The numbers should be Pi x (3.5/2)^2 - Pi x (Radius of
the motor spindle)^2 Your numbers are an order of magnitude
off.
Okay, I have a platter sitting on my desk at this very moment:
OD = 3.75in; Pi*(3.50/2)^2 =11.04 (a "3.5in" HDD actually measures almost 4in). ID = 1.25in; Pi*(1.25/2)^2 = 1.23 (actually the OD of the little aluminum disks
separating the platters). 11.04 - 1.23 = 9.81in^2
This discrepancy (on the high side, I would point out)
allows a good bit of space between the absolute physical edges
and the data-containing region. So I'd have to say 6.5in^2 sounds
like a reasonable number, per side per platter. 6.5 times two sides
times three platters gives 39in^2; At 1Tb/in^2, dividing by 8 for
bits-to-bytes, we get 4.875TB.
Incidentally, I actually found that number in an old Seagate
tech-oriented PR, rather than calculating it for my prevous
post. So I thank you for keeping me honest, but the numbers
do indeed work out.
That quote doesn't describe the false positive rate. It describes
the number of cases of non-Alzheimer's dementia that their test
correctly doesn't call Alzheimer's. The false positive rate
would indicate the number of participants without Alzheimer's (including
this group of 39) who incorrectly test as having Alzheimers.
Also, remember that their test is also designed to detect people
at risk of developing AD years in the future, so, as is also pointed
out in the article false positive rates can not be fully determined
for some years.
True, but that would seem to make the test worthless. It doesn't always
catch people known to have it, it at least sometimes (5 times out
of 39) flags people known to not have it, and for the rest we can't
say if it works or not.
When I call that an abuse of statistics, I very much mean it. Give me
120 protein markers in a small enough group (in this case, fewer subjects
than proteins under consideration!), and I'll get you a similar level
of accuracy in predicting whether they wear boxers or briefs.
It may turn out that they have something. But as written, I'd take this
study with a whole salt-lick.
But the typical consumer wants a hard drive that is durable enough that it can be abused a bit more.
Fair enough - I can accept that interpretation... But ignoring the reality that
HDDs have rapidly moving parts that must never touch mere nanometers apart,
combined with a high sensitivity to heat, well, that just asks for trouble.
Ideally, we'd have better. Practically, we have what we have.
I don't have time to cool all my hard drives.
I didn't mean to imply that I have some complicated setup... Just a $3 DC fan,
in its simplest form. For cases that have 4+ 5.25 bays, ThermalTake
makes a great little kit for about $12 that holds 3 HDDs with a
120mm fan (you can get 4HDD-in-3bay as well, but they pack
the drives a bit tighter than I'd like); For those with too
few external bays, zip-ties work wonders for connecting fans
to anything at odd angles.
I could live with a ten gig drive that was robust.
As you point out, iff I could always access my home
file server, a 10GB flash drive would indeed work fine in
any other machine I own. But again, this comes down to what-we'd-like
vs what-we-have.
I want more reliability. Over the last ten years of using hard drives, I have about a 50% failure rate.
I see comments like this all the time, and really don't understand them.
I have personally bought an average of one HDD per six months over the past decade, and, except for ones
outright DOA, I have only had one fail, ever (and that after it had served for a good many years).
And I include both DiamondMaxes and the legendary DeathStars in that list, both considered some of the
most prone-to-failure out there.
Considering my work environment, I can expand that sample to most like 100+ HDDs; Of those, only two
have failed, both laptop drives.
I have to suspect the people experiencing the flakyness of HDDs either fail to adequately cool
them (I put ALL my HDDs loosely-packed in 5.25 bays with a front-mounted 120mm low-RPM
fan cooling them) or somehow subject them to mechanical stresses not intended (car PC? portable
gaming rig? screws tight agains the drive's board?).
This will pave the way for quadrupling today's storage limits to 4
terabytes for desktop computers and 1 terabyte on laptops in 2011.
Prior to the rise of perpendicular recording,
we had cheap and plentiful 200-400GB HDDs using plain ol' longitudinal recording.
Suddenly PMR hits the market, promising 10x the storage density at up to 1Tb/in^2
(which Seagate claims they actually achieve), and two years later we have only two
real models (with a few variations for SATA/PATA) of 1TB drives available.
Call me crazy, but a few really trivial calculations show that at 6.25in^2 *of
usable area) per platter surface, times two surfaces per platter, times three
platters, we should have, using today's technology, 4.5TB (note the change
in case of the "B", no confusing units here) 3.5" HDDs.
So forgive me for not wetting my pants in excitement about an "announcement"
that something realistically available today, we won't have for another half
of a decade.
Let me guess. It's also successful at diagnosing 88% of people who have no symptoms whatsoever?
