I'm surprised nobody is mentioning that Red Hat was itself recently bitten by another sort of bug - a security breach. Red Hat's servers were breached and an openssh trojan installed with correct Red Hat signature. Sadly, it seems that the breach happened because Red Hat was in the peculiar habit of keeping the package signing machine networked and accessible from the internet.
We've long thought that nuclear decay rates are constant regardless of ambient conditions (except in a few special cases where beta decay can be influenced by powerful electric fields).
If you count the presence or absence of observation as part of "ambient conditions", there are two cases where nuclear decay rates are affected by ambient conditions: The quantum Zeno effect and the quantum anti-Zeno effect.
Let me guess: you've never read anything about microprocessor engineering, have you ?
Actually I do my own FPGA designs, and write microcode too. Where do you get that I "want a chip that any idiot can reprogram"? I don't. I want an open-source microcode chip on the market that I can reprogram. That's not something "every non-engineer dreams of." Purpose-built chips are fixed in purpose. I don't want that. I want versatility in a single chip. That's why I want an open-source microcode chip. I would use that in my own designs. Perhaps you've never done FPGA design? In my experience, doing a FPGA-based CPU is considerably more complex than writing microcode for an existing CPU.
I was aiming for the extreme reprogrammability and versatility that an open-source microcode CPU design with SIMD, RISC and CISC sections all on a single die. Sure, the trade off is that you don't get as much capability in each subsection (compared to the capabilities of a dedicated GPU, or a dedicated modern CPU) because the sub-sections all have to fit inside the same total area of silicon. But what you get instead is an open-source microcode CPU which has great versatility, without needing to go down the FPGA design route (even more versatile, but less simple to use).
When hell freezes over, they could release a GPU where the instruction set is itself microprogrammable with open-source design, and then end users could decide whether they want to load the GPU's microcode with an x86 instruction set, a dsp set, or whatever.
Nothin' like sniping a long-range moving target with a full second of lag!
A scope capable of facial recognition at 1km is useful for much more than just targeting to kill, because it helps you work out who a person is, an activity commonly associated with performing surveillance. There are some other military applications too, which I'll leave to your imagination.
When someone serves in the Senate for 30 years, we have to..
assume they have been bought and sold so many times, that they don't really have any position on any issue.
Help me to understand, when regard for all senior politicians has fallen to such extreme cynicism, I wonder what sort of feasible measures would help restore trust in the politicians?
Gotta say a good browser is essential, and KDE's konqueror browser is in a truly hopeless situation. The developers' attention is focused on KDE4, and they have no time to fix any of the literally 1000s of severe bugs in konqueror. They don't even have the time to confirm or reject the open bug reports from five years ago!! There are hundreds of really critical bugs like javascript crashes, remote code execution vulnerabilities, screwed up rendering, etc etc etc. It's a total mess. KDE has nowhere near enough developers to even make a start on konqueror's bugs. I'd say KDE's flagship browser is dead in the water.
I wasn't equating CSS with Javascript. I was saying I don't need Javascript or CSS. I therefore disable both. This has the side-effect of reducing the attackable surface of my browser, although in practice it may not be much of an issue because security holes tend to be fixed quickly, and anyway, as I said, that's not the main issue for me. The issue is that I need and am completely satisfied with only text, a good font and simple, good old fashioned HTML for linking between webpages and for (sparingly) embedding images etc.
This kind of security bug never affects me for a simple reason -- I permanently turn off Javascript. But the main issue for me is actually not a concern about security; afterall serious holes tend to be fixed quickly. The issue is that I use the web primarily to to find information, to study, to learn and when I do those things, what I am mostly doing is reading text. I don't need fancy "interactivity" features which would be a distraction from reading text. I don't need the additional "beauty" that CSS enables. All I need is a good font and then I read. In other words, I am completely and totally satisfied with how web was in 1995 based on web standards of that time -- so-called Web 1.0. For me, this is very productive. I don't use Google Desktop.
I realise there are many other people who see Web 1.0 as too limited for all the usual reasons, e.g. because they want interactivity features, or Flash movies, or proper CSS support for different display devices, etc, all of which are good reasons for them and do require the use of Javascript / AJAX. I don't need any of that, however, so I disable Javascript. I have yet to find a website with textual information that could not have been written or read by me based on good old HTML. Another reason I prefer websites that avoid relying heavily upon Javascript, even to make simple links between webpages, is that they can be properly indexed by search engines.
