IE/ActiveX that allowed web pages to read, write, and execute files anywhere on the system? That's an exploit to be truly worried about. Hey look! This webpage not only writes a virus to your system, it executes it too!
This one only serves up files, and while bad, also took much longer to find, meaning it was probably deep in the code.... i.e. a mistake. I only hope there will be a patch soon.
Darn you Amokscience! You saw through my evil plan to hide the bad parts of the idea!
The first thing I guess I should say is that we did do other things in the course. There was an independant research project, a number of guest lecturers, programming assignments, and a lot of studies of other computer science related topics. Plus, AFAIK most classes come close to completing the big project (we needed another week at max). You mentionned this too, but I'm going to stress it again: I think that less than 50% of the class (or so) actually went into computer science related fields. It's high school, people are looking for credits to fill up their diploma. Not everyone's a CS buff.
The reason I talked about it the way I did was because I was trying to help the teacher who asked the question by putting a focus on the organisation of the project to make their job easier. My prof did point out in the closing lecture about how projects take longer than expected.
My OAC Computer Science course (OAC=Ontario's Grade 13) consisted of, among other things, a term-long project for the entire class, which was learning about how to, and creating, a full-blown application.
At the start of the term, everyone in the class applied to "jobs", with resumes and everything. According to what you applied for, and how you presented yourself (not necessarily your skillset), you got certain jobs. One person was chosen as the "VP" (the Pres was the prof), and had to manage a lot of stuff, as well as do some work. We had three departments: Coding, UI, and QA (whose job it was to make the coders and the UIs co-operate). There were department leaders, and then inside the deparments, if there were special task forces, they had team leaders, and so on. Basically, our prof tried to make it as much like a company as possible. It was a lot of fun. No class (to my knowledge) has actually completed the project, but it's the process that's important.
For me, it was really helpful to learn how to work well in teams, and how the real world operates. It was a lot of fun, and I think you learn more than doing games, or anything like that.
I state as my two examples, both from the realm of anime: Cowboy Bebop and Blue Subamrine No. 6.
Any true anime fans, if you haven't seen either of these, should. Cowboy Bebop is by far one of the best animated series I have ever seen, and the CGI is tastefully placed throughout the series. You don't see it often, but when you do, sometimes you don't even notice.
Blue Submarine No. 6 is a new one, the plot isn't the best I've ever seen (although it got better in episode 3 of 4, haven't seen 4 yet... those bastards) but the animation is incredible. Almost every scene is a combination of CGI and 2D, and it's flawless. Completely flawless.
Anime fans (and even non-anime fans, Bebop rocks) should hunt these down with a passion. Bebop is slowly being released on DVD. Haven't seen Sub 6 much anywhere yet though.
Okay, true, but the point was the factor of increase in keyspace, not the size of the keyspace itself. Increasing the keyspace by only 128 bits gives you a lot more primes to work with, thus increasing the number of viable keys.
Increase the keysize by one bit, and you've just doubled the key space. Say, go from 128-bit to 256-bit, and you've increased the keyspace by a factor of:
340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,45 6 (Thank you Maple!)
Jon quotes a professional who says that NSA can crack PGP, so to speak. This is by no means true. Take a look at the distributed.net effort, which has now been running for 1000 days, and is only 28% through the keyspace for a small RC5-64 decryption. The fastest computers in the world (clusters or no) don't run much faster than this effort.
If NSA wants to spend 1000 or so days cracking my email, they're more than welcome to.
(They still couldn't do anyting cuz I'm in Canada, but they can still try)
I DO have the math background for this and I know something about the MP3 algorithm, so I'll take a shot at it.
Theoretically, it is possible. But I stress possible. There are a number of problems with this idea.
1) You would have to audibly interfere with the actual song. You see, one of the first things that the MP3 encoding algorithm does is strip off very high and very low sounds (to some degree, depends on the encoder), so only those in the threshold of human hearing (and less most of the time) remain. So no deal there.