From your low moderation score, I'd guess that most people didn't "get" the half-seriousness
of your joke, but kudos for at least trying to keep people honest in reporting (or in this
case, reading) statistics.
But yeah, I too found it suspicious that they only quoted positive accuracies,
completely ignoring false positives. It also doesn't say whether those numbers come
from the same samples as used to pick the target proteins. Nice thing about PCA as
a statistical technique, it will almost always account for the bulk of your variance
with only a handful of components; It doesn't, however, select meaningful
components - So while you can get an arbitrarily low in-series error, you have almost
no external validity (for the non-statistically inclined, think of this as having a
good travel atlas... It will show you every possible point of interest, but you won't
personally find every park, statue, battle field, boat launch, and historical district
really all that interesting).
That could somewhat explain why they "only" get a 90% success rate - If they had indeed
found a set of Alzheimer's "markers", you'd expect very close to 100% (though in fairness,
they compared against official diagnoses, which quite likely have Alzheimers vs "other"
dementias). They likely chose 18 markers because 18 markers put them at 90%, the worst
kind of abuse of statistics to support a meaningless correlation.
Ethanol is commonly known to give feelings of warmth
Except, it doesn't just make you feel warm - It reduces your body's
natural tendancy to hoarde blood in your core when the outside temperature
drops, thus actually warming your skin and periphery.
Of course, on the down side, with warmer skin you lose heat faster,
and when your core temperature drops a few degrees, you go into
hypothermia (and to make matters worse, with a few drinks in you, you
might not notice until too late).
My forecast is that around 2050, the state of Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize marriages with robots
Using an artificial device for sexual purposes does not equal marriage, people.
Marriage exists for one reason, and one reason only - Succession of property rights.
Allowing humans and robots to marry would mean allowing robots to own land. No
more, no less.
You can talk about medical power of attorney (would that even apply to a robot?);
a stable environment for raising children (definitely wouldn't apply); a religious
institution to make sex okay to your friend in the sky (yeah, like the fundies
wouldn't just love this one); but all those come secondary to the state
sanctioning a legal contract between two humans.
When I was the young guy with no family- I remember having to go home from work
one day, pack, come back to work, then drive to Portland to catch a flight in under
3 hours, while the travel agent got me boarding passes at the call desk.
...So basically, you applaud this program, because it means your employer
can't (so easily) dick with your life on a whim and give you a moment's notice
to cancel your plans for the weekend?
I'd suggest that certain people be allowed to willingly give up privacy
in return for fast track at the airport through the TSA.
I'm sorry, the answer was colonialism. But thanks for playing.
I know, right? Like those "New World" American colonies.
Look what a shithole those ended up as... The UK's
little experiment-that-rebelled, barely able to feed the
rich, nevermind the poor; Canada, France's version of the
same, we have to accept that they always had the climate
against them anyway; And the mishmash in South America,
man, a real sob-story with the Spanish taking their gold
and the Vatican taking their souls.
Colonialism makes a nice "White Man's fault" excuse.
Yet, I'd have to say that we really don't have a lot
of examples that do anything but contradict that
stance. Europeans found Africa in a state of savagery,
and such has it stayed (though they've upgraded the
weaponry used in tribal warfare - Though they need to
thank (or curse) the Europeans even for that
humble advancement).
The closest Africa ever came to pulling itself
out of the mud (Biafra), it excised like a tumor. And
how does it view attempts at Western aid to its woes?
They seriously believe we've sent them condoms poisoned
with AIDS to kill them all off (on a good day - On bad
days, they accuse us of witchcraft).
The jury had the option of fixing penalties at $750 per song.
They opted for more than 10x that.
On that, I have to agree with you. Though I have to admit, it
doesn't do much for my personal opinion of the naivete of Duluthites.
Says who?
Says anyone who understands why we have juries of our peers
rather than juries of government-appointed experts, when the latter
could incontrovertibly do a much better job of deciding the
facts of the case.
Jury nullification, not the USSC or the presidential pardon, represents the final and
most effective of the "checks and balances" on government abuse of power.
If time becomes space-like, what would that mean for us?
The "problem", philosophically, with a purely Newtonian universe,
derives from the niggling little detail that free will cannot
exist. Every possible action you could ever take will have already
happened, just not yet.
As one way to interpret time as reducing to the status of a mere spatial
dimension, consider the classic phrase, "God does not play dice with the
universe". Quantum theory basically breathed new life into the universe,
by allowing for "true" random numbers at the lowest levels of reality. If
that suddently stops, and all phenomena revert to deterministic
behavior, we go back to a purely Newtonian universe (or at least, a Newtonianly
"simulated" relativistic universe), where you have absolutely no
influence over what will happen in the future. Ever decision you make,
every action you take, exists as the only physically-allowed path from that
point in spacetime.
