Film has been an impressive technology for quite some time, this I grant. Kodak did some amazing things.
But Digital is going to overtake it. Not might, not could, and not just because the public is full of stupid people. Digital will overtake film, because digital will enable video with proper frame rates.
It's kind of funny talking to film people about frame rates. Given the general cluelessness of computer people about all things AV (I spent a few weeks working on low latency audio under standard operating systems; it's a nightmare, the entire architecture presumes nobody would want to do more than a thousand things a second), I didn't really expect that I'd find something about motion pictures that film people were... ahem... creative about. But, alas. In the era of 60fps gaming, who's backing 24fps imagery?
Film people. They have to; doubling the frame rate doubles the size of the cans, doubles the cost of printing each movie, to say nothing of the effects on production. So they tell stories. "It's dark. The human eye just can't see very high frame rates when the pupil's all big." Or they make it a challenge, "A sign of a master cinematographer is that he can work around this awful framerate...not that you'd be able to detect it anyway."
It's not that film itself can't run at higher framerates -- Maxivision48 was a system that finally fixed some of films most annoying problems -- not only the low framerate, but physical jitter from the motor. You know what? No traction, none whatsoever. They blamed digital, but at some point the entire production line made the call: Nobody needs higher framerates, why try?
(Yes, IMAX is also >24fps. But it's on a massive screen, so the effective fps still isn't fast enough. The bigger the screen, the higher a frame rate you require for panning to seem credible. Too low a frame rate, and objects in Frame 1 become difficult to locate, ten feet away, in Frame 2. But I digress.)
Digital has a reason to make people try. Viewers -- the ones who are actually bringing in money -- don't care at all about lowered expenses to ship 3000 movies; it's not like they're going to see any of the savings anyway. And of course viewers really don't care about the cool security technology being used to prevent the piracy of the video streams. However, viewers "care" about quality. I put that in quotes, because on average they don't, but as a few "experts" rail on digital for having visible pixels and thus looking bad, average viewers, not generally seeing a difference between film and what they're seeing, will "play along" rather than look bad for being unable to perceive the problems. (I know this sounds awful, but it happens all the time in a number of different fields. The irony that the complaints about digital are coming from people with huge home theatre systems w/ MPEG-2 compressed DVD's playing should not be lost on anyone.)
Framerate changes everything.
Seeing large amounts of silky-smooth motion is a noticably different experience. There was a small period in the late 90's where there was still argument about whether the human eye could detect frame rates above 30fps. 3Dfx ended up assembling a demo where the left side of a spinning donut was animating at 30fps, and the right side at 60fps. That ended that debate rather quickly. I expect we'll see the same thing out of digital. Potentially, movies will be run through framerate-upsampling algorithms that intelligently interpolate the motion vectors to derive new frames -- in English, simply by doing compression, the computer knows what's moving where between Frame 1 and Frame 2, so it's not ridiculously difficult to invent Frame 1.5. They'll do a side-by-side for the press, and everyone will ooh and aah.
But what I *actually* expect will happen involves Slashdot favorite Steve Jobs, acting not with his Apple hat, but with his Pixar hat. Pixar will render a movi
I've worked with a fair number of reporters; they're not coming up with something that complicated on their own. Hell, you're lucky if you can get like two sentences correctly quoted:) Only time you get that much technical writing in a row is if it's straight from the interview, and generally copied word for word from email.
Now, you're right. I could have taken that metaphor seriously. I could have gone ahead and pointed out, gee, they're basically describing a protocol in which the server XOR's arbitrary content from the client against the password (look real close at the "zero" and "more than zero" math. In bitspace, that's XOR). In this case, I can derive any password just by XORing two Bank->Alice/Bank->Mallory communications against one another.
But XOR is a simple encryption system, probably the only one you could hope to describe in the space alloted. So I gave them the benefit of the doubt; they weren't actually using a wildly broken cipher, just a seriously broken architecture.
So we don't actually know how this protocol works, but the description at the above link is vastly more coherent. (Anything with "magic envelope" and "this is a metaphor" really shouldn't be taken as a protocol specification.)