2) All encoders are different. There is no one magical algorithm to make MP3s. There are a large number of parameters each of which will produce a different result (this is a good loosy compression scheme after all). So you'd have to make it so that somehow all of these parameters didn't make a difference and it always worked.
So basically, it wouldn't work due to the nature of the compression. RIAA's only hope is to come up with a proprietary algorithm, release a player for free, and publish all of their artists' songs. And still, the CDs will be ripped.
Yes, I remember that well. I'm pretty sure it was by a Winnipeg native composer by the name of Victor Davies. He also did a symphony using car horns, which I saw performed on TV once. Very well done, very musical.
A small description of that concert is available here.
Victor Davies' website is at http://www.goodmedia.com/vdavies/. I recommend you check some of his music out. He is a phenominal composer.
Yes, I'm only in second-year of an undergrad CS/Cognitive Science degree, but I seem to remember some of the reading I've done sort of contradict this.
Is it not true though that after the cell reaches its threshold and fires, if the activation potential of the neuron continues to increase, the neuron fires more often? Each firing is digital, but the frequency is analog.
It would seem to me therefore that every neuron is both a digital and analog device. Strange.
Slashdot Mirror
This is good news for Mozilla.
AOL also is seeking to give an advantage to Netscape, its own Web browser...
Truly, I am torn over this one... no wait, I'm not, that's just heartburn.
The difference between your standard financing of R&D and this is that with these bonds, you're getting your VC from potential customers, and so they're getting something for their money at the end. It's not some random company, and the profit stream is something the investor wants. It's a win-win situation!
One problem: There are enough geeks out there that care about their pay-cheques more than 48 hours of political activism that this wouldn't be superbly effective. Sad, but true.
If you go the page now, view the results of the survey, then repeatedly hit reload on your browser, you can see a real live slashdot effect.... one submission per second (approx). Very neat!!
Well, yes and no... most highways are ashphalt, not concrete... However, there may be uses in replacing the concrete that surrounds the ashphalt on bridges etc...
The art programs at my school require you to show them a portfolio. CS does not. So the CS classes are half coders like me and half people who never coded before.
University of Waterloo has a good solution for this. There are three starting points for CS. CS 120: you've never coded before; CS 130: You've coded, but not OO; CS 134: You know OO fairly well. You are required to submit some code with your application to prove you know what you're talking about, but people have to know the basics, but if you already know them, you can skip ahead. It tends to improve things.
I learn nothing from someone teaching me how to code.
If your CS program is someone teaching you how to code... you're in the wrong place.... I'm only in 2nd year and we've stopped taking "coding" classes (well, with one exception). It's all algorithms, DS and theory now...
I disagree. My first few CS courses were taught in Java, we're just learning C++ now... however there's a huge problem with that.
Although Java is a good language, it does one very bad thing from a pedagogical point of view: it doesn't have pointers. Sure, it has references... but they're implicit, not explicit like pointers are. Students are getting screwed because it's not an easy thing to grasp for the first time.
I'd recommend a language like Pascal (to start with) which has pointers, but also has a good, structured language, to make teaching easy. There exists OO in Pascal too... so you've got that base covered. Then, when students are ready, have them learn Java AND C++, because they're both very good languages.
Does that make the cool kids uncool or something? Ow. My head hurts.
I agree, the best example I have was way back when when Magic cards were only popular with the nerds (i.e. me). Then, once the "cool" kids started playing, we moved on to bigger and better things.
This article seems to insinuate that "anime" is by nature a violent "genre". This couldn't be farther from the truth. Anime is simply a style of drawing, not a genre.
In Japan, there are a number of shows which have no violence at all, but here would still be called "anime". Two examples that come to mind are Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou and Love Hina. While there are a few obviously comical violent moments in both of these shows... they're not "fight-oriented" at all. Both shows are (in very different ways), about growing up and dealing with things. This is the kind of stuff kids need to see.
