More specifically, the circumference of a circle is 1D and the surface of a sphere is 2D. However in most cases in which a circle or sphere are considered in a more complete system a circle is described in 2D and a sphere in 3D.
After all, any closed parametric equation of the form x=x(t), y=y(t) can have its position described in terms of t. A circle fits this description. However the properties that define a circle must be defined in 2D (i.e. all circles can be represented by the above form, but not all equation of this form are circles, because f(t) must specifically describe 2 dimensions).
This could have interesting effects on the type and quality of copyrighted media illegally made available on the internet.
By raising the bar of difficulty for ripping media, the average person doing the ripping is likely to be much more proficient as more casual rippers are locked out. This could acually mean an *decrease* in the number of badly ripped mp3s, etc. since more care will be taken in the ripping process.
It could also drastically alter the type of music and other media available, because the more technologically inclined individuals who will take over the bulk of the ripping and distribution duties will likely be less inclined to want to listen to crappy pop and other watered down mainstream music.
Sheesh, after reading the headline displayed in the comment I thought it was saying that the script for "Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace" was just an accident caused by buggy speech recognition software.
I thought it was the beginning to a witty satirical comment, and wondered why it was modded up as informative rather than funny.
Placing the Greens in with the Republicans and Democrats is ludicrous. While Greens may strongly support social programs (the handouts you refer to), the Green party puts people before corporations. I would surely trust Ralph Nader, the most prominent member of the Green party, to protect my rights as an individual from corporate interests before any libertarian. Nader has a proven track record of protecting consumer interests.
I find it quite interesting that you believe that you believe libertarianism is a solution to a problem rooted in big business, while placing blame primarily on government corruption (a major factor to be sure, but only because of te influence of the content industries).
Re:Should I send this to my congressmen?
on
SSSCA Hearing
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· Score: 1
Although perception takes place in our minds, the key to perception of color is in the sensory events that happen right at the retina. There are three types of cones in the retina that are each sensitive to different frequencies. One type is attuned to red, another to green, and the other to blue. A red photon strongly stimulates red cones while stimulating green and blue weakly or not at all. A yellow photon stimulates both the red and green cones moderately, since yellow is between red and green in wavelength.
To perceive white light, all three types of receptor must be stimulated in close proximity. In this way our retinas are actually mechanically more like the current type of digital cameras, with three interspersed but non-overlapping types of color sensors (receptors). This is very different than the type of sensor described above, since each cone in our eye is only sensitive to part of the spectrum, and different types of cones working together are needed for true color perception.
Tshak, just a little offtopic FYI, I think something is wrong with you sig link, because I clicked on it and it brought me to MY (empty) journal. Just thought I'd let you know.
There is another problem with this though. As long as Linus requires that every bit of code that makes it into the master kernel is examined/tested/whatever by/him/, that means that there is a limit to the amount of new code that can be entered into the kernel during a span of time.
It doesn't matter how many kernel maintainers there are are all of them have to submit code to Linus directly. It still results in the same amount of work for Linus (maybe a little less if more maintainers means more stuff is discarded before being submitted to Linus), an amount probortional to the amount of quality code that is available for entry into the kernel at any time.
There are only two solutions ultimately as long as everything has to go through Linus: reduce the amount of code submitted to Linus by making everything go through a subsystem maintainer, and making sure each maintainer has a limited quota of code that they can pass on to Linus during any time frame, or simply slow down kernel patch submissions.
The second option is not really an option in my mind unless every single person working only the Linux kernel is willing to submit less code.
I think that the first option is realistic though, and would force each subsystem maintainer to live up to strict quality standards since they would be limited in the amount of patch code they can submit. I cansee this as being positive for Linus (less headaches dealing with low quality patches) and Linux in general.
I'm not sure of what you mean. Most lossy compression techniques allow for either guaranteed ratio or guaranteed quality. With MP3 compression most MP3s have constant bitrates (CBR), which is a guaranteed compression ratio (for instance 128 kbps). The actual quality for any fixed CBR will vary across compression codecs used, though.
