Good idea for the Russians, they should avoid syncing their state secrets to the cloud. They better be sure that there are no back doors left in, but they probably use Windows too. I don't think even the CIA would use basic Android for their spies.
I think spies would use standard phones because weird phone would blow their cover. They would just know not to discuss their spying activities on email, text message or voice. The professional spies would know how to send encrypted data on public channels back to their agency or handlers.
If I were running the CIA, I'd send all my intel back to HQ using Pastebin or something like that, and my best sources would look to all the world like notorious hackers who somehow evade being apprehended...
Or I'd encode it in the misppelings in flamebait AC posts on Slashdot. You think it's just an anonymous dickhead talking about some irrelevant obsession, but it gives the names and addresses of Israeli spies in Tehran to my analysts who are monitoring what they are doing.
They're not protecting YOUR privacy. They're protecting the Russian government's privacy from Google. I don't see why anybody would be surprised by this at all. Instead, information channels keep the Russian government's central servers informed what their defense employees are doing with their phones.
The Russian consumer grade product probably also keeps the government servers (possibly separate from the military servers to keep the civilians out of the military's business) informed about what the consumers are doing with their phones.
When I mentioned wanting support, I was referring to the business side mostly. Windows systems (for the last decade at least) are really designed for business and their business-class products come with support to help you get started.
But Microsoft DOES give your home computer support. They also give you free, automatic OS updates if you'll allow them, and bug fixes for applications. Most of this passes beneath your notice because you've become so used to having Windows say it wants to do an update and telling it OK.
I don't disagree with the well-worn-path analogy. I think it's apt.
One of the factors that has made Windows so big at home is that so many people use it at work. A couple hundred million people had to learn how to use a Windows computer at work and that was their first exposure to computers. Having a computer at home that has a familiar interface and uses the same concepts top to bottom with only a few features removed is the easiest thing for them to do.
The Unix-family community maybe isn't so that different in that regard. It's significantly populated by people from the scientific and technical fields who had to learn to use Unix on the job. So it's easier for them to adapt to Linux or BSD for the home because of the familiarity of concepts and interfaces. But there's also the fact that if you know what you're doing, Unix is more flexible and allows you to do more things easily at the system level.
I think the real root of the difference is that Linux serves a different market. Apple Mac OS X is a consumer product pitched for people who want their computers to "just work." Windows is a consumer/business product geared to people who want (and are convinced they need) a high level of support. Linux is not either of those and never will be. It's a system made by and for programmers and other techies who want to be free of the monopolistic practices and have full control of their own machines from top to bottom.
I think Linux may in fact be close to saturating that market. It may make inroads into the business and consumer user spaces. I think it will and should because businesses shouldn't be using things that are very expensive and promote lock-in when there are good-enough alternatives that meet most of their needs. Corporate customers are very conservative about risk, and they perceive that buying a professionally supported commercial product is a lower-risk option. And they've drunk the Kool-Aid regarding how efficient their office applications are.
In reality, Windows customers probably pay the steepest price for their OS choice. It requires tons of support in a corporate environment and exposes you to a much higher risk of malware infections and security breaches. Maybe you need Windows on a few of your machines -- those of people who need to establish an appearance of "Corporate" credibility. And maybe you need some Macs for certain applications where the Mac apps give you enough of a productivity improvement to pay for the expensive system. But most of the worker bees can do as well or better on Linux at much less cost. But it will never come with support. Support will be either hire-your-own or contracted separately.
Would this count as "experimenting on humans" without their consent if Denisovans were sort of a different species? Or for that matter, is the thing you're experimenting on a human before you're done building it from scratch?
The article says the genes were found in MODERN humans, not Denisovans.
I knew a guy who got Creutzfeld-Yakov, presumably from eating deer meat. At least, I think it was deer meat. He hunted a lot in Colorado which at the time had an outbreak of CWD. But then again he was a priest so he ate the Body of Christ a lot too. But there's little evidience that Catholics are particularly prone to CYD so I think Jesus was clean.
Based on that anecdotal evidence, I think it likely that the prion-resistance gene likely was selected for because early humans ate deer, cattle, sheep and other animals that are prone to prion diseases. They certainly eat those things a lot more often than they eat each other.
There is an advantage to having the cutting edge machines in your own country to attract the best scientists and engineers.
I think that advantage might be outweighed by the cost of building and maintaining another $8,000,000,000 collider.
These may seem somewhat esoteric devices, but there is $10s billion invested in them world wide and they are valuable for a variety of materials, biological and energy research.
I can see that there was some materials and energy research involved, but biological? I think the biological implications of getting hit with a TeV proton are pretty clearly understood.