To us, however, nothing will change. The universe will just start using/dev/urandom with an empty enropy pool. For all we know, this could
already have happened.
Would time itself become irrelevent as we could look "forwards"?
"Look" with what sensory organs? Imagine watching a home movie of yourself...
In hindsight, you already know what happens. But that knowledge doesn't
make the you-in-the-movie any more able to change or even perceive the same
future-to-it sequence events. The you-in-the-movie has to watch events
unfold as they occurred, as if for the first time. More than that, though...
Even if the you-in-the-movie could know its future, by somehow
having consciousness and sensing its celluloidy future, it couldn't do
anything about that. The movie itself would limit what it can do to what
it always did/does/will do, no different than a brick wall limits our ability
to move between two points in space.
Of course, the implications for morality under such considions seem rather
disturbing... No matter what we do, we will do what we would always will
have done.
While this is certainly potentially more incriminating
More incriminating? Notice they describe weights and chemical names,
and refer to an "underground" book on explosives. Pure sensationalism.
If they had said "So, we found a bag of fertilizer, in the shed with some
potting soil, pots, and gardening tools; a bag of ice-melt in the garage
next to a bucket of sand and a snow-shovel; an all-time best selling book
available in a dozen languages and from major vendors such as Amazon; oh,
and his browser cache contained video clips from last night's NBC Nightly
News", we'd have people rioting in the streets over the outrageousness of
calling the kid a potential terrorist.
Especially here on Slashdot, anyone damning this kid for
the circumstantial evidence needs to think back to their own
teens (or last night, as the case warrants). How many of us made
small bombs just for fun? How many of us, if the police raided our
houses today, wouldn't have all this and more, all purely
innocuous? And even if for playing around with explosives,
that still doesn't make a person a threat to anyone but
themselves.
Who said anything about a conspiracy? Just a bunch of domesticated
primates acting purely out of self-interest, for their own advancement.
No conspiracies involved.
The Kool Aid at MoveOn must be pretty good to keep ill informed people
repeating stupid things.
What a strange comment... I don't drink Kool Aid; I don't follow MoveOn; and
as for well-informed, by dear little pot, you might find it somewhat more effective
to post some form of factual refutation rather than an effectively contentless set
of insults.
But hey, if you like the system we have now, or lack the will or courage to
say otherwise - good for you! Some of us would prefer to consider the government
we could have, and dare to say as much.
1) The general dislike for the current administration (whether applicable or not, it's still there).
Admitted freely, but irrelevant to this particular issue.
2) The big question of whether national security trumps personal privacy.
Absolutely not. Period.
3) How much personal privacy is given up in the interest of national security.
Ideally, none. In practice, we already have a system of legal hoops to jump through
to allow a carefully controlled, specifically targetted loss of privacy when
overwhelming evidence makes it clear that someone intends to do something nasty. And
I don't mean the joke we call the FISA court, which should simply not exist. Need a
warrant? Come up with some evidence first.
4) Just what information was gathered by the surveillance program.
This one has an all-too-easy answser - "All of it". And ironically, too much
to use. Casting an overly-broad net to fish for evidence has one major drawback,
aside from cost (which we the taxpayers bear, so the government couldn't care less about
that) - For every "real" potential terrorist intent on blowing something up,
you have hundreds of discontents who may talk about it but would never actaully do
anything; tens of thousands who talk about the topic in a way that careful inspection
would filter out but still sounds suspicious at first listen; and millions of
completely irrelevant conversations about shopping and dating and telemarketing and
what to have for dinner, all of which may well throw in the occasional phrase that
catches the filters' attention. And the wider the net, the more likely the one real
terrorist will manage to evade it (and that doesn't even consider that he'll likely speak
the most guardedly).
If Congress can't exert any power in situations like this, what CAN it do?
They can, but they won't.
You make a mistake in thinking congress actually objects to the wholesale
stripping away of our privacy, to the war in Iraq, to all the crap they've scapegoated
Bush with for the last six years. What a great game! Last week you hated Bill, this
week you hate George, next week you hate Hillary, but we just keep going back to the
same used car dealership so one of them can rape us week after week after week...
Yes, few people in US history can come close to Bush for outright in-your-faceness
about how frequently they wipe their asses with the constitution. But we need
to avoid presuming that he has done anything new - He just lacks the saavy
to hide his abuses.
If congress so desired, they could end all this tomorrow. They could end the
war, they could end the spying programs, they could end our use of torture and
our continued illegal detainment of both foreigners and US citizens, they could
end Bush's presidency. They have that power. But they won't use
it, because they all want the same things that Bush does - Further consolidation
of power and money into their own families and friends.