I blame the north-american networks for bringing over only fight-oriented shows, and none of the anime which deals with social issues in a social manner. Perhaps if kids were shown a balanced TV diet, things would be better here.
Anyways, this article was very narrow in it's point of view, and the authour ovbiously doesn't know much about the shows in Japan, only what he sees when he turns on his boob tube.
I think you're a bit wrong about the Japanese, you've got to make the prepositions into postpositions. More accurately it would be:
ACCOUNTS FROM Id=660 WHERE Name SELECT
Look at it from the point of grammer. One example would be "if-then" or "if-else" statements. In English the structure is "If X then Y". Not being multilingual, I can't say for sure that another language is structured differently, but I'd hazard a guess that it's the same. Messing around with a logical sentence structure like that isn't the same as putting adjectives in a different place.
Being quadrilingual (with a smattering of others), I can say for certain that that is certainly not the case. In most western european languages that is the case (English, German, French, Spanish, Italian), but if you consider the Oriental languages like Japanese and all the various dialects of Chinese, they have very different sentence structures.
The only reason an if-then-else structure seems solely logical is because you haven't had exposure to other languages. It's as much a cultural thing as anything else.
I've administered Unix (Linux), NT, and NetWare networks over the years, and I gotta say that NetWare is the best, hands down. Ecspecially when you consider NDS. Don't get me wrong, Linux is great... (and NT sucks...) but NetWare was easy to manage, easy to administer, and still gave me the flexibility I needed to do what had to be done.
I'm glad that Novell's going to be given another chance under Big Blue's umbrella. Go IBM.
Is that most anime shows deal with issues that most mainstream American shows won't go near. Now, I know that there are exceptions to the rule. But there is still an opinion in the States that cartoons are either for kids or have to be funny. This couldn't be further from the truth. Look at the old Sunday comics from the early days of press. Look at Dick Tracy. He wasn't funny. But he was cool, and the comic told great stories. Since then the comic/cartoon scene has degenerated into a series of jokes (pun intended).
To anyone who says that anime only fits certain molds, or that the plotlines are stupid, you're probably watching the thin slice of the pie that is displayed in the US of A. Look at "Shoujo Kakumei Utena" or "Rurouni Kenshin" or "Berserk" or "Neon Genesis Evangelion". These shows aren't funny on the whole, they tell stories. And really good ones at that. Sure, they have funny bits, but even the scariest movie has funny bits.
If all you've seen is Pokemon, Sailor Moon, and DragonBall Z... you haven't seen anime.
I donno, the exploits in IE/ActiveX that allowed web pages to read, write, and execute files anywhere on the system? That's an exploit to be truly worried about. Hey look! This webpage not only writes a virus to your system, it executes it too! This one only serves up files, and while bad, also took much longer to find, meaning it was probably deep in the code.... i.e. a mistake. I only hope there will be a patch soon.
Darn you Amokscience! You saw through my evil plan to hide the bad parts of the idea!
The first thing I guess I should say is that we did do other things in the course. There was an independant research project, a number of guest lecturers, programming assignments, and a lot of studies of other computer science related topics. Plus, AFAIK most classes come close to completing the big project (we needed another week at max). You mentionned this too, but I'm going to stress it again: I think that less than 50% of the class (or so) actually went into computer science related fields. It's high school, people are looking for credits to fill up their diploma. Not everyone's a CS buff.
The reason I talked about it the way I did was because I was trying to help the teacher who asked the question by putting a focus on the organisation of the project to make their job easier. My prof did point out in the closing lecture about how projects take longer than expected.
My OAC Computer Science course (OAC=Ontario's Grade 13) consisted of, among other things, a term-long project for the entire class, which was learning about how to, and creating, a full-blown application.