Apologies for blowing my own trumpet here, but there was much earlier work in the 1980s and 1990s on recognizing objects in images of outdoor scenes using neural networks that achieved a similarly high accuracy compared to the system mentioned in this article:
Design of a database of colorimetrically calibrated, high quality images of street scenes and rural scenes, with highly accurate near-pixel ground-truth labelling based on a hierarchy of object categories. Example of labelled image from database
Design of a neural network system that recognized categories of objects by labelling regions in random test images from the database achieving 86% accuracy
The database is now known as the Sowerby Image Database and is available from the Advanced Technology Centre, British Aerospace PLC, Bristol, UK. If you use it, please cite: WPJ Mackeown (1994), A Labelled Image Database, PhD Thesis, Bristol University.
2. WPJ Mackeown, P Greenway, BT Thomas, WA Wright (1994).
Road recognition with a neural network, Engineering Applications of Artificial
Intelligence, 7(2):169-176.
A neural network system that recognized categories of objects by labelling regions in random test images of street scenes and rural scenes achieving 86% accuracy
3. NW Campbell, WPJ Mackeown, BT Thomas, T Troscianko (1997). Interpreting image databases by region classification.
Pattern Recognition, 30(4):555-563.
A neural network system that recognized categories of objects by labelling regions in random test images of street scenes and rural scenes achieving 92% accuracy
I think further research on the effects of DCA is needed before anybody can say that DCA is safe to use in humans. There seem to be very good and very bad effects reported in different studies:
Diamond, whether natural or synthetic, is not the hardest known material. Aggregated diamond nanorods are 1.11 times harder than diamond, as discussed here in 2005. And Acetylene polyyne is 40 times harder than diamond. See here
Why do melting icebergs raise sea level?
on
Giant Ice Shelf Snaps
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The pure water from a melting iceberg is less dense than sea water. How much less dense depends on temperature. The water from a melting iceberg will probably be around 1Celsius. Pure water at 1C is 2.5% less dense than sea water at 1C.
Imagine you could contain the pure water from a fully melted iceberg inside a sphere. In the same way an iceberg floats and sticks out of the sea, the ball of pure water would float in the sea with 2.5% of its volume sticking out above the sea surface. If you let the water out of the sphere, the 2.5% volume of pure water that was above the sea level inside the sphere will spread out across the planet's oceans, raising the global sea level.
The iceberg mentioned in the article was 40metres thick and 66 square kilometres in area, so the ice volume is 2.6 billion cubic metres. Ice is 8.3% less dense than pure water liquid, so when the iceberg melts, the volume of pure water will be 2.4 billion cubic metres and 2.5% of that is 60 million cubic metres. The world has 360 million square kilometers of ocean, so adding 60 million cubic metres of pure water will raise average global sea level by 0.17 microns (thousandths of a millimetre)!
In the copyright sense, "Linus Torvalds giving away his software" is not an accurate description. What happened is that "Linus Torvalds retained the copyright on his software and published it under a licence". "Giving away software" is more akin to "putting software in the public domain".
it's not like you'll be able to [...] add some nanorust, and have fresh sparkling drinking water. [...] the key is ensuring factories and agriculture do not dump their waste into the drinking supply (one of the big problems in India), that the sewage and drinking systems are separated, and that modern filtration units are used.
The history is that thousands of deep tube wells were constructed in Bangladesh with generous international funding and advice from various well-meaning organisations and governments around the world who wanted to help solve the problem of dangerous bacteriological contamination of drinking water supplies in the old shallow pit wells. For 10 years, lots of new tube wells were built all over the country at great expense. It was simply assumed that water supplies from these deep tube wells would automatically be safe to drink or use for irrigation because the water would be well filtered by the thick layers of sediments.
Unfortunately the deep sediments contained naturally occurring deposits of arsenic. Nobody realised this until local doctors noticed a large increase in arsenic-related health problems such as cancers, hair loss and skin lesions among young Bangladeshis. The drinking water from the tube wells was then tested and found to have dangerously high levels of arsenic. This arsenic contamination is caused by natural microbial degradation of peat, not by industrial pollution. Some people have unsuccessfully argued that the foreign experts involved in providing tube well advice in the 1990s were negligent in not having done any arsenic tests.