I'm fairly sure that most lossy compression also allows for guaranteed quality, although the actual measure of quality is more subjective. Photoshop allows you to specify the quality used when saving JPEGs, higher quality generally means larger files. So I'm not sure whther the dimesnionality of the representation actually has anything to do with a guaranteed compression ratio, unless higher dimensional representations always mean more compression at (probably) more lossiness.
After seeing the renewed comments about ZeoSync's supposed compression technique I decided it might be worth checking out their site to read whatever technical info they might have that wasn't deeply disscused here the last time around.
The most interesting thing I read is in their Technical Description, where they state that they "will have for all intents and purposes successfully encoded lossy universal compression". No where in their description can I find anything that explicitly states that their algorithm is lossless.
They also talk about mapping binary strings into higher dimensional spaces, but that these spaces cannot become super saturated or their "multi dimensional circumvention of the pigeonhole principle breaks down". In other words they do claim to be able to compress all strings of equal size down to smaller strings.
This makes me look at them in a different light. I'm still skeptical because they have offered no proof of their algorithms, but at least in their "technical description" they do not seem to make claims that have already been proven impossible. I also find their talk about multi dimensional representations intriguing, because lots of typical information does become more compressible in higher dimensions. Look at how much better video compression works when encoding just the changes between frames rather than encoding frames individually. An ideal compression algorithm would find such representations in any kind of data (maybe that's where the marketspeak about "random" data came in) and be able to compress it, since all meaningful data is full of patterns.
Think of music, specifically 74 minutes of 16 bit, 44.1 kHz audio. Uncompressed = 650 MB, or about 5e9 bits. That means 2^(5e9) possible 74 minute sound samples. Now think about how many of those are likely to match anyone's idea of music. I don't know if ZeoSync has actually found a way to extract that kind of pattern from arbitrary data, but it seems like the way to go for a universal lossy compression algorithm.
This guy goes on about how only 1% of the people out there are hard core music pirates that will have the diligence and know-how to defeat the protection schemes, but what happens when these skilled CD ripping individuals put the ripped tracks on Morpheus/Gnutella/(insert favorite P2P file sharing app here)? Then the 40% of us who are the casual pirates have the music just like before.
Most of us never rip our own tracks. We get them over the net and share them over the net. It only takes one person to rip a song to get the song beyond the copy-protected barrier for everyone.
Terrorists aren't fossil fuels, the world won't run out if you kill every last one. The idiocy of your plan would lead to atrocity far greater in magnitude than that which occurred this morning.
Kill all terrorists? How do you propose to identify them all? If our intelligence was even close to capable of accomplishing such a feat we would have stopped this before it ever happened. Lacking actual knowledge of terrorist identity, we'll just kill everyone in nations that have some reason to dislike the U.S. (most of them, for one reason or another). Yeah, that will really show us for the symbol of freedom and democracy we strive to be.
I know I just fed a troll, but I couldn't just not respond to this fool.
Pearl Harbor was an act of war, by a soverign (sp?) nation, against a military installation. This was terrorism, by a group probably not allied with any national government, against civilians.
In war a lot more is at stake, and there was a clear target to respond against. With terrorism, even if the group responsible is reliably identified, issues are more difficult. i believe that the primary responsibility with cleaning up terrorist groups lies with the nation they reside in, only only upon that nation's failure to respond does the US have the right to take action against/within a foreign country.
I agree that we can't just ignore the terrorists. I mainly want to emphasize that enough damage has been done without doing terrorists work for them by playing into their type of game.
Terrorism is a truly despicable activity. It is important at times like this to keep a level head and not let surges of emotion dictate our behavior. I believe that military retaliation will do more harm than good *unless* it can be assured that only the group responsible pays for their actions, it would be even more tragic if innocents in Palestine or wherever are brought into conflict due to US retaliation. To act otherwise would bring us down to their level. We have to act civilized, even when other groups don't want to.