=== CUSTOMER: Bank, I will send you some information that is encrypted. You can only decrypt it if you know my password. If you don't know the password, you could of course try all possible passwords (although that is a lot of work!), but you would never know from my message if you picked the right one. Once you have decrypted the message, I want you to send it to me. If it is correctly decrypted, I will know that you know my password already. Once I know that you know my password, I will send it to you so that you can verify that I also know it. Of course, if I am lying about my identity and don't know the password in the first place, then I will not learn anything about the password from your message, so it is safe in both directions. ===
It's also wildly exploitable. Here's how:
First of all, password brute forcing? Alot of work? Only if there's no way to execute an offline attack, i.e. you can run attempts as fast as your own computer can calculate them. What we need is an offline attack -- something that lets us try to try as many attempts as possible. The most important thing is verifiability -- we need to know when we guessed the actual password.
Can we possibly verify our guess? Well, Alice sends the bank some random data, which is dutifully returned to Eve. Eve sniffs this traffic, and now has a very simple task:
Guess all possible passwords the bank could have used to decrypt the password. When the content from Alice, decrypted with the guess, equals what came back from the Bank, Eve has found the password.
But then there's Eve's friend Mallory, who thinks Eve isn't ambitious enough and wants to steal anyone's password at the bank, not just Alice's. Suppose Bob has angered her somehow. Mallory can't sniff Bob's traffic, but then, she doesn't actually need to. Mallory can simply blindly provide some arbitrary data to the bank. It's garbage going out, but even garbage will decrypt into something. Unless the bank specifically has users provide some known plaintext in the outgoing data, it's going to "decrypt" that noise, using the password, into more noise.
Once again, outgoing data + bank password = incoming data. Mallory gets to do offline attacks too -- but against any user she wants.
Of course, the bank *could* put some sort of verifier in the message that Alice sends to it. But then Eve has an even easier time guessing passwords, since she just tries random passwords until the verifier is unveiled. No need to sniff the traffic back from the Bank (which is actually significant -- it means Mallory could firewall off the bank and still successfully participate in the auth protocol, with no way for the bank to find out.)
Anyway, long story short, broken. Really, really broken.
Yes, but those commodity parts added up to around $700 worth. They wanted to sell it for $200.
You only get to do that when you're single sourcing and building everything yourself, which has massive initial costs but shields you from other company's profit margins down the road. And that's what Sony's done.
New consoles are sold at a loss, but there's a limit to how muc of a loss companies can take. If the CPU itself ends up costing Sony $300+, they'd be looking at a massive loss on the consoles, probably larger than they are willing to take.
Before they've sold a single processor, they've put billions in. How much does their first wafer cost to print?
Not much more than their 100,000th.
Yields are of course important, and one of the neat things about going multicore is that you get more granularity on defects, i.e. you're able to tolerate more defects because you're planning on shipping broken (and disabled) cores. And yields do go up over time. But chip cost has way less to do with the per-wafer cost than it does the cost of doing research.
PS3 ships with economies of scale on Day 1. XBox didn't.
Stop by EB, or Gamestop, or wherever you get games.
Look at the Gameboy section.
Try to find a game you'd actually want to play, you know, being over the age of 13.
There are indeed a couple. Some Castlevanias, the new Final Fantasy. Mario and NES remakes, if you like. But not nearly enough.
Nintendo has a real problem with the whole "my voice has broken, can I please play something fun now" crowd. Fantastic battery life ain't going to help with that, and neither is Feel The Magic XX XY.
The bias was outside of the submission. The non-italicized text comes from CowboyNeal. We've long established that Slashdot editors are allowed to editorialize.
So we're looking at maybe 787K symbols per second on my machine, at 100% CPU. How does this translate to XML parsers? You're right, this is something I should look into.
Ummm...it's "OK". This is probably the least ambitious Binary XML spec imaginable. That may actually be good, but I don't know. Lets see what's up here...
First of all, it's completely impossible to stream this format. All the binary chunks have to be read at some point in the future when the actual XML non-opaque content is complete. In a stream, that never happens. (Of course, XML isn't the most stream friendly protocol...you can't validate a stream.)
Secondly, this isn't wonderful for large files either; you're constantly seeking for binary data that can be many megabytes away. We solve this in web pages by having the images be completely separate (binary) files.