At the start of the term, everyone in the class applied to "jobs", with resumes and everything. According to what you applied for, and how you presented yourself (not necessarily your skillset), you got certain jobs. One person was chosen as the "VP" (the Pres was the prof), and had to manage a lot of stuff, as well as do some work. We had three departments: Coding, UI, and QA (whose job it was to make the coders and the UIs co-operate). There were department leaders, and then inside the deparments, if there were special task forces, they had team leaders, and so on. Basically, our prof tried to make it as much like a company as possible. It was a lot of fun. No class (to my knowledge) has actually completed the project, but it's the process that's important.
For me, it was really helpful to learn how to work well in teams, and how the real world operates. It was a lot of fun, and I think you learn more than doing games, or anything like that.
I state as my two examples, both from the realm of anime: Cowboy Bebop and Blue Subamrine No. 6.
Any true anime fans, if you haven't seen either of these, should. Cowboy Bebop is by far one of the best animated series I have ever seen, and the CGI is tastefully placed throughout the series. You don't see it often, but when you do, sometimes you don't even notice.
Blue Submarine No. 6 is a new one, the plot isn't the best I've ever seen (although it got better in episode 3 of 4, haven't seen 4 yet... those bastards) but the animation is incredible. Almost every scene is a combination of CGI and 2D, and it's flawless. Completely flawless.
Anime fans (and even non-anime fans, Bebop rocks) should hunt these down with a passion. Bebop is slowly being released on DVD. Haven't seen Sub 6 much anywhere yet though.
Okay, true, but the point was the factor of increase in keyspace, not the size of the keyspace itself. Increasing the keyspace by only 128 bits gives you a lot more primes to work with, thus increasing the number of viable keys.
Heck no!
5 6 (Thank you Maple!)
Increase the keysize by one bit, and you've just doubled the key space. Say, go from 128-bit to 256-bit, and you've increased the keyspace by a factor of:
340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,4
That's a big keyspace increase.
Jon quotes a professional who says that NSA can crack PGP, so to speak. This is by no means true. Take a look at the distributed.net effort, which has now been running for 1000 days, and is only 28% through the keyspace for a small RC5-64 decryption. The fastest computers in the world (clusters or no) don't run much faster than this effort.
If NSA wants to spend 1000 or so days cracking my email, they're more than welcome to.
(They still couldn't do anyting cuz I'm in Canada, but they can still try)
I DO have the math background for this and I know something about the MP3 algorithm, so I'll take a shot at it.
Theoretically, it is possible. But I stress possible. There are a number of problems with this idea.
1) You would have to audibly interfere with the actual song. You see, one of the first things that the MP3 encoding algorithm does is strip off very high and very low sounds (to some degree, depends on the encoder), so only those in the threshold of human hearing (and less most of the time) remain. So no deal there.
2) All encoders are different. There is no one magical algorithm to make MP3s. There are a large number of parameters each of which will produce a different result (this is a good loosy compression scheme after all). So you'd have to make it so that somehow all of these parameters didn't make a difference and it always worked.
So basically, it wouldn't work due to the nature of the compression. RIAA's only hope is to come up with a proprietary algorithm, release a player for free, and publish all of their artists' songs. And still, the CDs will be ripped.
It's too bad, really.
Yes, I remember that well. I'm pretty sure it was by a Winnipeg native composer by the name of Victor Davies. He also did a symphony using car horns, which I saw performed on TV once. Very well done, very musical.
A small description of that concert is available here.
Victor Davies' website is at http://www.goodmedia.com/vdavies/. I recommend you check some of his music out. He is a phenominal composer.
Yes, I'm only in second-year of an undergrad CS/Cognitive Science degree, but I seem to remember some of the reading I've done sort of contradict this.
Is it not true though that after the cell reaches its threshold and fires, if the activation potential of the neuron continues to increase, the neuron fires more often? Each firing is digital, but the frequency is analog.
It would seem to me therefore that every neuron is both a digital and analog device. Strange.