In the scientific interest, I think it's good to have a second collider.
One key aspect of the scientific method is that experiments are repeatable, preferably on a different machine. This to make sure there are no systemic errors, where you think you see something but actually it's an artifact of your machine. That artifact shouldn't be there on a different machine. So having a second one can be very useful, if only to confirm results, which while not as sexy as making the discovery is also important.
That, at least, is valid. But it doesn't mean the USA has to build it and certainly doesn't mean there's any scientific merit in doing it alone.
On the other hand, COOPERATION is good, it's what drives people forward. It's what got people to the moon some decades ago.
Fixed that for you.
Now the problem of these colliders is of course the huge cost of building, maintaining and operating them. As a European I think it's cool that the biggest one is now in Europe, though it'd be even cooler if the US would be building an even bigger one. Or have some matching ones. Even if their power is less, I can't imagine that everything below the power levels reached by the LHC has been researched already.
Or we could just keep Tevatron on line in that case.
"Seven billion light years away (seven billion years ago), a gamma-ray burst may have occurred. The observation of four Fermi-detected gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) has led physicists to speculate that space-time is indeed smooth (abstract and a pre-publication PDF both available). A trio of photons XwereX was observed to arrive very close together, and the observers believe that these are from the same burst, which XmeansX suggests that there was nothing diffracting their paths from the gamma-ray burst to Earth. This observation doesn't prove that space-time is infinitesimally smooth like Einstein predicted, but does indicate it's smooth for a range of parameters. Before we can totally discount the theory that space-time is XcomprisedX composed of Planck-scale XpixelsX voxels, we must now establish that the proposed XpixelsX voxels don't disrupt the photons in ways independent of their wavelengths. For example, this observation did not disprove the possibility that the XpixelsX voxelsexert a subtler 'quadratic' influence over the photons, nor could it determine the presence of birefringence — an effect that depends on the polarization of the light particles."
Writing is not entirely a lost art, but it's close.
When people have a greater expectation that their children will grow up, they have fewer children, especially if their religion doesn't forbid birth control.
The USA doesn't need the world's best particle collider. Our scientists need access to the world's best particle collider. It's much more efficient for several countries to fund one big machine than to have a giant competition for who has the bigger proton gun.
Seems like all that should give them is ability to take you DN. What international treaty gives them jurisdiction of your business if you're on foreign soil?
DOJ: We don't want to bother or can't prove they broke any laws but you should just give us everything they have now that we've wrecked their business.
Of course prior art was misunderstood. It usually is, including the misunderstanding that Groklaw is propagating. For the purposes of dismissing a patent, prior art does not just have to be something similar, but must be something that is, in whole or in part, exactly the same as what's claimed in the patent. If the patent claims a specific processor function that the prior art didn't have, it's not prior art!
No, it doesn't have to be exactly the same. It has to work the same way or in a similar enough way that the latter work is an obvious variation of or combination of the prior art works. It is not relevant whether the prior art works were patented.
No, and they wrote about it in the summary article, "Improvements in the superconducting qubit coherence times and more complex circuits should provide the resources necessary to factor larger composite numbers and run more intricate quantum algorithms." In other words, they don't believe their hardware works well enough to do anything much more complex than factoring small composite numbers, a conclusion that I concur with based on their not being much closer to 50% predicted by the Shor algorithm.
There's a tendency in science writing to make inflated claims about how important results are. This is important in that it shows that they have a quantum processor with elements that fundamentally work and carry out the intended process. But it's also very limited in that they only factored one number without giving a rationale for why they didn't extend this to more interesting problem sets. This might be due to a limitation of the hardware that makes it hard to reprogram it to carry out a different operation, or it may be that they just decided to publish the first time they had any confidence at all that they had a result that wasn't random. The full article doesn't state why they only factored 15 nor does it state anything about limitations on the scalability.
Market domination isn't a goal of FOSS at all, ir shouldnt be. Software freedom is for those who want it and are willing to trade their own time and effort for it.
It's no surprise at all that a commercial UI would be more stable and maintain backward compatibility better than a free and open development project. Apple was always concerned with an easy user experience as a primary goal, and their management could and did exercise rigid control of the UI model. How can you do that when anyone can contribute? In FOSS land there is no way to enforce regression testing and when contributes give you whatever they want to make instead of that somebody tells them to make?/p>
Slashdot Mirror
> They better be sure that there are no back doors left in, but they probably use Windows too.
Not where it matters, probably. Russian Ministry of Defense has a custom Linux distro too.
And they share back source code?
Good idea for the Russians, they should avoid syncing their state secrets to the cloud. They better be sure that there are no back doors left in, but they probably use Windows too. I don't think even the CIA would use basic Android for their spies.