Thirdly, its telling that they used a PNG as a data type. Besides being yet another file format that needs its own custom binary parser (heh, I like PNG, I'm just complaining about it in the XML whinespace), it's big and simple and there's just one there. One of the things I really liked about the various Binary XML formats was the degree to which they expressly typed things like arrays of floating point values or little-endian integers. Converting values between binary and string format is an enormously painful process, one that frankly I'm astonished hasn't received CPU acceleration at this point. Every other Binary XML format has seriously thought about how to efficiently but correctly manage large arrays of such values. XOP just says...heh...you wanna dump alot of data efficiently? Check your typing at the door. Feel free to bring a buffer-overflow ridden parser in with you if you like, though.
Don't get me wrong, there's a fundamental simplicity to XOP that I can certainly understand how it's appealing. But it seems to go so massively against what XML represents that I'm not entirely sure XOP encoded content deserves to be compliant with the very regulations that forced XML adoption in the first place: Opaque formats are too expensive to maintain for any amount of time, therefore either self-describe or don't get deployed. A self-decribing document that says "All performance-critical content is opaque" seems rather counter to this spirit.
>Folks who steal food usually don't deny morality; instead they assert a greater moral good (their survival) over a lesser one (property ownership). This isn't rewriting morality, it's studying it.
No, it's totally rewriting morality. You have a choice when you do something immoral:
1) Deny morality -- there's no such thing, I do what I want. 2) Rewrite morality -- Maybe this is normally wrong, but I would have starved otherwise, so it can't be wrong, because morality can't tell me I have to die.
> Hm. So, anything that causes death is immoral, is that right? Doesn't that deny the moral good of a soldier throwing himself on a grenade?
The soldier's death is accepted and praised because it contributed to the survival of other people. If he'd thrown himself on a grenade to protect a tree, we'd consider him a fool. If he'd been ordered to throw himself on the grenade to protect that tree, we'd accept him refusing, despite the deep moral duty a soldier has to follow orders.
Secondly, don't believe the hype. One of the things we learned from Dolly (the cloned sheep) is that adult cells are quite different than fetal cells -- the loss of telomeres creates significant problems with aging and long term survival. We don't know entirely how stem cells are going to work; from the article, the Chinese have already abandoned them in favor of nasal cells from four month old fetuses. (In a counterpoint, I've read there are attempts to harvest the same cells from adults. It might work.)
Fundamentally, we don't really know what cures we're going to get out of stem cells. But this isn't an argument about whether they'll work or not; like you say, it's an argument about whether it's right to take the cells from fetuses. What I'm saying is that if a cure is found, the ethics will be rewritten, because while a fetus might be human, a six year old child and a seventy two year old grandfather definitely are.
So that's the fight. That's why you started by insisting that embryonic cells are useless. That's why the non-embryonic studies are getting funded so richly. Your only hope really is that the non-embryonic cures will be so fantastically effective that embryo-harvesting approaches won't be able to keep up. This is imaginable -- reimplanting one's own stem cells neatly avoids all sorts of rejection issues -- but it's not likely.
> Hm. But that's not _self_ preservation... that's more of a "preservation of mankind" sort of thing.
They're related. From an evolutionary-biology point of view, we're the children of people who died for one another. Alot of military acculturation is about getting people to be willing to extend their sense of self to others.
It's not so abstract when you consider protecting your child, especially not genetically.
>Right... yes. But I'm not sure how often that choice arises... I guess I'm not sure how that sentence supports "the need for survival rewriting things that get in its way".
War is a pretty huge rewriting. Mostly I'm making reference to the fact that survival is a shockingly potent trump card.
> To pose a related thought experiment, suppose a woman has a choice to abort a baby and knows that aborting the baby may result in medical benefits for someone else. Now she has even less of a reason to spare her child's life.
Thus the desperate fight to prevent a cure (at least, a publically accessible one; the elite want the research to happen somewhere so they themselves can be treated.)
> Yes. They're fighting the use of embryonic stem cells because they believe humans are an end, not a mean to an end.
And this gets resolved by taking the position that it's not a human yet. C'mon, there's lots of people who already think that, and this way Grandpa won't suffer from Alzheimers. You like Grandpa, don't you?
> I'm not sure that I follow this analogy. I think you're saying that behavior which opposes our self-preservation instinct is a temporary anomaly. Is that right?
First of all, not all suicidal behavior opposes our self-preservation instinct. The soldier who jumps on a live grenade to save his buddies is appealing to a greater sense of survival, as does the man who risks his life to save his family.