I believe a better solution may be (once the group responsible is reliably identified) to put pressure on the nation the group originated from to clean them up themselves. A lot of people don't like the US because it sticks its nose where it doesn't belong, lets keep our muscle out of other nations unless it becomes clear that these terrorists are being tolerated within their own borders.
This may seem to be too soft, but if a terrorist group ever originated in the US and waged this kind of attack on another nation, the US gov't would assure the victim nation that it would take care of things. We would never allow another country to go terrorist hunting on our turf, even if that country seemed entitled to swift retribution.
I do believe the ones responsible (besides the suicide attackers) deserve to be punished, but I'm not sure if it would really be effective in preventive future terrorist activities.
I use to think as a kid that jailing drug dealers would solve drug problems. Now I realize that as long as people want drugs, there will be drug dealers to fill "the market". I think that terrorists may always appear under conditions of sufficient social unrest.
The only way punishment is an effective deterrent is if it is fast and sure. Neither of these conditions seems likely in this case, and it is very hard to deter people willing (for good OR bad reasons) to die for their cause.
There's been a lot of posts talking about how we need to strike back, and hard. I hope everyone here realizes that's what the terrorists want.
Terrorism is not about strategy or tacticts, these acts were not battles in a war. they served no strategic or tactical purpose, the group that perpetrated these acts is not going to move in and conquer, or anything like that. The purpose of terrorism is to generate fear and political tension.
All this commotion the politicians are making is exactly what the terrorists wanted. They have succeeded in the first steps of disrupting American lifestyle. By making huge reactions we're fulfilling the terrorists goals.
What we need to do is first keep calm and tend to our victims. Second we need to take a few days (at least) to cool off and evaluate ways we can improve security and information access (why was it so hard to figure out which planes crashed? can't we keep track of where a plane is in the air?). Finally, and most difficult, we need to figure how to go back about our lives. We need to show that terrorism is an impotent tool.
I think that would only happen if one company thought it had the leverage to take control of Linux, which I don't see anyone trying. I think that these companies are more likely to migrate their big iron UNIXs to Linux compatibility rather than the other way around.
This should not preclude using HP-UX code in Linux. As long as they GPL it like the rest of Linux, it's no longer their own proprietary code, and if they have tools or algorithms that are superior to what's currently in Linux, adding them to Linux will only make it stronger.
I imagine HP-UX will be supported for quite some time, and developed as well. A post in an earlier thread predicted that HP-UX and Linux will be developed together, making HP-UX into Linux's binary compatible "big brother" on big iron.
HP could infuse Linux with HP-UX code to improve it, and migrating HP-UX to Linux compatibility should not be too painful since they have the code to work from.
Some layoffs are inevitable, but with an abundance of resources I think it would be very unlikely to reduce support for Linux. IBM has made the beginnings of significant investment in Linux and businesses are starting to see Linux as the potential "next big thing", at least to some. HP-Compaq will probably not want to risk missing the boat here, so at least some Linux initiative would be prudent.
More importantly in my mind is the fact that a combined HP-Compaq may have enough leverage in the home PC market to fight against Microsoft leveraging tactics. With one less big PC OEM to play against each other with threats of high prices or refusal of product sales HP-Compaq (and possibly, Dell, IBM, etc.) will have an easier time calling Microsofts tactics and "leveraging" their own solutions (hopefully including Linux).
Such a strategy would be risky, but a combined company has a better chance of pulling it off.
I don't have a single machine, I don't have a single browser
Guess what, neither do I. That never caused any problems. Register once, login (and stay logged in permanently if you so desire) on each computer you use.
You mention not carrying around cookies, but as long as cookies are enabled on each machine you use you can use as many machines/browsers as you want.
I have a hard time believing a computer program generated this story (I didn't read all of it, but enough to see that it seemed pretty real). I imagine most other people have a hard time believing, too.
If you really do have such a program I would love to see it open sourced. In the mean time you should post a working executable or tarball (or zipfile) of your code, makefiles, etc. just so us skeptics can verify that your program actually works for ourselves.