Because arsenic is cumulative and the local people have no alternative but to continue drinking the tube well water, the health problems from the arsenic are continuing to worsen and now affect over 13000 people. New more affordable arsenic filtration technologies are badly needed. Current technlogies are not practicable due to their very high maintenance costs.
To clarify: Google does not consider the search histories of its users to be part of what they call "data" they are talking about, so they will not send you your entire search history and erase their copy if you tell them you want to move all your data to another place.
I was well aware of the word meanings, and so phrased what I wrote because I think the vernacular is usually a more effective way of communicating with an audience. Sorry if that has upset you. How about sharing your thoughts about the subject of the article / this thread?
Taiji, Japan, is the site of the annual ritual dolphin massacre in which fishermen drive pods of dolphins into shallow coves and stab them with spears. You should see it. It is quite a sight. The sea water turns red with blood, and the air is filled with the extraordinary sounds of screaming dolphins (they literally seem to scream).
I would suggest the money should be used instead to support a powerful well-funded lobbying effort for copyright reform, perhaps helping any number of the existing organisations such as Union for the Public Domain. There are many issues - the unnecessarily huge and increasing length of copyright terms, the inaccessibility of orphan works whose copyright owners cannot be traced, questions of balance between just rewards to creators and fair use/dealing for consumers, non-expiry of DRM even after nominal copyright expiration, etc. Spending USD 100m on a number of popular copyrights is very generous, but copyrights can be extremely expensive, and USD 100m is a tiny bit of the total value of all the still current copyrights. Reforming copyright, however, would change the future for all copyright works, something which could be of greater long-term value to society, commerce and industry including the copyright holders.
If Lik Sang were to bulk-buy PSPs from Japanese retailers (legal) in Japan, have the purchased PSPs delivered to the home addresses in Japan of minimum-wage Japanese workers who open the PSP retail box/packaging and use the PSPs for at least a month (legal), the consoles would then be used goods which could be legally exported and sold anywhere in the world including the EU and UK. Even after shipping costs and customs taxes are taken into account, it should still be profitable given the relatively very high prices in the EU and UK of brand new PSPs.
The more people talk about "the stock market bubble" and upcoming crash, the more people start expecting it and theb selling their stocks, which makes it more likely to happen.
Tracking products from farm through the processing chain to the retailer is already done in some places such as the EU. The cost of that tracking is relatively very small compared to the costs of all the other components of food bureaucracy and compared with the large hidden costs of farming subsidies which exist in both the US and the EU and which continue to distort and harm the free market. Even for organic food which has the most stringent and thus the most expensive of tracking requirements, the tracking cost is actually a very small part of the overall additional cost of that sort of food.
"I object to the labeling for the same reason why I wouldn't want my tax money being spent to certify kosher food or bottled holy water. There is no SCIENTIFIC way, with a mass spectromer or any other means, to tell the difference between the products."
That's incorrect. There certainly are scientific ways of detecting GMO food products, and some of these methods are commercially available today. For example, Invitrogen has a GMO testing service:
"Our GMO test procedures are capable of detecting as little as 10-100 copies of GM DNA which is typically well below 0.001%. Test sensitivity does diminish depending on the degree of processing the sample has undergone, certain processing practices are more destructive than others. Typically our tests are capable of detecting GM-DNA if present at or above 0.1%."
Slashdot Mirror
I'm surprised nobody is mentioning that Red Hat was itself recently bitten by another sort of bug - a security breach. Red Hat's servers were breached and an openssh trojan installed with correct Red Hat signature. Sadly, it seems that the breach happened because Red Hat was in the peculiar habit of keeping the package signing machine networked and accessible from the internet.
If you count the presence or absence of observation as part of "ambient conditions", there are two cases where nuclear decay rates are affected by ambient conditions: The quantum Zeno effect and the quantum anti-Zeno effect.