But the suicide you're probably thinking of is borne of despondance and hopelessness. These are aspects of depression. Drawing conclusions about human nature based on a depressed individual is a little like drawing conclusions on cell division based on a cancerous tumor; we're _not_ supposed to work that way.
>> Survival is _constantly_ rewriting morality
>Did you mean "society is [...]"?
No. I mean the need for survival rewrites things that get in its way. The law can say what it likes; if my choice is life in jail or the death of my child, most people will go for the former.
>Hm. I guess I'm not sure what morality is being rewritten in this case. I mean, suppose nothing happened to the "morality police". Would their actions still be wrong?
You're not understanding. We know what they did was immoral _because_ the girls didn't survive. It was so blatantly obvious that not even those tasked with defining morality for the society could stand against the outrage.
Now, imagine there's a six year old girl who will die unless she's given cells from a four month old fetus that was aborted anyway. Imagine her mom refuses, for religious reasons. What happens?
Do you see the endgame? Do you see why they're fighting the development of cures so desperately?
You may be correct that solutions will be found that do not involve abortion -- but they will not come first, and faced with the choice between "living in a glass coffin" and accepting something that's already controversial...
Look at the end game. "Abortion cured my Alzheimers." "I wasn't ready to have a child, but I was ready to save a life!" That kind of thinking ends the war. Sure, you'll have boutique procedures developed for those who want to remain ethically pure, but they'll initially be less effective than "the real thing".
And what happens when kids become involved? It's one thing to refuse treatment for yourself, but for your child? Even if you do refuse the treatment, should the state respect your will, given that it's clearly not in the best interest of the child? We've already seen some of this with those sects that refuse blood transfusions, or even any modern medical treatment on their children.
The only X-Factor is if the first cure from stem cells comes from an ethically sound source (adult cells, mainly). I don't expect this, but it's not impossible. If it happens, fetal sources would be put on the defensive -- if it was so much better, why didn't it have the first cure?
That's like asking why the body gets cancer when that's clearly not a healthy thing to get.
>> morality will inexorably be rewritten to >> allow whatever is required to survive.
>What evidence do you have to support this assertion?
Survival is _constantly_ rewriting morality. It's wrong to kill someone, it's right to protect yourself, it's more right to protect yourself than it is wrong to kill. This applies to ourselves, this applies to our families, this applies to our nations. Some time ago, there was this awful event in Saudi Arabia when a fire broke out in a girl's school. All the students ran out, but were forced back in by the Madrassa's -- enforcers from the Department For Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice -- as the girls weren't sufficiently covered to be seen in public.
Many died. Presumably, the morality police had their rules "clarified".
It really comes down to this: "Imagine if abortion saved lives."
There's an astonishing report out of China; it can be read here. (The story, already quite poignant, is made even more so by the realization that the author is himself tetraplegic and is considering the procedure himself.) Essentially, the Chinese have already abandoned stem cells, and have moved onto nasal cells from four month old fetuses. They're working. Read this:
His patients - foreign and Chinese - and their families appear to adore him, and to accept what he does with foetuses. Huang has already operated on 500 people. Every month, at least a dozen more fly in. He gets hundreds of new inquiries a week and his waiting list for foreigners now stretches until next December. So many Chinese patients have asked for treatment that he says he could be busy for 10 years, even though he has trained at least five other doctors in the procedure.
"We need 100 more Dr Huangs," says Laura Jackson's father Daryl. "And we need more cells. It's a different government over here. They have to trim the population. There are 15 to 20 million abortions in China a year. If everyone who was aborted could save a life, there would be no sick people left in the world." Golden's Christian wife, Debbie, also sees Huang as an idealist - particularly in comparison to the US doctors who charged her husband almost $1m, but were able only to make him more comfortable in his wheelchair.
"In the US it's totally about money, but China is more ethical," she says. "They work harder. I'm American, so that is very hard to say.
"I don't agree with abortion, but it will happen anyway. In the US, we do abortions but don't use the cells. In China, they don't just take life and destroy it - they give something back. It's like lemonade out of lemons. You take something bad and you make it good." Such reasoning requires a moral somersault, but it is one that can be done easily in China. That is enough to generate hope.
Self-preservation is the strongest instinct, and morality will inexorably be rewritten to allow whatever is required to survive. This is ultimately what will end the abortion wars, and pro-lifers are horrified at this (likely) endgame.