The only part of domestic wiretapping they actually object to involves who
gets to listen. They want in on the action, and resent Bush keeping them
outside the loop.
Going through the steps of capturing it to MP3 to play on the iPod doesn't have enough value for the time spent doing it in my opinion.
For most things, I would agree. A new DNA radio show, though?
Most Slashdotters, I think, if we had to hold a microphone in front of the
speaker to capture this one - We would spend the time. Fortunately, we have
MPlayer (though it annoyingly appears to only capture BBC streams in realtime),
so we can fire it off and go make coffee.
No, as an appendix is a complex structure, and its presence in an organism lowers the
organism's informational entropy, evolution would remove it without positive pressure to keep it.
Well said! Okay, my apologies for failing to give you enough credit... I took your previous statement
as the all-too-common idea that evolution somehow actively removes unneeded parts wholesale from
a species.
I still disagree somewhat, though much more resprctfully, in that the entropic view (over a finite
number of iterations, of course) presumes that either a low number of single changes can remove the
appendix, or all possible intermediate stages have either no effect or a positive one on viability of the
organism. It could turn out that with an appendix less than a third its current length, the right
kidney shifts slightly, increasing the risk of death from renal infection.
Or you could be wary of attempts to ascribe to physical causes things which have spiritual causes.
Here, I have to sharply disagree with you. I do believe in a deity, but Nietzsche summed it up
nicely - "God is dead", at least for epistemological purposes.
But you can't claim you've "Created Life" by modifying an existing instance.
So did Netscape or the Mozilla Foundation "create" FireFox 2?;-)
I agree, we haven't reached the point where we can fairly call it "created life". But
this one step, more than anything since Pasteur, represents a major step
forward. The ability to invoke a breakpoint on a running cell, replace its code
with a custom gene sequence, and continue execution, means we can now probe the rest
of the cellular machinery with unprecedented efficiency.
The GP's point aside, I think this one step means we'll see a fully artificial cell
within a decade or two - Certainly within our lifetimes... Presuming, of course, that
the military doesn't create and release (accidentally or deliberately doesn't matter)
the "perfect bug" before then.
Apparently it is up to the operating system implementation to provide real time conversions to DNA code bocks from the file stream.
Humorous or not, I consider this one of the most insightful comments I've read on Slashdot in quite a long time. If you hadn't
posted as AC, I even have mod points at the moment, but, so it goes.
Hardly "evolutionary", designing a system that designs trial and error is hardly "evolutonary",
its basically an intelligent search of a search space compared against a pattern.
Not "evolution" in the "squishy wet things having sex sense", but in the randomized
state-space search sense - The use of an iterated genetic algorithm to satisfy an
arbitrary fitness measure. "Natural" evolution represents merely a specific
instantiation of that larger concept, but certainly not the only possible one.
Evolution is blind, it has no end goal.
"Natural" evolution results from organisms who best satisfy the fitness heuristic
of "able to produce the most children that survive to themselves reproduce". No,
you cannot attribute any motive or intent to what amounts to an abstract description
of a purely statistical phenomenon; But you can use the same mechanism to
artificially "evolve" a solution to any problem that you can encode as a finite vector
of parameters describing the solution set.
Whether DNA describing the number and sequence of amino acids to form into proteins, or
a vector of numbers representing lengths and angles of wire segments in an antenna, you
can equally well call both "evolution".
Or to put it another way - Would you pedantically refuse to call a robotic appendage with
three main joints and five articulated digits an "arm"?
Evolution would have gotten rid of it if this part were useless.
No. Evolution would have gotten rid of it if it caused a net increase in
the risk of death between menarche and menopause (males simply don't matter here).
Now, we might presume at first glance that since appendicitis can kill, and
a not-inconsiderable portion of the population will at some point get it. But
the lower incidence in underdeveloped countries suggests that its modern
danger to us may result largely from lifestyle; and, as we currently chop it
out at the first sign of inflammation, we may also overstate the actual risk
of death from appendicitis in the absence of treatment.
Evolution/God does their work quite well I guess.
You can believe what you want about a deity, and what mechanisms it put into
place to run the universe. But beware of animism by ascribing "intent" to
abstract statistical descriptions of phenomena.
plus the task to try to think of nothing, which is quite hard
I don't think you can safely pass that off as a minor little clause in your
point - The same problem this FP seems to make.
Of course we have "spontaneous brain activity" that influences our
performance on certain tasks. Most of us call that "thinking", preferably
about the problem, but also quite possibly about lunch or that cute tech's
short skirt or about why the FSM lets good pasta get overcooked.
This seems like a non-article. No one seriously believes the human brain
does nothing but react to sensory input. It just makes a good model since
we have nothing but wild guesses about how our wetware really works.
Slashdot Mirror
The numbers should be Pi x (3.5/2)^2 - Pi x (Radius of the motor spindle)^2 Your numbers are an order of magnitude off.
Okay, I have a platter sitting on my desk at this very moment:
OD = 3.75in; Pi*(3.50/2)^2 =11.04 (a "3.5in" HDD actually measures almost 4in).
ID = 1.25in; Pi*(1.25/2)^2 = 1.23 (actually the OD of the little aluminum disks separating the platters).
11.04 - 1.23 = 9.81in^2
This discrepancy (on the high side, I would point out) allows a good bit of space between the absolute physical edges and the data-containing region. So I'd have to say 6.5in^2 sounds like a reasonable number, per side per platter. 6.5 times two sides times three platters gives 39in^2; At 1Tb/in^2, dividing by 8 for bits-to-bytes, we get 4.875TB.
Incidentally, I actually found that number in an old Seagate tech-oriented PR, rather than calculating it for my prevous post. So I thank you for keeping me honest, but the numbers do indeed work out.
TFA does quote the false positive rate
That quote doesn't describe the false positive rate. It describes the number of cases of non-Alzheimer's dementia that their test correctly doesn't call Alzheimer's. The false positive rate would indicate the number of participants without Alzheimer's (including this group of 39) who incorrectly test as having Alzheimers.
Also, remember that their test is also designed to detect people at risk of developing AD years in the future, so, as is also pointed out in the article false positive rates can not be fully determined for some years.
True, but that would seem to make the test worthless. It doesn't always catch people known to have it, it at least sometimes (5 times out of 39) flags people known to not have it, and for the rest we can't say if it works or not.
When I call that an abuse of statistics, I very much mean it. Give me 120 protein markers in a small enough group (in this case, fewer subjects than proteins under consideration!), and I'll get you a similar level of accuracy in predicting whether they wear boxers or briefs.
It may turn out that they have something. But as written, I'd take this study with a whole salt-lick.
But the typical consumer wants a hard drive that is durable enough that it can be abused a bit more.
Fair enough - I can accept that interpretation... But ignoring the reality that HDDs have rapidly moving parts that must never touch mere nanometers apart, combined with a high sensitivity to heat, well, that just asks for trouble. Ideally, we'd have better. Practically, we have what we have.
I don't have time to cool all my hard drives.
I didn't mean to imply that I have some complicated setup... Just a $3 DC fan, in its simplest form. For cases that have 4+ 5.25 bays, ThermalTake makes a great little kit for about $12 that holds 3 HDDs with a 120mm fan (you can get 4HDD-in-3bay as well, but they pack the drives a bit tighter than I'd like); For those with too few external bays, zip-ties work wonders for connecting fans to anything at odd angles.
I could live with a ten gig drive that was robust.
As you point out, iff I could always access my home file server, a 10GB flash drive would indeed work fine in any other machine I own. But again, this comes down to what-we'd-like vs what-we-have.
I want more reliability. Over the last ten years of using hard drives, I have about a 50% failure rate.
I see comments like this all the time, and really don't understand them.
I have personally bought an average of one HDD per six months over the past decade, and, except for ones outright DOA, I have only had one fail, ever (and that after it had served for a good many years). And I include both DiamondMaxes and the legendary DeathStars in that list, both considered some of the most prone-to-failure out there.
Considering my work environment, I can expand that sample to most like 100+ HDDs; Of those, only two have failed, both laptop drives.
I have to suspect the people experiencing the flakyness of HDDs either fail to adequately cool them (I put ALL my HDDs loosely-packed in 5.25 bays with a front-mounted 120mm low-RPM fan cooling them) or somehow subject them to mechanical stresses not intended (car PC? portable gaming rig? screws tight agains the drive's board?).
This will pave the way for quadrupling today's storage limits to 4 terabytes for desktop computers and 1 terabyte on laptops in 2011.
Prior to the rise of perpendicular recording, we had cheap and plentiful 200-400GB HDDs using plain ol' longitudinal recording. Suddenly PMR hits the market, promising 10x the storage density at up to 1Tb/in^2 (which Seagate claims they actually achieve), and two years later we have only two real models (with a few variations for SATA/PATA) of 1TB drives available.
Call me crazy, but a few really trivial calculations show that at 6.25in^2 *of usable area) per platter surface, times two surfaces per platter, times three platters, we should have, using today's technology, 4.5TB (note the change in case of the "B", no confusing units here) 3.5" HDDs.
So forgive me for not wetting my pants in excitement about an "announcement" that something realistically available today, we won't have for another half of a decade.
Let me guess. It's also successful at diagnosing 88% of people who have no symptoms whatsoever?
From your low moderation score, I'd guess that most people didn't "get" the half-seriousness of your joke, but kudos for at least trying to keep people honest in reporting (or in this case, reading) statistics.
But yeah, I too found it suspicious that they only quoted positive accuracies, completely ignoring false positives. It also doesn't say whether those numbers come from the same samples as used to pick the target proteins. Nice thing about PCA as a statistical technique, it will almost always account for the bulk of your variance with only a handful of components; It doesn't, however, select meaningful components - So while you can get an arbitrarily low in-series error, you have almost no external validity (for the non-statistically inclined, think of this as having a good travel atlas... It will show you every possible point of interest, but you won't personally find every park, statue, battle field, boat launch, and historical district really all that interesting).
That could somewhat explain why they "only" get a 90% success rate - If they had indeed found a set of Alzheimer's "markers", you'd expect very close to 100% (though in fairness, they compared against official diagnoses, which quite likely have Alzheimers vs "other" dementias). They likely chose 18 markers because 18 markers put them at 90%, the worst kind of abuse of statistics to support a meaningless correlation.
Ethanol is commonly known to give feelings of warmth
Except, it doesn't just make you feel warm - It reduces your body's natural tendancy to hoarde blood in your core when the outside temperature drops, thus actually warming your skin and periphery.
Of course, on the down side, with warmer skin you lose heat faster, and when your core temperature drops a few degrees, you go into hypothermia (and to make matters worse, with a few drinks in you, you might not notice until too late).
My forecast is that around 2050, the state of Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize marriages with robots
Using an artificial device for sexual purposes does not equal marriage, people.
Marriage exists for one reason, and one reason only - Succession of property rights. Allowing humans and robots to marry would mean allowing robots to own land. No more, no less.
You can talk about medical power of attorney (would that even apply to a robot?); a stable environment for raising children (definitely wouldn't apply); a religious institution to make sex okay to your friend in the sky (yeah, like the fundies wouldn't just love this one); but all those come secondary to the state sanctioning a legal contract between two humans.
Use your own domain and pay $5.00/month
You pay $60/year for your domain registration? You might want to shop around a bit...
(Unless you know of an actual hosting company offering unlimited space and bandwidth for $5/mo, in which case, where do I sign up?)
When I was the young guy with no family- I remember having to go home from work one day, pack, come back to work, then drive to Portland to catch a flight in under 3 hours, while the travel agent got me boarding passes at the call desk.
...So basically, you applaud this program, because it means your employer
can't (so easily) dick with your life on a whim and give you a moment's notice
to cancel your plans for the weekend?
I'd suggest that certain people be allowed to willingly give up privacy in return for fast track at the airport through the TSA.
Ah.
I see, my mistake.
Carry on then, my fine wooly friend. Carry on.
I'm sorry, the answer was colonialism. But thanks for playing.
I know, right? Like those "New World" American colonies. Look what a shithole those ended up as... The UK's little experiment-that-rebelled, barely able to feed the rich, nevermind the poor; Canada, France's version of the same, we have to accept that they always had the climate against them anyway; And the mishmash in South America, man, a real sob-story with the Spanish taking their gold and the Vatican taking their souls.
Colonialism makes a nice "White Man's fault" excuse. Yet, I'd have to say that we really don't have a lot of examples that do anything but contradict that stance. Europeans found Africa in a state of savagery, and such has it stayed (though they've upgraded the weaponry used in tribal warfare - Though they need to thank (or curse) the Europeans even for that humble advancement).
The closest Africa ever came to pulling itself out of the mud (Biafra), it excised like a tumor. And how does it view attempts at Western aid to its woes? They seriously believe we've sent them condoms poisoned with AIDS to kill them all off (on a good day - On bad days, they accuse us of witchcraft).
The jury had the option of fixing penalties at $750 per song. They opted for more than 10x that.
On that, I have to agree with you. Though I have to admit, it doesn't do much for my personal opinion of the naivete of Duluthites.
Says who?
Says anyone who understands why we have juries of our peers rather than juries of government-appointed experts, when the latter could incontrovertibly do a much better job of deciding the facts of the case.
Jury nullification, not the USSC or the presidential pardon, represents the final and most effective of the "checks and balances" on government abuse of power.
And that's the jury's fault?
Yes. every juror has an obligation to understand the concept of "jury nullification". End of story.
If time becomes space-like, what would that mean for us?
/dev/urandom with an empty enropy pool. For all we know, this could
already have happened.
The "problem", philosophically, with a purely Newtonian universe, derives from the niggling little detail that free will cannot exist. Every possible action you could ever take will have already happened, just not yet.
As one way to interpret time as reducing to the status of a mere spatial dimension, consider the classic phrase, "God does not play dice with the universe". Quantum theory basically breathed new life into the universe, by allowing for "true" random numbers at the lowest levels of reality. If that suddently stops, and all phenomena revert to deterministic behavior, we go back to a purely Newtonian universe (or at least, a Newtonianly "simulated" relativistic universe), where you have absolutely no influence over what will happen in the future. Ever decision you make, every action you take, exists as the only physically-allowed path from that point in spacetime.
To us, however, nothing will change. The universe will just start using
Would time itself become irrelevent as we could look "forwards"?
"Look" with what sensory organs? Imagine watching a home movie of yourself... In hindsight, you already know what happens. But that knowledge doesn't make the you-in-the-movie any more able to change or even perceive the same future-to-it sequence events. The you-in-the-movie has to watch events unfold as they occurred, as if for the first time. More than that, though... Even if the you-in-the-movie could know its future, by somehow having consciousness and sensing its celluloidy future, it couldn't do anything about that. The movie itself would limit what it can do to what it always did/does/will do, no different than a brick wall limits our ability to move between two points in space.
Of course, the implications for morality under such considions seem rather disturbing... No matter what we do, we will do what we would always will have done.
While this is certainly potentially more incriminating
More incriminating? Notice they describe weights and chemical names, and refer to an "underground" book on explosives. Pure sensationalism.
If they had said "So, we found a bag of fertilizer, in the shed with some potting soil, pots, and gardening tools; a bag of ice-melt in the garage next to a bucket of sand and a snow-shovel; an all-time best selling book available in a dozen languages and from major vendors such as Amazon; oh, and his browser cache contained video clips from last night's NBC Nightly News", we'd have people rioting in the streets over the outrageousness of calling the kid a potential terrorist.
Especially here on Slashdot, anyone damning this kid for the circumstantial evidence needs to think back to their own teens (or last night, as the case warrants). How many of us made small bombs just for fun? How many of us, if the police raided our houses today, wouldn't have all this and more, all purely innocuous? And even if for playing around with explosives, that still doesn't make a person a threat to anyone but themselves.
Oh, wow! Another repeater of conspiracy theories.
Who said anything about a conspiracy? Just a bunch of domesticated primates acting purely out of self-interest, for their own advancement. No conspiracies involved.
The Kool Aid at MoveOn must be pretty good to keep ill informed people repeating stupid things.
What a strange comment... I don't drink Kool Aid; I don't follow MoveOn; and as for well-informed, by dear little pot, you might find it somewhat more effective to post some form of factual refutation rather than an effectively contentless set of insults.
But hey, if you like the system we have now, or lack the will or courage to say otherwise - good for you! Some of us would prefer to consider the government we could have, and dare to say as much.
1) The general dislike for the current administration (whether applicable or not, it's still there).
Admitted freely, but irrelevant to this particular issue.
2) The big question of whether national security trumps personal privacy.
Absolutely not. Period.
3) How much personal privacy is given up in the interest of national security.
Ideally, none. In practice, we already have a system of legal hoops to jump through to allow a carefully controlled, specifically targetted loss of privacy when overwhelming evidence makes it clear that someone intends to do something nasty. And I don't mean the joke we call the FISA court, which should simply not exist. Need a warrant? Come up with some evidence first.
4) Just what information was gathered by the surveillance program.
This one has an all-too-easy answser - "All of it". And ironically, too much to use. Casting an overly-broad net to fish for evidence has one major drawback, aside from cost (which we the taxpayers bear, so the government couldn't care less about that) - For every "real" potential terrorist intent on blowing something up, you have hundreds of discontents who may talk about it but would never actaully do anything; tens of thousands who talk about the topic in a way that careful inspection would filter out but still sounds suspicious at first listen; and millions of completely irrelevant conversations about shopping and dating and telemarketing and what to have for dinner, all of which may well throw in the occasional phrase that catches the filters' attention. And the wider the net, the more likely the one real terrorist will manage to evade it (and that doesn't even consider that he'll likely speak the most guardedly).
If Congress can't exert any power in situations like this, what CAN it do?
They can, but they won't.
You make a mistake in thinking congress actually objects to the wholesale stripping away of our privacy, to the war in Iraq, to all the crap they've scapegoated Bush with for the last six years. What a great game! Last week you hated Bill, this week you hate George, next week you hate Hillary, but we just keep going back to the same used car dealership so one of them can rape us week after week after week...
Yes, few people in US history can come close to Bush for outright in-your-faceness about how frequently they wipe their asses with the constitution. But we need to avoid presuming that he has done anything new - He just lacks the saavy to hide his abuses.
If congress so desired, they could end all this tomorrow. They could end the war, they could end the spying programs, they could end our use of torture and our continued illegal detainment of both foreigners and US citizens, they could end Bush's presidency. They have that power. But they won't use it, because they all want the same things that Bush does - Further consolidation of power and money into their own families and friends.
The only part of domestic wiretapping they actually object to involves who gets to listen. They want in on the action, and resent Bush keeping them outside the loop.
Going through the steps of capturing it to MP3 to play on the iPod doesn't have enough value for the time spent doing it in my opinion.
For most things, I would agree. A new DNA radio show, though?
Most Slashdotters, I think, if we had to hold a microphone in front of the speaker to capture this one - We would spend the time. Fortunately, we have MPlayer (though it annoyingly appears to only capture BBC streams in realtime), so we can fire it off and go make coffee.
No, as an appendix is a complex structure, and its presence in an organism lowers the organism's informational entropy, evolution would remove it without positive pressure to keep it.
Well said! Okay, my apologies for failing to give you enough credit... I took your previous statement as the all-too-common idea that evolution somehow actively removes unneeded parts wholesale from a species.
I still disagree somewhat, though much more resprctfully, in that the entropic view (over a finite number of iterations, of course) presumes that either a low number of single changes can remove the appendix, or all possible intermediate stages have either no effect or a positive one on viability of the organism. It could turn out that with an appendix less than a third its current length, the right kidney shifts slightly, increasing the risk of death from renal infection.
Or you could be wary of attempts to ascribe to physical causes things which have spiritual causes.
Here, I have to sharply disagree with you. I do believe in a deity, but Nietzsche summed it up nicely - "God is dead", at least for epistemological purposes.
But you can't claim you've "Created Life" by modifying an existing instance.
;-)
So did Netscape or the Mozilla Foundation "create" FireFox 2?
I agree, we haven't reached the point where we can fairly call it "created life". But this one step, more than anything since Pasteur, represents a major step forward. The ability to invoke a breakpoint on a running cell, replace its code with a custom gene sequence, and continue execution, means we can now probe the rest of the cellular machinery with unprecedented efficiency.
The GP's point aside, I think this one step means we'll see a fully artificial cell within a decade or two - Certainly within our lifetimes... Presuming, of course, that the military doesn't create and release (accidentally or deliberately doesn't matter) the "perfect bug" before then.
Apparently it is up to the operating system implementation to provide real time conversions to DNA code bocks from the file stream.
Humorous or not, I consider this one of the most insightful comments I've read on Slashdot in quite a long time. If you hadn't posted as AC, I even have mod points at the moment, but, so it goes.
Kudos!
Hardly "evolutionary", designing a system that designs trial and error is hardly "evolutonary", its basically an intelligent search of a search space compared against a pattern.
Not "evolution" in the "squishy wet things having sex sense", but in the randomized state-space search sense - The use of an iterated genetic algorithm to satisfy an arbitrary fitness measure. "Natural" evolution represents merely a specific instantiation of that larger concept, but certainly not the only possible one.
Evolution is blind, it has no end goal.
"Natural" evolution results from organisms who best satisfy the fitness heuristic of "able to produce the most children that survive to themselves reproduce". No, you cannot attribute any motive or intent to what amounts to an abstract description of a purely statistical phenomenon; But you can use the same mechanism to artificially "evolve" a solution to any problem that you can encode as a finite vector of parameters describing the solution set.
Whether DNA describing the number and sequence of amino acids to form into proteins, or a vector of numbers representing lengths and angles of wire segments in an antenna, you can equally well call both "evolution".
Or to put it another way - Would you pedantically refuse to call a robotic appendage with three main joints and five articulated digits an "arm"?
Evolution would have gotten rid of it if this part were useless.
No. Evolution would have gotten rid of it if it caused a net increase in the risk of death between menarche and menopause (males simply don't matter here).
Now, we might presume at first glance that since appendicitis can kill, and a not-inconsiderable portion of the population will at some point get it. But the lower incidence in underdeveloped countries suggests that its modern danger to us may result largely from lifestyle; and, as we currently chop it out at the first sign of inflammation, we may also overstate the actual risk of death from appendicitis in the absence of treatment.
Evolution/God does their work quite well I guess.
You can believe what you want about a deity, and what mechanisms it put into place to run the universe. But beware of animism by ascribing "intent" to abstract statistical descriptions of phenomena.
plus the task to try to think of nothing, which is quite hard
I don't think you can safely pass that off as a minor little clause in your point - The same problem this FP seems to make.
Of course we have "spontaneous brain activity" that influences our performance on certain tasks. Most of us call that "thinking", preferably about the problem, but also quite possibly about lunch or that cute tech's short skirt or about why the FSM lets good pasta get overcooked.
This seems like a non-article. No one seriously believes the human brain does nothing but react to sensory input. It just makes a good model since we have nothing but wild guesses about how our wetware really works.