Slashdot Mirror
More specifically, the circumference of a circle is 1D and the surface of a sphere is 2D. However in most cases in which a circle or sphere are considered in a more complete system a circle is described in 2D and a sphere in 3D.
After all, any closed parametric equation of the form x=x(t), y=y(t) can have its position described in terms of t. A circle fits this description. However the properties that define a circle must be defined in 2D (i.e. all circles can be represented by the above form, but not all equation of this form are circles, because f(t) must specifically describe 2 dimensions).
You should check, its hilarious. It points at (or is a copy of) Microsoft's "7 Steps to Personal Computing Security"
This could have interesting effects on the type and quality of copyrighted media illegally made available on the internet.
By raising the bar of difficulty for ripping media, the average person doing the ripping is likely to be much more proficient as more casual rippers are locked out. This could acually mean an *decrease* in the number of badly ripped mp3s, etc. since more care will be taken in the ripping process.
It could also drastically alter the type of music and other media available, because the more technologically inclined individuals who will take over the bulk of the ripping and distribution duties will likely be less inclined to want to listen to crappy pop and other watered down mainstream music.
Sheesh, after reading the headline displayed in the comment I thought it was saying that the script for "Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace" was just an accident caused by buggy speech recognition software.
I thought it was the beginning to a witty satirical comment, and wondered why it was modded up as informative rather than funny.
Placing the Greens in with the Republicans and Democrats is ludicrous. While Greens may strongly support social programs (the handouts you refer to), the Green party puts people before corporations. I would surely trust Ralph Nader, the most prominent member of the Green party, to protect my rights as an individual from corporate interests before any libertarian. Nader has a proven track record of protecting consumer interests.
I find it quite interesting that you believe that you believe libertarianism is a solution to a problem rooted in big business, while placing blame primarily on government corruption (a major factor to be sure, but only because of te influence of the content industries).
One correction, it's RIAA, not RIIA.
Although perception takes place in our minds, the key to perception of color is in the sensory events that happen right at the retina. There are three types of cones in the retina that are each sensitive to different frequencies. One type is attuned to red, another to green, and the other to blue. A red photon strongly stimulates red cones while stimulating green and blue weakly or not at all. A yellow photon stimulates both the red and green cones moderately, since yellow is between red and green in wavelength.
To perceive white light, all three types of receptor must be stimulated in close proximity. In this way our retinas are actually mechanically more like the current type of digital cameras, with three interspersed but non-overlapping types of color sensors (receptors). This is very different than the type of sensor described above, since each cone in our eye is only sensitive to part of the spectrum, and different types of cones working together are needed for true color perception.
So how does this sensor deal with colors that are only possible with combinations of different color photons, such as white light?
Tshak, just a little offtopic FYI, I think something is wrong with you sig link, because I clicked on it and it brought me to MY (empty) journal. Just thought I'd let you know.
Arkaein
There is another problem with this though. As long as Linus requires that every bit of code that makes it into the master kernel is examined/tested/whatever by /him/, that means that there is a limit to the amount of new code that can be entered into the kernel during a span of time.
It doesn't matter how many kernel maintainers there are are all of them have to submit code to Linus directly. It still results in the same amount of work for Linus (maybe a little less if more maintainers means more stuff is discarded before being submitted to Linus), an amount probortional to the amount of quality code that is available for entry into the kernel at any time.
There are only two solutions ultimately as long as everything has to go through Linus: reduce the amount of code submitted to Linus by making everything go through a subsystem maintainer, and making sure each maintainer has a limited quota of code that they can pass on to Linus during any time frame, or simply slow down kernel patch submissions.
The second option is not really an option in my mind unless every single person working only the Linux kernel is willing to submit less code.
I think that the first option is realistic though, and would force each subsystem maintainer to live up to strict quality standards since they would be limited in the amount of patch code they can submit. I cansee this as being positive for Linus (less headaches dealing with low quality patches) and Linux in general.
I'm not sure of what you mean. Most lossy compression techniques allow for either guaranteed ratio or guaranteed quality. With MP3 compression most MP3s have constant bitrates (CBR), which is a guaranteed compression ratio (for instance 128 kbps). The actual quality for any fixed CBR will vary across compression codecs used, though.
I'm fairly sure that most lossy compression also allows for guaranteed quality, although the actual measure of quality is more subjective. Photoshop allows you to specify the quality used when saving JPEGs, higher quality generally means larger files. So I'm not sure whther the dimesnionality of the representation actually has anything to do with a guaranteed compression ratio, unless higher dimensional representations always mean more compression at (probably) more lossiness.
The most interesting thing I read is in their Technical Description, where they state that they "will have for all intents and purposes successfully encoded lossy universal compression". No where in their description can I find anything that explicitly states that their algorithm is lossless.
They also talk about mapping binary strings into higher dimensional spaces, but that these spaces cannot become super saturated or their "multi dimensional circumvention of the pigeonhole principle breaks down". In other words they do claim to be able to compress all strings of equal size down to smaller strings.
This makes me look at them in a different light. I'm still skeptical because they have offered no proof of their algorithms, but at least in their "technical description" they do not seem to make claims that have already been proven impossible. I also find their talk about multi dimensional representations intriguing, because lots of typical information does become more compressible in higher dimensions. Look at how much better video compression works when encoding just the changes between frames rather than encoding frames individually. An ideal compression algorithm would find such representations in any kind of data (maybe that's where the marketspeak about "random" data came in) and be able to compress it, since all meaningful data is full of patterns.
Think of music, specifically 74 minutes of 16 bit, 44.1 kHz audio. Uncompressed = 650 MB, or about 5e9 bits. That means 2^(5e9) possible 74 minute sound samples. Now think about how many of those are likely to match anyone's idea of music. I don't know if ZeoSync has actually found a way to extract that kind of pattern from arbitrary data, but it seems like the way to go for a universal lossy compression algorithm.
You forgot about KillaBitches.
Anyone as pedantic as you, Grammar Nazi, should know that the generally accepted spelling is "yep."
This guy goes on about how only 1% of the people out there are hard core music pirates that will have the diligence and know-how to defeat the protection schemes, but what happens when these skilled CD ripping individuals put the ripped tracks on Morpheus/Gnutella/(insert favorite P2P file sharing app here)? Then the 40% of us who are the casual pirates have the music just like before.
Most of us never rip our own tracks. We get them over the net and share them over the net. It only takes one person to rip a song to get the song beyond the copy-protected barrier for everyone.
Terrorists aren't fossil fuels, the world won't run out if you kill every last one. The idiocy of your plan would lead to atrocity far greater in magnitude than that which occurred this morning.
Kill all terrorists? How do you propose to identify them all? If our intelligence was even close to capable of accomplishing such a feat we would have stopped this before it ever happened. Lacking actual knowledge of terrorist identity, we'll just kill everyone in nations that have some reason to dislike the U.S. (most of them, for one reason or another). Yeah, that will really show us for the symbol of freedom and democracy we strive to be.
I know I just fed a troll, but I couldn't just not respond to this fool.
Pearl Harbor was an act of war, by a soverign (sp?) nation, against a military installation. This was terrorism, by a group probably not allied with any national government, against civilians.
In war a lot more is at stake, and there was a clear target to respond against. With terrorism, even if the group responsible is reliably identified, issues are more difficult. i believe that the primary responsibility with cleaning up terrorist groups lies with the nation they reside in, only only upon that nation's failure to respond does the US have the right to take action against/within a foreign country.
I agree that we can't just ignore the terrorists. I mainly want to emphasize that enough damage has been done without doing terrorists work for them by playing into their type of game.
Terrorism is a truly despicable activity. It is important at times like this to keep a level head and not let surges of emotion dictate our behavior. I believe that military retaliation will do more harm than good *unless* it can be assured that only the group responsible pays for their actions, it would be even more tragic if innocents in Palestine or wherever are brought into conflict due to US retaliation. To act otherwise would bring us down to their level. We have to act civilized, even when other groups don't want to.
I believe a better solution may be (once the group responsible is reliably identified) to put pressure on the nation the group originated from to clean them up themselves. A lot of people don't like the US because it sticks its nose where it doesn't belong, lets keep our muscle out of other nations unless it becomes clear that these terrorists are being tolerated within their own borders.
This may seem to be too soft, but if a terrorist group ever originated in the US and waged this kind of attack on another nation, the US gov't would assure the victim nation that it would take care of things. We would never allow another country to go terrorist hunting on our turf, even if that country seemed entitled to swift retribution.
I do believe the ones responsible (besides the suicide attackers) deserve to be punished, but I'm not sure if it would really be effective in preventive future terrorist activities.
I use to think as a kid that jailing drug dealers would solve drug problems. Now I realize that as long as people want drugs, there will be drug dealers to fill "the market". I think that terrorists may always appear under conditions of sufficient social unrest.
The only way punishment is an effective deterrent is if it is fast and sure. Neither of these conditions seems likely in this case, and it is very hard to deter people willing (for good OR bad reasons) to die for their cause.
There's been a lot of posts talking about how we need to strike back, and hard. I hope everyone here realizes that's what the terrorists want.
Terrorism is not about strategy or tacticts, these acts were not battles in a war. they served no strategic or tactical purpose, the group that perpetrated these acts is not going to move in and conquer, or anything like that. The purpose of terrorism is to generate fear and political tension.
All this commotion the politicians are making is exactly what the terrorists wanted. They have succeeded in the first steps of disrupting American lifestyle. By making huge reactions we're fulfilling the terrorists goals.
What we need to do is first keep calm and tend to our victims. Second we need to take a few days (at least) to cool off and evaluate ways we can improve security and information access (why was it so hard to figure out which planes crashed? can't we keep track of where a plane is in the air?). Finally, and most difficult, we need to figure how to go back about our lives. We need to show that terrorism is an impotent tool.
I think that would only happen if one company thought it had the leverage to take control of Linux, which I don't see anyone trying. I think that these companies are more likely to migrate their big iron UNIXs to Linux compatibility rather than the other way around.
This should not preclude using HP-UX code in Linux. As long as they GPL it like the rest of Linux, it's no longer their own proprietary code, and if they have tools or algorithms that are superior to what's currently in Linux, adding them to Linux will only make it stronger.
I imagine HP-UX will be supported for quite some time, and developed as well. A post in an earlier thread predicted that HP-UX and Linux will be developed together, making HP-UX into Linux's binary compatible "big brother" on big iron.
HP could infuse Linux with HP-UX code to improve it, and migrating HP-UX to Linux compatibility should not be too painful since they have the code to work from.
Some layoffs are inevitable, but with an abundance of resources I think it would be very unlikely to reduce support for Linux. IBM has made the beginnings of significant investment in Linux and businesses are starting to see Linux as the potential "next big thing", at least to some. HP-Compaq will probably not want to risk missing the boat here, so at least some Linux initiative would be prudent.
More importantly in my mind is the fact that a combined HP-Compaq may have enough leverage in the home PC market to fight against Microsoft leveraging tactics. With one less big PC OEM to play against each other with threats of high prices or refusal of product sales HP-Compaq (and possibly, Dell, IBM, etc.) will have an easier time calling Microsofts tactics and "leveraging" their own solutions (hopefully including Linux).
Such a strategy would be risky, but a combined company has a better chance of pulling it off.
Guess what, neither do I. That never caused any problems. Register once, login (and stay logged in permanently if you so desire) on each computer you use.
You mention not carrying around cookies, but as long as cookies are enabled on each machine you use you can use as many machines/browsers as you want.
I have a hard time believing a computer program generated this story (I didn't read all of it, but enough to see that it seemed pretty real). I imagine most other people have a hard time believing, too.
If you really do have such a program I would love to see it open sourced. In the mean time you should post a working executable or tarball (or zipfile) of your code, makefiles, etc. just so us skeptics can verify that your program actually works for ourselves.