Ebonics was never proposed as a valid dialect for use in the classroom. If you've got a bunch of students that can only speak French, and you want to teach them English -- it helps to know enough French to understand what they're trying to say.
Same concept. Whole thing got hijacked by politics.
Slashdot Mirror
Film has been an impressive technology for quite some time, this I grant. Kodak did some amazing things.
... ahem ... creative about. But, alas. In the era of 60fps gaming, who's backing 24fps imagery?
But Digital is going to overtake it. Not might, not could, and not just because the public is full of stupid people. Digital will overtake film, because digital will enable video with proper frame rates.
It's kind of funny talking to film people about frame rates. Given the general cluelessness of computer people about all things AV (I spent a few weeks working on low latency audio under standard operating systems; it's a nightmare, the entire architecture presumes nobody would want to do more than a thousand things a second), I didn't really expect that I'd find something about motion pictures that film people were
Film people. They have to; doubling the frame rate doubles the size of the cans, doubles the cost of printing each movie, to say nothing of the effects on production. So they tell stories. "It's dark. The human eye just can't see very high frame rates when the pupil's all big." Or they make it a challenge, "A sign of a master cinematographer is that he can work around this awful framerate...not that you'd be able to detect it anyway."
It's not that film itself can't run at higher framerates -- Maxivision48 was a system that finally fixed some of films most annoying problems -- not only the low framerate, but physical jitter from the motor. You know what? No traction, none whatsoever. They blamed digital, but at some point the entire production line made the call: Nobody needs higher framerates, why try?
(Yes, IMAX is also >24fps. But it's on a massive screen, so the effective fps still isn't fast enough. The bigger the screen, the higher a frame rate you require for panning to seem credible. Too low a frame rate, and objects in Frame 1 become difficult to locate, ten feet away, in Frame 2. But I digress.)
Digital has a reason to make people try. Viewers -- the ones who are actually bringing in money -- don't care at all about lowered expenses to ship 3000 movies; it's not like they're going to see any of the savings anyway. And of course viewers really don't care about the cool security technology being used to prevent the piracy of the video streams. However, viewers "care" about quality. I put that in quotes, because on average they don't, but as a few "experts" rail on digital for having visible pixels and thus looking bad, average viewers, not generally seeing a difference between film and what they're seeing, will "play along" rather than look bad for being unable to perceive the problems. (I know this sounds awful, but it happens all the time in a number of different fields. The irony that the complaints about digital are coming from people with huge home theatre systems w/ MPEG-2 compressed DVD's playing should not be lost on anyone.)
Framerate changes everything.
Seeing large amounts of silky-smooth motion is a noticably different experience. There was a small period in the late 90's where there was still argument about whether the human eye could detect frame rates above 30fps. 3Dfx ended up assembling a demo where the left side of a spinning donut was animating at 30fps, and the right side at 60fps. That ended that debate rather quickly. I expect we'll see the same thing out of digital. Potentially, movies will be run through framerate-upsampling algorithms that intelligently interpolate the motion vectors to derive new frames -- in English, simply by doing compression, the computer knows what's moving where between Frame 1 and Frame 2, so it's not ridiculously difficult to invent Frame 1.5. They'll do a side-by-side for the press, and everyone will ooh and aah.
But what I *actually* expect will happen involves Slashdot favorite Steve Jobs, acting not with his Apple hat, but with his Pixar hat. Pixar will render a movi
I've worked with a fair number of reporters; they're not coming up with something that complicated on their own. Hell, you're lucky if you can get like two sentences correctly quoted :) Only time you get that much technical writing in a row is if it's straight from the interview, and generally copied word for word from email.
Now, you're right. I could have taken that metaphor seriously. I could have gone ahead and pointed out, gee, they're basically describing a protocol in which the server XOR's arbitrary content from the client against the password (look real close at the "zero" and "more than zero" math. In bitspace, that's XOR). In this case, I can derive any password just by XORing two Bank->Alice/Bank->Mallory communications against one another.
But XOR is a simple encryption system, probably the only one you could hope to describe in the space alloted. So I gave them the benefit of the doubt; they weren't actually using a wildly broken cipher, just a seriously broken architecture.
4x the channels is bad?
Quite a few fans of Food Network, Animal Planet, Comedy Central, and Cartoon Network out there.
Same bandwidth, 4x or more the channels. Not complex.
So I actually got this sent to me this morning, accompanied with some nice snarkiness about "known plaintext handouts".
a af t-ncs021405.php
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-02/
Hmm. It's basically Kerberos, except totally broken.
So we don't actually know how this protocol works, but the description at the above link is vastly more coherent. (Anything with "magic envelope" and "this is a metaphor" really shouldn't be taken as a protocol specification.)
===
CUSTOMER: Bank, I will send you some information that is encrypted. You can only decrypt it if you know my password. If you don't know the password, you could of course try all possible passwords (although that is a lot of work!), but you would never know from my message if you picked the right one. Once you have decrypted the message, I want you to send it to me. If it is correctly decrypted, I will know that you know my password already. Once I know that you know my password, I will send it to you so that you can verify that I also know it. Of course, if I am lying about my identity and don't know the password in the first place, then I will not learn anything about the password from your message, so it is safe in both directions.
===
It's also wildly exploitable. Here's how:
First of all, password brute forcing? Alot of work? Only if there's no way to execute an offline attack, i.e. you can run attempts as fast as your own computer can calculate them. What we need is an offline attack -- something that lets us try to try as many attempts as possible. The most important thing is verifiability -- we need to know when we guessed the actual password.
Can we possibly verify our guess? Well, Alice sends the bank some random data, which is dutifully returned to Eve. Eve sniffs this traffic, and now has a very simple task:
Guess all possible passwords the bank could have used to decrypt the password. When the content from Alice, decrypted with the guess, equals what came back from the Bank, Eve has found the password.
But then there's Eve's friend Mallory, who thinks Eve isn't ambitious enough and wants to steal anyone's password at the bank, not just Alice's. Suppose Bob has angered her somehow. Mallory can't sniff Bob's traffic, but then, she doesn't actually need to. Mallory can simply blindly provide some arbitrary data to the bank. It's garbage going out, but even garbage will decrypt into something. Unless the bank specifically has users provide some known plaintext in the outgoing data, it's going to "decrypt" that noise, using the password, into more noise.
Once again, outgoing data + bank password = incoming data. Mallory gets to do offline attacks too -- but against any user she wants.
Of course, the bank *could* put some sort of verifier in the message that Alice sends to it. But then Eve has an even easier time guessing passwords, since she just tries random passwords until the verifier is unveiled. No need to sniff the traffic back from the Bank (which is actually significant -- it means Mallory could firewall off the bank and still successfully participate in the auth protocol, with no way for the bank to find out.)
Anyway, long story short, broken. Really, really broken.
--Dan
Ahem.
l
www.doxpara.com/t1.html
www.doxpara.com/t2.htm
Throw both through md5sum and tell me we're not worried about something legitimate.
http://www.doxpara.com/md5_someday.pdf
s/md5/sha-1/g
Nam--
Yes, but those commodity parts added up to around $700 worth. They wanted to sell it for $200.
You only get to do that when you're single sourcing and building everything yourself, which has massive initial costs but shields you from other company's profit margins down the road. And that's what Sony's done.
--Dan
New consoles are sold at a loss, but there's a limit to how muc of a loss companies can take. If the CPU itself ends up costing Sony $300+, they'd be looking at a massive loss on the consoles, probably larger than they are willing to take.
Before they've sold a single processor, they've put billions in. How much does their first wafer cost to print?
Not much more than their 100,000th.
Yields are of course important, and one of the neat things about going multicore is that you get more granularity on defects, i.e. you're able to tolerate more defects because you're planning on shipping broken (and disabled) cores. And yields do go up over time. But chip cost has way less to do with the per-wafer cost than it does the cost of doing research.
PS3 ships with economies of scale on Day 1. XBox didn't.
No subsidies required. PS3 will sell enough to write its own ticket. No need to hope others pick up the slack.
Stop by EB, or Gamestop, or wherever you get games.
Look at the Gameboy section.
Try to find a game you'd actually want to play, you know, being over the age of 13.
There are indeed a couple. Some Castlevanias, the new Final Fantasy. Mario and NES remakes, if you like. But not nearly enough.
Nintendo has a real problem with the whole "my voice has broken, can I please play something fun now" crowd. Fantastic battery life ain't going to help with that, and neither is Feel The Magic XX XY.
--Dan
Rendering is only embarassingly parallel when done poorly. There's alot that doesn't change on a frame-by-frame basis, you know.
The bias was outside of the submission. The non-italicized text comes from CowboyNeal. We've long established that Slashdot editors are allowed to editorialize.
Ummm...it's "OK". This is probably the least ambitious Binary XML spec imaginable. That may actually be good, but I don't know. Lets see what's up here...
First of all, it's completely impossible to stream this format. All the binary chunks have to be read at some point in the future when the actual XML non-opaque content is complete. In a stream, that never happens. (Of course, XML isn't the most stream friendly protocol...you can't validate a stream.)
Secondly, this isn't wonderful for large files either; you're constantly seeking for binary data that can be many megabytes away. We solve this in web pages by having the images be completely separate (binary) files.
Thirdly, its telling that they used a PNG as a data type. Besides being yet another file format that needs its own custom binary parser (heh, I like PNG, I'm just complaining about it in the XML whinespace), it's big and simple and there's just one there. One of the things I really liked about the various Binary XML formats was the degree to which they expressly typed things like arrays of floating point values or little-endian integers. Converting values between binary and string format is an enormously painful process, one that frankly I'm astonished hasn't received CPU acceleration at this point. Every other Binary XML format has seriously thought about how to efficiently but correctly manage large arrays of such values. XOP just says...heh...you wanna dump alot of data efficiently? Check your typing at the door. Feel free to bring a buffer-overflow ridden parser in with you if you like, though.
Don't get me wrong, there's a fundamental simplicity to XOP that I can certainly understand how it's appealing. But it seems to go so massively against what XML represents that I'm not entirely sure XOP encoded content deserves to be compliant with the very regulations that forced XML adoption in the first place: Opaque formats are too expensive to maintain for any amount of time, therefore either self-describe or don't get deployed. A self-decribing document that says "All performance-critical content is opaque" seems rather counter to this spirit.
Yup. Suicide missions are illegal in western militaries. Soldiers react much differently to a heavy chance of death vs. a guaranteed chance of death.
>Folks who steal food usually don't deny morality; instead they assert a greater moral good (their survival) over a lesser one (property ownership). This isn't rewriting morality, it's studying it.
No, it's totally rewriting morality. You have a choice when you do something immoral:
1) Deny morality -- there's no such thing, I do what I want.
2) Rewrite morality -- Maybe this is normally wrong, but I would have starved otherwise, so it can't be wrong, because morality can't tell me I have to die.
> Hm. So, anything that causes death is immoral, is that right? Doesn't that deny the moral good of a soldier throwing himself on a grenade?
The soldier's death is accepted and praised because it contributed to the survival of other people. If he'd thrown himself on a grenade to protect a tree, we'd consider him a fool. If he'd been ordered to throw himself on the grenade to protect that tree, we'd accept him refusing, despite the deep moral duty a soldier has to follow orders.
First of all, embryonic.
Secondly, don't believe the hype. One of the things we learned from Dolly (the cloned sheep) is that adult cells are quite different than fetal cells -- the loss of telomeres creates significant problems with aging and long term survival. We don't know entirely how stem cells are going to work; from the article, the Chinese have already abandoned them in favor of nasal cells from four month old fetuses. (In a counterpoint, I've read there are attempts to harvest the same cells from adults. It might work.)
Fundamentally, we don't really know what cures we're going to get out of stem cells. But this isn't an argument about whether they'll work or not; like you say, it's an argument about whether it's right to take the cells from fetuses. What I'm saying is that if a cure is found, the ethics will be rewritten, because while a fetus might be human, a six year old child and a seventy two year old grandfather definitely are.
So that's the fight. That's why you started by insisting that embryonic cells are useless. That's why the non-embryonic studies are getting funded so richly. Your only hope really is that the non-embryonic cures will be so fantastically effective that embryo-harvesting approaches won't be able to keep up. This is imaginable -- reimplanting one's own stem cells neatly avoids all sorts of rejection issues -- but it's not likely.
> Hm. But that's not _self_ preservation... that's more of a "preservation of mankind" sort of thing.
They're related. From an evolutionary-biology point of view, we're the children of people who died for one another. Alot of military acculturation is about getting people to be willing to extend their sense of self to others.
It's not so abstract when you consider protecting your child, especially not genetically.
>Right... yes. But I'm not sure how often that choice arises... I guess I'm not sure how that sentence supports "the need for survival rewriting things that get in its way".
War is a pretty huge rewriting. Mostly I'm making reference to the fact that survival is a shockingly potent trump card.
> To pose a related thought experiment, suppose a woman has a choice to abort a baby and knows that aborting the baby may result in medical benefits for someone else. Now she has even less of a reason to spare her child's life.
Thus the desperate fight to prevent a cure (at least, a publically accessible one; the elite want the research to happen somewhere so they themselves can be treated.)
> Yes. They're fighting the use of embryonic stem cells because they believe humans are an end, not a mean to an end.
And this gets resolved by taking the position that it's not a human yet. C'mon, there's lots of people who already think that, and this way Grandpa won't suffer from Alzheimers. You like Grandpa, don't you?
> I'm not sure that I follow this analogy. I think you're saying that behavior which opposes our self-preservation instinct is a temporary anomaly. Is that right?
First of all, not all suicidal behavior opposes our self-preservation instinct. The soldier who jumps on a live grenade to save his buddies is appealing to a greater sense of survival, as does the man who risks his life to save his family.
But the suicide you're probably thinking of is borne of despondance and hopelessness. These are aspects of depression. Drawing conclusions about human nature based on a depressed individual is a little like drawing conclusions on cell division based on a cancerous tumor; we're _not_ supposed to work that way.
>> Survival is _constantly_ rewriting morality
>Did you mean "society is [...]"?
No. I mean the need for survival rewrites things that get in its way. The law can say what it likes; if my choice is life in jail or the death of my child, most people will go for the former.
>Hm. I guess I'm not sure what morality is being rewritten in this case. I mean, suppose nothing happened to the "morality police". Would their actions still be wrong?
You're not understanding. We know what they did was immoral _because_ the girls didn't survive. It was so blatantly obvious that not even those tasked with defining morality for the society could stand against the outrage.
Now, imagine there's a six year old girl who will die unless she's given cells from a four month old fetus that was aborted anyway. Imagine her mom refuses, for religious reasons. What happens?
Do you see the endgame? Do you see why they're fighting the development of cures so desperately?
You may be correct that solutions will be found that do not involve abortion -- but they will not come first, and faced with the choice between "living in a glass coffin" and accepting something that's already controversial...
Look at the end game. "Abortion cured my Alzheimers." "I wasn't ready to have a child, but I was ready to save a life!" That kind of thinking ends the war. Sure, you'll have boutique procedures developed for those who want to remain ethically pure, but they'll initially be less effective than "the real thing".
And what happens when kids become involved? It's one thing to refuse treatment for yourself, but for your child? Even if you do refuse the treatment, should the state respect your will, given that it's clearly not in the best interest of the child? We've already seen some of this with those sects that refuse blood transfusions, or even any modern medical treatment on their children.
The only X-Factor is if the first cure from stem cells comes from an ethically sound source (adult cells, mainly). I don't expect this, but it's not impossible. If it happens, fetal sources would be put on the defensive -- if it was so much better, why didn't it have the first cure?
> Then why do people commit suicide?
That's like asking why the body gets cancer when that's clearly not a healthy thing to get.
>> morality will inexorably be rewritten to
>> allow whatever is required to survive.
>What evidence do you have to support this assertion?
Survival is _constantly_ rewriting morality. It's wrong to kill someone, it's right to protect yourself, it's more right to protect yourself than it is wrong to kill. This applies to ourselves, this applies to our families, this applies to our nations. Some time ago, there was this awful event in Saudi Arabia when a fire broke out in a girl's school. All the students ran out, but were forced back in by the Madrassa's -- enforcers from the Department For Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice -- as the girls weren't sufficiently covered to be seen in public.
Many died. Presumably, the morality police had their rules "clarified".
There's an astonishing report out of China; it can be read here. (The story, already quite poignant, is made even more so by the realization that the author is himself tetraplegic and is considering the procedure himself.) Essentially, the Chinese have already abandoned stem cells, and have moved onto nasal cells from four month old fetuses. They're working. Read this:
Self-preservation is the strongest instinct, and morality will inexorably be rewritten to allow whatever is required to survive. This is ultimately what will end the abortion wars, and pro-lifers are horrified at this (likely) endgame.
Ebonics was never proposed as a valid dialect for use in the classroom. If you've got a bunch of students that can only speak French, and you want to teach them English -- it helps to know enough French to understand what they're trying to say.
Same concept. Whole thing got hijacked by politics.
--Dan