Actually I do my own FPGA designs, and write microcode too. Where do you get that I "want a chip that any idiot can reprogram"? I don't. I want an open-source microcode chip on the market that I can reprogram. That's not something "every non-engineer dreams of." Purpose-built chips are fixed in purpose. I don't want that. I want versatility in a single chip. That's why I want an open-source microcode chip. I would use that in my own designs. Perhaps you've never done FPGA design? In my experience, doing a FPGA-based CPU is considerably more complex than writing microcode for an existing CPU.
I was aiming for the extreme reprogrammability and versatility that an open-source microcode CPU design with SIMD, RISC and CISC sections all on a single die. Sure, the trade off is that you don't get as much capability in each subsection (compared to the capabilities of a dedicated GPU, or a dedicated modern CPU) because the sub-sections all have to fit inside the same total area of silicon. But what you get instead is an open-source microcode CPU which has great versatility, without needing to go down the FPGA design route (even more versatile, but less simple to use).
When hell freezes over, they could release a GPU where the instruction set is itself microprogrammable with open-source design, and then end users could decide whether they want to load the GPU's microcode with an x86 instruction set, a dsp set, or whatever.
A scope capable of facial recognition at 1km is useful for much more than just targeting to kill, because it helps you work out who a person is, an activity commonly associated with performing surveillance. There are some other military applications too, which I'll leave to your imagination.
Help me to understand, when regard for all senior politicians has fallen to such extreme cynicism, I wonder what sort of feasible measures would help restore trust in the politicians?
Gotta say a good browser is essential, and KDE's konqueror browser is in a truly hopeless situation. The developers' attention is focused on KDE4, and they have no time to fix any of the literally 1000s of severe bugs in konqueror. They don't even have the time to confirm or reject the open bug reports from five years ago!! There are hundreds of really critical bugs like javascript crashes, remote code execution vulnerabilities, screwed up rendering, etc etc etc. It's a total mess. KDE has nowhere near enough developers to even make a start on konqueror's bugs. I'd say KDE's flagship browser is dead in the water.
There are two free (GPL) 3d electromagnetics FDTD solvers, RadarFDTD and Tessa.
I wasn't equating CSS with Javascript. I was saying I don't need Javascript or CSS. I therefore disable both. This has the side-effect of reducing the attackable surface of my browser, although in practice it may not be much of an issue because security holes tend to be fixed quickly, and anyway, as I said, that's not the main issue for me. The issue is that I need and am completely satisfied with only text, a good font and simple, good old fashioned HTML for linking between webpages and for (sparingly) embedding images etc.
I realise there are many other people who see Web 1.0 as too limited for all the usual reasons, e.g. because they want interactivity features, or Flash movies, or proper CSS support for different display devices, etc, all of which are good reasons for them and do require the use of Javascript / AJAX. I don't need any of that, however, so I disable Javascript. I have yet to find a website with textual information that could not have been written or read by me based on good old HTML. Another reason I prefer websites that avoid relying heavily upon Javascript, even to make simple links between webpages, is that they can be properly indexed by search engines.
The PhD thesis title got truncated during cut-and-paste:
WPJ Mackeown (1994), A Labelled Image Database and its Application to Outdoor Scene Analysis, unpublished PhD Thesis, Bristol University.
1. WPJ Mackeown (1994), A Labelled Image Database, unpublished PhD Thesis, Bristol University.
2. WPJ Mackeown, P Greenway, BT Thomas, WA Wright (1994).Road recognition with a neural network, Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 7(2):169-176.
3. NW Campbell, WPJ Mackeown, BT Thomas, T Troscianko (1997).
Interpreting image databases by region classification. Pattern Recognition, 30(4):555-563.
There has been various follow up research since then
DCA and a related chemical TCE were both found to play a prominent role in creating liver cancers with DCA accelerating the growth rate of liver cancer
Later research found that DCA and its metabolites may have different roles in the cancer process and that dose-response is very non-linear because DCA inhibits its own metabolism.
DCA has such serious side effects on the human nervous system that in a recent study 15 out of 15 test patients had to be taken off experimental DCA treatment because of toxic neuropathy and the study was terminated early.