I think spies would use standard phones because weird phone would blow their cover. They would just know not to discuss their spying activities on email, text message or voice. The professional spies would know how to send encrypted data on public channels back to their agency or handlers.
If I were running the CIA, I'd send all my intel back to HQ using Pastebin or something like that, and my best sources would look to all the world like notorious hackers who somehow evade being apprehended...
Or I'd encode it in the misppelings in flamebait AC posts on Slashdot. You think it's just an anonymous dickhead talking about some irrelevant obsession, but it gives the names and addresses of Israeli spies in Tehran to my analysts who are monitoring what they are doing.
They're protecting the data from Google, that doesn't mean that they aren't themselves receiving that data and more.
It couldn't possibly be more. Google knows when and where you pee.
They're not protecting YOUR privacy. They're protecting the Russian government's privacy from Google. I don't see why anybody would be surprised by this at all. Instead, information channels keep the Russian government's central servers informed what their defense employees are doing with their phones.
The Russian consumer grade product probably also keeps the government servers (possibly separate from the military servers to keep the civilians out of the military's business) informed about what the consumers are doing with their phones.
When I mentioned wanting support, I was referring to the business side mostly. Windows systems (for the last decade at least) are really designed for business and their business-class products come with support to help you get started.
But Microsoft DOES give your home computer support. They also give you free, automatic OS updates if you'll allow them, and bug fixes for applications. Most of this passes beneath your notice because you've become so used to having Windows say it wants to do an update and telling it OK.
I don't disagree with the well-worn-path analogy. I think it's apt.
One of the factors that has made Windows so big at home is that so many people use it at work. A couple hundred million people had to learn how to use a Windows computer at work and that was their first exposure to computers. Having a computer at home that has a familiar interface and uses the same concepts top to bottom with only a few features removed is the easiest thing for them to do.
The Unix-family community maybe isn't so that different in that regard. It's significantly populated by people from the scientific and technical fields who had to learn to use Unix on the job. So it's easier for them to adapt to Linux or BSD for the home because of the familiarity of concepts and interfaces. But there's also the fact that if you know what you're doing, Unix is more flexible and allows you to do more things easily at the system level.
I think the real root of the difference is that Linux serves a different market. Apple Mac OS X is a consumer product pitched for people who want their computers to "just work." Windows is a consumer/business product geared to people who want (and are convinced they need) a high level of support. Linux is not either of those and never will be. It's a system made by and for programmers and other techies who want to be free of the monopolistic practices and have full control of their own machines from top to bottom.
I think Linux may in fact be close to saturating that market. It may make inroads into the business and consumer user spaces. I think it will and should because businesses shouldn't be using things that are very expensive and promote lock-in when there are good-enough alternatives that meet most of their needs. Corporate customers are very conservative about risk, and they perceive that buying a professionally supported commercial product is a lower-risk option. And they've drunk the Kool-Aid regarding how efficient their office applications are.
In reality, Windows customers probably pay the steepest price for their OS choice. It requires tons of support in a corporate environment and exposes you to a much higher risk of malware infections and security breaches. Maybe you need Windows on a few of your machines -- those of people who need to establish an appearance of "Corporate" credibility. And maybe you need some Macs for certain applications where the Mac apps give you enough of a productivity improvement to pay for the expensive system. But most of the worker bees can do as well or better on Linux at much less cost. But it will never come with support. Support will be either hire-your-own or contracted separately.
So are homo-sapiens men.
This is why we're still around.
Would this count as "experimenting on humans" without their consent if Denisovans were sort of a different species? Or for that matter, is the thing you're experimenting on a human before you're done building it from scratch?
The article says the genes were found in MODERN humans, not Denisovans.
I knew a guy who got Creutzfeld-Yakov, presumably from eating deer meat. At least, I think it was deer meat. He hunted a lot in Colorado which at the time had an outbreak of CWD. But then again he was a priest so he ate the Body of Christ a lot too. But there's little evidience that Catholics are particularly prone to CYD so I think Jesus was clean.
Based on that anecdotal evidence, I think it likely that the prion-resistance gene likely was selected for because early humans ate deer, cattle, sheep and other animals that are prone to prion diseases. They certainly eat those things a lot more often than they eat each other.
There is an advantage to having the cutting edge machines in your own country to attract the best scientists and engineers.
I think that advantage might be outweighed by the cost of building and maintaining another $8,000,000,000 collider.
These may seem somewhat esoteric devices, but there is $10s billion invested in them world wide and they are valuable for a variety of materials, biological and energy research.
I can see that there was some materials and energy research involved, but biological? I think the biological implications of getting hit with a TeV proton are pretty clearly understood.
In the scientific interest, I think it's good to have a second collider.
One key aspect of the scientific method is that experiments are repeatable, preferably on a different machine. This to make sure there are no systemic errors, where you think you see something but actually it's an artifact of your machine. That artifact shouldn't be there on a different machine. So having a second one can be very useful, if only to confirm results, which while not as sexy as making the discovery is also important.
That, at least, is valid. But it doesn't mean the USA has to build it and certainly doesn't mean there's any scientific merit in doing it alone.
On the other hand, COOPERATION is good, it's what drives people forward. It's what got people to the moon some decades ago.
Fixed that for you.
Now the problem of these colliders is of course the huge cost of building, maintaining and operating them. As a European I think it's cool that the biggest one is now in Europe, though it'd be even cooler if the US would be building an even bigger one. Or have some matching ones. Even if their power is less, I can't imagine that everything below the power levels reached by the LHC has been researched already.
Or we could just keep Tevatron on line in that case.
"Seven billion light years away (seven billion years ago), a gamma-ray burst may have occurred. The observation of four Fermi-detected gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) has led physicists to speculate that space-time is indeed smooth (abstract and a pre-publication PDF both available). A trio of photons XwereX was observed to arrive very close together, and the observers believe that these are from the same burst, which XmeansX suggests that there was nothing diffracting their paths from the gamma-ray burst to Earth. This observation doesn't prove that space-time is infinitesimally smooth like Einstein predicted, but does indicate it's smooth for a range of parameters. Before we can totally discount the theory that space-time is XcomprisedX composed of Planck-scale XpixelsX voxels, we must now establish that the proposed XpixelsX voxels don't disrupt the photons in ways independent of their wavelengths. For example, this observation did not disprove the possibility that the XpixelsX voxelsexert a subtler 'quadratic' influence over the photons, nor could it determine the presence of birefringence — an effect that depends on the polarization of the light particles."
Writing is not entirely a lost art, but it's close.
It will cost whatever a third of them can pay.
There are such pills but you won't survive taking one.
When people have a greater expectation that their children will grow up, they have fewer children, especially if their religion doesn't forbid birth control.
Can we give it to the mosquitos?
The USA doesn't need the world's best particle collider. Our scientists need access to the world's best particle collider. It's much more efficient for several countries to fund one big machine than to have a giant competition for who has the bigger proton gun.
Seems like all that should give them is ability to take you DN. What international treaty gives them jurisdiction of your business if you're on foreign soil?
Doesn't seem to help much. If anything it looks to me like the US DOJ is more apt and just as able to seize foreign sites.
DOJ: We don't want to bother or can't prove they broke any laws but you should just give us everything they have now that we've wrecked their business.
Of course prior art was misunderstood. It usually is, including the misunderstanding that Groklaw is propagating. For the purposes of dismissing a patent, prior art does not just have to be something similar, but must be something that is, in whole or in part, exactly the same as what's claimed in the patent. If the patent claims a specific processor function that the prior art didn't have, it's not prior art!
No, it doesn't have to be exactly the same. It has to work the same way or in a similar enough way that the latter work is an obvious variation of or combination of the prior art works. It is not relevant whether the prior art works were patented.
No, and they wrote about it in the summary article, "Improvements in the superconducting qubit coherence times and more complex circuits should provide the resources necessary to factor larger composite numbers and run more intricate quantum algorithms." In other words, they don't believe their hardware works well enough to do anything much more complex than factoring small composite numbers, a conclusion that I concur with based on their not being much closer to 50% predicted by the Shor algorithm.
There's a tendency in science writing to make inflated claims about how important results are. This is important in that it shows that they have a quantum processor with elements that fundamentally work and carry out the intended process. But it's also very limited in that they only factored one number without giving a rationale for why they didn't extend this to more interesting problem sets. This might be due to a limitation of the hardware that makes it hard to reprogram it to carry out a different operation, or it may be that they just decided to publish the first time they had any confidence at all that they had a result that wasn't random. The full article doesn't state why they only factored 15 nor does it state anything about limitations on the scalability.
Market domination isn't a goal of FOSS at all, ir shouldnt be. Software freedom is for those who want it and are willing to trade their own time and effort for it.
It's no surprise at all that a commercial UI would be more stable and maintain backward compatibility better than a free and open development project. Apple was always concerned with an easy user experience as a primary goal, and their management could and did exercise rigid control of the UI model. How can you do that when anyone can contribute? In FOSS land there is no way to enforce regression testing and when contributes give you whatever they want to make instead of that somebody tells them to make?/p>
And before any wannabe heros mod me down you might want to consider that YOUR data could be part of it.
Or next.
Angry birds create the craters.