DCA has been found to prevent and reverses pulmonary high blood pressure
Diamond, whether natural or synthetic, is not the hardest known material. Aggregated diamond nanorods are 1.11 times harder than diamond, as discussed here in 2005. And Acetylene polyyne is 40 times harder than diamond. See here
Imagine you could contain the pure water from a fully melted iceberg inside a sphere. In the same way an iceberg floats and sticks out of the sea, the ball of pure water would float in the sea with 2.5% of its volume sticking out above the sea surface. If you let the water out of the sphere, the 2.5% volume of pure water that was above the sea level inside the sphere will spread out across the planet's oceans, raising the global sea level.
The iceberg mentioned in the article was 40metres thick and 66 square kilometres in area, so the ice volume is 2.6 billion cubic metres. Ice is 8.3% less dense than pure water liquid , so when the iceberg melts, the volume of pure water will be 2.4 billion cubic metres and 2.5% of that is 60 million cubic metres. The world has 360 million square kilometers of ocean, so adding 60 million cubic metres of pure water will raise average global sea level by 0.17 microns (thousandths of a millimetre)!
In the copyright sense, "Linus Torvalds giving away his software" is not an accurate description. What happened is that "Linus Torvalds retained the copyright on his software and published it under a licence". "Giving away software" is more akin to "putting software in the public domain".
Unfortunately the deep sediments contained naturally occurring deposits of arsenic. Nobody realised this until local doctors noticed a large increase in arsenic-related health problems such as cancers, hair loss and skin lesions among young Bangladeshis. The drinking water from the tube wells was then tested and found to have dangerously high levels of arsenic. This arsenic contamination is caused by natural microbial degradation of peat, not by industrial pollution. Some people have unsuccessfully argued that the foreign experts involved in providing tube well advice in the 1990s were negligent in not having done any arsenic tests.
Because arsenic is cumulative and the local people have no alternative but to continue drinking the tube well water, the health problems from the arsenic are continuing to worsen and now affect over 13000 people. New more affordable arsenic filtration technologies are badly needed. Current technlogies are not practicable due to their very high maintenance costs.
To clarify: Google does not consider the search histories of its users to be part of what they call "data" they are talking about, so they will not send you your entire search history and erase their copy if you tell them you want to move all your data to another place.
I was well aware of the word meanings, and so phrased what I wrote because I think the vernacular is usually a more effective way of communicating with an audience. Sorry if that has upset you. How about sharing your thoughts about the subject of the article / this thread?
Taiji, Japan, is the site of the annual ritual dolphin massacre in which fishermen drive pods of dolphins into shallow coves and stab them with spears. You should see it. It is quite a sight. The sea water turns red with blood, and the air is filled with the extraordinary sounds of screaming dolphins (they literally seem to scream).
I would suggest the money should be used instead to support a powerful well-funded lobbying effort for copyright reform, perhaps helping any number of the existing organisations such as Union for the Public Domain. There are many issues - the unnecessarily huge and increasing length of copyright terms, the inaccessibility of orphan works whose copyright owners cannot be traced, questions of balance between just rewards to creators and fair use/dealing for consumers, non-expiry of DRM even after nominal copyright expiration, etc. Spending USD 100m on a number of popular copyrights is very generous, but copyrights can be extremely expensive, and USD 100m is a tiny bit of the total value of all the still current copyrights. Reforming copyright, however, would change the future for all copyright works, something which could be of greater long-term value to society, commerce and industry including the copyright holders.
If Lik Sang were to bulk-buy PSPs from Japanese retailers (legal) in Japan, have the purchased PSPs delivered to the home addresses in Japan of minimum-wage Japanese workers who open the PSP retail box/packaging and use the PSPs for at least a month (legal), the consoles would then be used goods which could be legally exported and sold anywhere in the world including the EU and UK. Even after shipping costs and customs taxes are taken into account, it should still be profitable given the relatively very high prices in the EU and UK of brand new PSPs.
The more people talk about "the stock market bubble" and upcoming crash, the more people start expecting it and theb selling their stocks, which makes it more likely to happen.
"I object to the labeling for the same reason why I wouldn't want my tax money being spent to certify kosher food or bottled holy water. There is no SCIENTIFIC way, with a mass spectromer or any other means, to tell the difference between the products."
That's incorrect. There certainly are scientific ways of detecting GMO food products, and some of these methods are commercially available today. For example, Invitrogen has a GMO testing service: