It seems like it's mostly because of bad PR for the word "nuclear". The sciency types here on/. know that nuclear power plants are not as dangerous as other types of power plants, yet the majority of the public is against nuclear power systems. The PR for "nuke" is so bad that it even caused medical types to change the name of one of their diagnostic devices: .
MRI machines (magnetic resonance imaging) are called that because when they called them NMR machines originally, people were afraid of the word "nuclear" in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance. Even though MRI machines are still exactly the same thing and still measure nuclear magnetic resonance, they no longer use the word "nuclear", because no one wanted to be stuffed in a tube of a machine that had "nuclear" in its name!! People confused it with nuclear imaging in which radioactive isotopes really are injected into the human body and then imaging is performed to see how the isotope is distributed and if it clusters in certain parts of the body.
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People are scared of "nukes", and not-so-much of teeny little microbes, though look at all of the wacky episodes of
ReGenesis, a canadian show about the canadian equivalent of the CDC and a genomics lab, to see the crazy plotlines of what could go wrong with bio-organisms. Psych also did an episode, "Death is in the Air", Season 4, Episode 13, that used "Bob" from Regenesis as the same sort of scientist. See my other post here for links to those episodes.
I loved the Spanish Flu episodes of ReGenesis. That show really captures a lot of intelligence and thoughtful analysis in the midst of crazy and unlikely + unrealistic plot lines.
Ellen Page was in it as Sandstrom daughter in the first-season episodes (The Ontario Genomics Institute also wrote a bunch of fact-sheets about the scientific facts behind the fictional story lines. Two of those apply to these concepts. Hell, even
Psych did an episode about virulent pathogens, and that episode even starred the Asperger's scientist from ReGenesis, Bob Melnikov (played by
Dmitry Chepovetsky): the episode was in 2010 Death is in the Air, which is Psych Season 4, episode 13.
Yes, that might be what the foundation might be supposed to be for. But have you seen any Linux commercials on television or heard them on radio? Have you seen any banner ads, or heaven forbid, any google adword ads for Linux (either paid for by that foundation or by anyone else?). .
Have you seen any concerted campaign of "Linux inside" for Roku, Google hardware, google tv, samsung and sony tv's that use linux or busybox, or any hardware or software like that? Have you seen any individual cases of "linux inside" except for some do-it-yourself breadboarding and circuit-board building kits and a couple of small linux laptop purveyors? .
So even if that is what the Linux Foundation might be for, that does not seem to be what that Foundation actually does. IMHO the foundation is a corporate entity for holding title to the trademark "Linux" so that others do not misappropriate it. If you've got examples of them publishing and promoting Linux, I would love to see more examples of it. I do know that GNU at least sent some people dressed as gnus to some microsoft Windows 8 events to hand out free software. (there were at least two/. articles about that, the original and of course the dupe that soon followed). All those big companies that use and sell linux don't bother working together to sell their common link. Their money is better off spent promoting their individual brands. That is what I mean by "there is no prime mover behind promoting the Linux trademark as a trade mark and a brand name".
That is extremely evil, even if Google no longer uses or advertises their original mantra of "Don't Be Evil". Their having had such a mantra as a motto, and not having it now anymore is public renunciation of not being evil which IMHO is equivalent to "Yes, Be Evil!!!" as a positive declaration. So there, I've said it. Google's new motto must be "Yes, Be Evillll!!!" (add a laugh, or cackle, as needed), as it has been proven linguamathacontextually equal. QED. Feynman. Fine Women. Help, I'm drowning in a stream of consciousness...
Hmmm... For Bacon to have an Erdos number, Kevin Bacon would first have had to have a paper published with co-authors who could then be linked to Erd``os. But I do not believe that Kevin Bacon has published a paper. So we're right out on an Erd``os number for KB. .
But if we consider the concept of a joint Erdos-Bacon number which is the sum of an individual's Bacon number and their Erdos number, then we might be able to go somewhere. Those individuals with joint Bacon-Erdos numbers have a vertex on the Bacon graph and a vertex on the Erdos graph, thus allowing travel between the Bacon graph and the Erdos graph. The individual with the smallest Bacon-Erdos number would then be able to provide the shortest path from Kevin Bacon on the Bacon graph to Erdos on the Paul Erdos graph. .
A quick look at the Erdos-Bacon number article on wikipedia shows that the minimal Erdos-Bacon number (in their given examples) is held by
Steven Strogatz, a professor at Cornell who has Bacon number 1 and Erdos number 3 with a combined Bacon-Erdos number of 4. .
Thus you can get from (0), Kevin Bacon, who was in a
film (Connected: The Power of Six Degrees) with
(1) - Steven Strogatz, who published a
paper with
(2) - Nadim Ali , who published a
paper with
(3) - Peter Salamon, who published a
paper with
(4) -
Paul Erd''os . Thus a path is drawn.
Cops are already wearing masks so that under police identities are not blown, and often they are allowed to have their names and addresses kept off of public information databases like tax registries, voter registration, or real estate property transaction lists:
-- Several deputies, detectives and undercover narcotics cops in ski masks later,... from http://www.tampabay.com/news/humaninterest/deputies-raid-als-patients-home-for-medical-marijuana/1276825
Wearing masks in public illegal in at least 18 states, mostly in the south-east, due to the prevalence of the KKK wearing masks and hoods while terrorizing, burning, lynching, and killing blacks and others:
Wow! Thanks for that amazing link. Now I've got a few more real life examples to show to some of the nay-sayers around me in my life. It is sad that the paranoia is rational and valid.
"So?" you ask? Look at the links about drug residue on money, and look up how little science and statistics is behind the so-called "accuracy of identification with fingerprints". The point is that the government is very likely to use long-path lengths to indict/accuse/try/convict people even when there is no evidence. .
I posit that they are using these scientifically useless approaches to flim-flam judges and grand-juries into rubber-stamping warrant requests based on these flimsy pretexts being their probable cause. I say this because this is exactly what they did for drug residue on money. This is exactly what they do when they claim that their drug-sniffing dogs have detected the scent of (ultimately) non-existent drugs. This abuse of process has occurred. And I say that this is subverting true science for the ability to cover their over-reaching for issues of probable cause when no probable cause exists .
Armand Jean du Plessis said in his role as Cardinal Richelieu: âoeIf you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang himâ (look it up). This is what they are doing here. Trying to find dirt in everyone, so that when they want to get you, they've got a so-called valid "probable cause" for doing so. --- sez paranoid me.;>)
Are they looking for cliques in all of the wrong places? Or are they attempting to subvert the system by turning everyone into a suspect because of their "degree of association" to criminal elements, smugglers, and terrorists just because everyone is linked to everyone else? .
So I guess that ATF just heard about cliques and graph theory. Perhaps knowing the degree of bacon-ness would tell them that this approach to a friend-of-a-friend is useless. As everyone knows, the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon Conjecture" posits that every-one in filmdom is on a path of length at most 6 away from being in a film with Kevin Bacon (link to him yourself, if you want, he's less than 6 degrees away). .
So if Baconicity holds true in all of life instead of just in the film industry graph, then any individual can be linked to a criminal within less than six steps. Oh-my-godzies, we're all linked to criminals!! We all have gang ties!! We're all affiliated with Terrorists!! That linkage list shows it!! It must be true!!! Lock us all up, for our own goods! .
If that sounds ridiculous, that's because it is ridiculous. But that won't stop the government from claiming it to be true and useful and actually use it in courts of law. Shheeeeesh. It's like the old canard about "cocaine residue on money":
-- most paper currency in the USA has cocaine residue on it
-- even national geographic
Cocaine on Money: Drug Found on 90% of U.S. Bills confirms this to be true
Yet the government often tried to try (yes, prosecute = to try a case) people for being drug couriers/smugglers/kingpins because the money found on their person had drug residue on it. Unfortunately, the penetrance of drug residue on money is so high that there is not a reliable way to link the person's drug use with the drugs found on the money. See statistics 101 to figure that out.
The name "linux" is not as toxic as the brand name "microsoft". Microsoft has the "(almost prime) mover advantage" of being the 800-pound gorilla after out-maneuvering IBM in their contract for MS-DOS for the IBM PC. Many people think very poorly of Microsoft products, yet MS does not realize this and keeps branding things with MS, or Windows 8 or Windows RT, because it knows that its brand name is well known. .
The brand-name "Linux" is very poorly known. It's so poorly known that it's ludicrous to posit the idea that there's a toxicity to attaching that brand name to software or to hardware products containing that software. Google didn't use the name for whatever reasons they had. My guess in "reading google's mind" is that they saw no advantage to adding the linux brandname to what they sell, not that they saw a disadvantage to adding the name. .
Religions have brandnames. Why do you think "Christian Science" and the "Mormons" == "Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter Day Saints" both co-opt Christian nomenclature in the names of their religions? To get people to buy in that this religion is not different from the other religion (even if it really is in fact quite different). .
So if Linux or even GNU/Linux (praise be to RMS, all hail gnu and yaks [yaks = yet another kind software] ) had any sort of cachet or style or fashionability to them, companies would be stampeding to brand their products as having "GNU inside" or "linux internalized just for U!". Intel and MS pay a lot for their ads. Google has gone the way of Hershey candy bars and switched over from "we're so well known that we don't have to advertise" into "we better splash our brand name out there so people pick us!" There is no corporate marketing entity behind Linux, so there is no prime director behind the brand name or promotional aspects of it. That gives it a floppy directionless kind of vibe. .
Will that lack of pointed focus kill GNU and Linux? Or will it be the saving grace for GNU and Linux? I vote on the saving side. It's the same arguments made for the GPL. Some say the GPL will kill all software that is GPL'ed. Others say GPL means the software will survive while non-GPL software won't fare as well as BSD and proprietary code-bases get co-opted and hidden by corporations and brands. I vote on the side of GPL surviving. But even GPL has been divided into the GPL 2 vs. the GPL 3 camps by Tivo-ization. .
Brand name fights are about marketing and building market awareness and publicity. Google wants you to believe that buying their ads and their adwords will help you succeed. If someone tries to sell you on the importance of branding, look to see what else they are trying to sell you. What they're trying to sell you is either a marketing campaign or some of their services. Don't be sidetracked. .
Content is more important than form. Well, form needs to be clean and crap-free, but a beautiful shiny-candy-coated interface over crap is still just candy-coated-crap. Don't eat it. Make the content good, and let the others fight over branding and 1st place. . Keep GNU good. Keep Linux good. The Linux "brand" is NOT toxic. Those who tell you that it is toxic are trying to sell you something.
Strangely, after getting 45 mod points on monday, I haven't gotten any mod points since then. It's enough to make a girl paranoid! Is it something I said? Did you stop getting an excessively large number of mod points too?
oopsie. Sorry, I misread the Tegra SoC "system on a chip" thing and my brain interpreted it as GPU stream processing. But hey, more opensourcing of video drivers is good in general.
re: cocaine was a terrible example since it really is not addictive to begin with.. [emphasis mine] .
Dude! You think cocaine is not addictive? You're completely wrong.
It is addictive because of its effect on the mesolimbic reward pathway. I link you to wikipedia's article on cocaine because the medical articles I found are behind paywalls and you might not be able to get to them unless you're on a university network that has medical journal access like UCSD does:
Data from The Lancet suggests cocaine is ranked both the 2nd most addictive and the 2nd most harmful of 20 popular recreational drugs.
So now there's a medical use for those frickin' sharks with laser beams! The only confound while doing the longitudinal study will be whether the rats were scared straight from addiction by the laser beam or by being confronted by the shark in the first place. So an extra experiment will have to be done using sharks that do not have laser beam capabilities. ;>)
Now the only problem is in getting the tiny little scuba suits for the rats, or the very large land-shark suits for the sharks (that have the appropriate wavelength-transparent ports [quartz glass? sapphire glass?] to let the IR laser through)... .
So this is good for investigational experiments, but I don't see how it would be useful for clinical and therapeutic uses in humans unless you insert the optogenetic materials into the brain regions you're interested in ahead of time.
So phoronix had the news yesterday about an open-source wrapper to AMD's concession to open-source "AMD Releases UVD Engine Source Code" for the kernel-level wrapper code, and today, NVidia open sources the 3-d driver for Tegra. That's progress. I use the Nvidia binary blob on my debian distro hardware, and the Nvidia blob with the knoppix live-boot system, as Nouveau does not work well enough on my hardware. I hope this will help Nouveau a lot.
re "It's not what a movie is about, it's how it is about it."
That's a great point. Form is separate from content. The point of a movie is not just its content, but also in the stylistic presentation form it uses to deliver that content. I've seen movies that had a nice "story" behind it but with poor execution of the plot by the actors or timing and editing of the scenes. I've also seen movies produced and directed by music video directors and by Michael Baye that are beautifully styled and paced and so well lit and with gorgeous sweeping camera movements that actually go with the underlying scene and with good music that punctuates and emphasizes the action but the content of the plot and the storyline is crap. .
When both form and content deliver something beautiful, it's a wonderful movie. I like Ebert's side commentaries and I also like that he was part of some schlocky movie writing in the 1960s.
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Ebert wrote the scripts for Who Killed Bambi?, a 1978 movie about the Sex Pistols that ultimately was not made because the financiers did not like what was in the script. Ebert's screenplay for the movie is on his blog. Bizarre. .
He also wrote the for
"Beyond the Valley of the Dolls," a movie for which he wrote the screenplay in 1969.
Here's a freeze drill article from the New York Times entitled "Playing Simon Says at the Airport", just in case people don't trust the authority or believability of the links I posted above.
But wait a minute: Am I really supposed to freeze? At many airports, T.S.A. officers conduct occasional drills in which the agents suddenly start screaming things like "Code Bravo! Freeze!" The drills, which the T.S.A. tells me happen only once or twice a year at any given airport, are intended to give the officers experience in what happens if there is a security breach. The goal is to train them in how to quickly shut down a checkpoint and, once the potential threat is resolved, get it up and running again in a timely manner.
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"These drills are generally conducted during off-peak hours to minimize disruption, and generally last a minute," said Kristin Lee, a spokeswoman for the agency. The agency conducts a range of security exercises, not all of them in public, to train checkpoint officers, she said.
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Understood, I said. But still, am I, a citizen, required to stop motionless when the T.S.A. officers yell "freeze"?
It seems like a way to get people to start being subjugated and to prove compliance with any authority figure, regardless of whether or not that "so-called authority figure" has any right to assert that sort of, or any sort of, power at all.
Stress can make people laugh or giggle, even if they don't want to. If people are walking around thinking to themselves "oh my, I better not make any bomb jokes or even accidentally say a word like 'bomb'", it's just like an admonishment that requests "Don't think about penguins!". .
The admonishment alone inserts thought about penguins into your head. So consciously thinking "don't say anything stupid" could make your brain ask itself "stupid things such as what?" and then your brain cooks up examples and a genuinely nervous person innocently blurts out "so, what do you think, that i have a bomb in there?" .
And then the excitement begins. This is ridiculous thought-porn torture, people, as part of security theater. And we buy tickets for that security theater every time we purchase a seat on an airliner. We pay to be subjected to this humiliation and useless piece of proof of our obeisance to group-think. It's like the idiotic "Freeze!" tactic exercises being performed at various airports:
TSA Freeze Drill links http://blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com/valleyfever/2012/09/tsa_freeze_drill_videod_at_sky.php http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/read.main/5103484/ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/28/tsa-all-stop-drill_n_1923683.html http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km0awE1Q2HA
Cochlear implants are required for some deaf patients, and those are the implants that require surgery. This PR bulletin from the Fraunhoffer institute is very cool, but it's like the retinal implants for vision, actually it's not even up to the level of retinal implants which are at least currently being tested. This implant system only has had its individual parts created. .
Those individual components have not yet been put together to make a full hearing aid. This is just a proof of concept or feasibility study thus far. They still have to select the materials that will be used for the long term implantation. An assembled version may be ready next year. As for the extremely small size claimed, that small size is just for the "electroacoustic transducer" (the details in the PDF file says it's a piezoelectric micro-actuator). And the round window is already the part of the ear that bulges in and out as the oval window accepts input from the stapedius. So this adds pressure on the other side of the fluid column.
Experts are currently testing a first working prototype in the laboratory. Results have been positive to date. "The individual components of the hearing aid have all been developed. The next step is to optimize and assemble them," says Kaltenbacher. The implant must measure up to high requirements: the material must be encased so the body tolerates it and it has to remain stable over long periods -- after all, hearing aid implants should last at least ten years. The optimized individual components should be ready by June of this year; testing of the overall system is planned for 2014.
Very nice comparison, and I agree with you about the silliness of dumping quality engineers to increase the profit level or save a little money. It's a short term gain for a much worse long term loss. I didn't know about all of those Saab innovations. Thanks for the details.
Yes, but the other key item is the incidence of "false positives" and "false negatives". Both of these incidences are very dependent upon the penetration of the disease in the general population in the first place. See the concept of sensitivity and specificity for more details. .
But the summary is a test that is 99% accurate (for both true positives and true negatives) with the zombie incidence rate shown would have:
the possibility that a positive test result being a true positive of only 1/6 = 16.66%
whereas a test that is 99.9% accurate would have
the possibility that a positive test result being a true positive of only 2/3 = 66.66%
for the incidence of Zombies (Mad Human disease) given in that student's example.
re: One of these days slashdotters will fall out of love with google and see them for who they really are. :>)
This slashdotter already has fallen out of love with google. I've got no google accounts and google-crap is noscripted out and DNS-blocked. I only have to allow/. and fsdn to post on/. and I can't vote articles up or down unless I enable google-fu / google-analytics / google-api and I don't allow that.
So what phase of the four steps is "pressuring vendors not to sell Linux"?
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." either Mahatma Gandhi or from an address by labor leader Nicholas Klein in a 1914 address to a labor union congress
Thanks for the detailed reply. I'm fairly new to a lot of this, but still very interested in it. I'm also writing X11 code, using Xlib routines rather than an overlying window manager style thing. I'm not a masochist, I'm just trying to learn the details from some good X examples. I've written some OpenGL stuff also. And I'm interested in learning the details from the ground up and from the high-level abstractions down. Get the devil in the details squeezed from above and below, if I can. Again, thanks for outlining the layers. .
I was also trying to learn the kernel drivers for some frame-buffer stuff for intel, as my dad bought an el-cheapo notebook. I can get X running just fine with Knoppix 7.04 and 7.05 for the notebook itself (which has 1024x600 pixels), but when you also try to use the hdmi output, it doesn't work. You always get a 1024x600 window with noisy (nonblinking) trash pixels around it on the HDMI screen to the full extent of the HDMI screen's pixel dimensions. I tried to see if I could inject (poke values directly into the video-buffer ram) some pixels outside of the recognized screen area, and thus learn how the memory mapping of the screen is capable of throwing the extraneous pixels on the HDMI screen, but the Xorg X display driver is only putting the display's pixels on the truncated 1024x600 window on the upper left. It's frustrating. (it's a walmart special Acer netbook, with the intel chip and the integrated video chip, 97xx maybe I don't remember off of the top of my head.)
Slashdot Mirror
It seems like it's mostly because of bad PR for the word "nuclear". The sciency types here on /. know that nuclear power plants are not as dangerous as other types of power plants, yet the majority of the public is against nuclear power systems. The PR for "nuke" is so bad that it even caused medical types to change the name of one of their diagnostic devices:
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MRI machines (magnetic resonance imaging) are called that because when they called them NMR machines originally, people were afraid of the word "nuclear" in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance. Even though MRI machines are still exactly the same thing and still measure nuclear magnetic resonance, they no longer use the word "nuclear", because no one wanted to be stuffed in a tube of a machine that had "nuclear" in its name!! People confused it with nuclear imaging in which radioactive isotopes really are injected into the human body and then imaging is performed to see how the isotope is distributed and if it clusters in certain parts of the body.
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People are scared of "nukes", and not-so-much of teeny little microbes, though look at all of the wacky episodes of ReGenesis, a canadian show about the canadian equivalent of the CDC and a genomics lab, to see the crazy plotlines of what could go wrong with bio-organisms. Psych also did an episode, "Death is in the Air", Season 4, Episode 13, that used "Bob" from Regenesis as the same sort of scientist. See my other post here for links to those episodes.
I loved the Spanish Flu episodes of ReGenesis. That show really captures a lot of intelligence and thoughtful analysis in the midst of crazy and unlikely + unrealistic plot lines. Ellen Page was in it as Sandstrom daughter in the first-season episodes (The Ontario Genomics Institute also wrote a bunch of fact-sheets about the scientific facts behind the fictional story lines. Two of those apply to these concepts. Hell, even Psych did an episode about virulent pathogens, and that episode even starred the Asperger's scientist from ReGenesis, Bob Melnikov (played by Dmitry Chepovetsky): the episode was in 2010 Death is in the Air, which is Psych Season 4, episode 13.
Yes, that might be what the foundation might be supposed to be for. But have you seen any Linux commercials on television or heard them on radio? Have you seen any banner ads, or heaven forbid, any google adword ads for Linux (either paid for by that foundation or by anyone else?). /. articles about that, the original and of course the dupe that soon followed). All those big companies that use and sell linux don't bother working together to sell their common link. Their money is better off spent promoting their individual brands. That is what I mean by "there is no prime mover behind promoting the Linux trademark as a trade mark and a brand name".
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Have you seen any concerted campaign of "Linux inside" for Roku, Google hardware, google tv, samsung and sony tv's that use linux or busybox, or any hardware or software like that? Have you seen any individual cases of "linux inside" except for some do-it-yourself breadboarding and circuit-board building kits and a couple of small linux laptop purveyors?
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So even if that is what the Linux Foundation might be for, that does not seem to be what that Foundation actually does. IMHO the foundation is a corporate entity for holding title to the trademark "Linux" so that others do not misappropriate it. If you've got examples of them publishing and promoting Linux, I would love to see more examples of it. I do know that GNU at least sent some people dressed as gnus to some microsoft Windows 8 events to hand out free software. (there were at least two
That is extremely evil, even if Google no longer uses or advertises their original mantra of "Don't Be Evil". Their having had such a mantra as a motto, and not having it now anymore is public renunciation of not being evil which IMHO is equivalent to "Yes, Be Evil!!!" as a positive declaration. So there, I've said it. Google's new motto must be "Yes, Be Evillll!!!" (add a laugh, or cackle, as needed), as it has been proven linguamathacontextually equal. QED. Feynman. Fine Women. Help, I'm drowning in a stream of consciousness...
Hmmm... For Bacon to have an Erdos number, Kevin Bacon would first have had to have a paper published with co-authors who could then be linked to Erd``os. But I do not believe that Kevin Bacon has published a paper. So we're right out on an Erd``os number for KB.
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But if we consider the concept of a joint Erdos-Bacon number which is the sum of an individual's Bacon number and their Erdos number, then we might be able to go somewhere. Those individuals with joint Bacon-Erdos numbers have a vertex on the Bacon graph and a vertex on the Erdos graph, thus allowing travel between the Bacon graph and the Erdos graph. The individual with the smallest Bacon-Erdos number would then be able to provide the shortest path from Kevin Bacon on the Bacon graph to Erdos on the Paul Erdos graph.
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A quick look at the Erdos-Bacon number article on wikipedia shows that the minimal Erdos-Bacon number (in their given examples) is held by Steven Strogatz, a professor at Cornell who has Bacon number 1 and Erdos number 3 with a combined Bacon-Erdos number of 4.
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Thus you can get from (0), Kevin Bacon, who was in a film (Connected: The Power of Six Degrees) with
(1) - Steven Strogatz, who published a paper with
(2) - Nadim Ali , who published a paper with
(3) - Peter Salamon, who published a paper with
(4) - Paul Erd''os . Thus a path is drawn.
Wearing masks in public illegal in at least 18 states, mostly in the south-east, due to the prevalence of the KKK wearing masks and hoods while terrorizing, burning, lynching, and killing blacks and others:
-- Smith said wearing a mask or hood in public is a misdemeanor under state law, punishable by a fine of up to $500 or up to a year in jail, or both. from http://www.thehighroad.org/archive/index.php/t-140409.html-- Wearing Mask or Face Covering Device - Mich. Comp. Laws Section 750.396 A person who conceals identity by wearing a mask to commit a crime is a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment for not more than 93 days or a fine of not more than $500.00. from http://www.chacha.com/question/are-masks-illegal-to-wear-in-the-us%3F-in-north-carolina
Wow! Thanks for that amazing link. Now I've got a few more real life examples to show to some of the nay-sayers around me in my life. It is sad that the paranoia is rational and valid.
"So?" you ask? Look at the links about drug residue on money, and look up how little science and statistics is behind the so-called "accuracy of identification with fingerprints". The point is that the government is very likely to use long-path lengths to indict/accuse/try/convict people even when there is no evidence. ;>)
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I posit that they are using these scientifically useless approaches to flim-flam judges and grand-juries into rubber-stamping warrant requests based on these flimsy pretexts being their probable cause. I say this because this is exactly what they did for drug residue on money. This is exactly what they do when they claim that their drug-sniffing dogs have detected the scent of (ultimately) non-existent drugs. This abuse of process has occurred. And I say that this is subverting true science for the ability to cover their over-reaching for issues of probable cause when no probable cause exists
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Armand Jean du Plessis said in his role as Cardinal Richelieu: âoeIf you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang himâ (look it up). This is what they are doing here. Trying to find dirt in everyone, so that when they want to get you, they've got a so-called valid "probable cause" for doing so. --- sez paranoid me.
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So I guess that ATF just heard about cliques and graph theory. Perhaps knowing the degree of bacon-ness would tell them that this approach to a friend-of-a-friend is useless. As everyone knows, the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon Conjecture" posits that every-one in filmdom is on a path of length at most 6 away from being in a film with Kevin Bacon (link to him yourself, if you want, he's less than 6 degrees away).
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So if Baconicity holds true in all of life instead of just in the film industry graph, then any individual can be linked to a criminal within less than six steps. Oh-my-godzies, we're all linked to criminals!! We all have gang ties!! We're all affiliated with Terrorists!! That linkage list shows it!! It must be true!!! Lock us all up, for our own goods!
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If that sounds ridiculous, that's because it is ridiculous. But that won't stop the government from claiming it to be true and useful and actually use it in courts of law. Shheeeeesh. It's like the old canard about "cocaine residue on money": -- most paper currency in the USA has cocaine residue on it
-- even national geographic Cocaine on Money: Drug Found on 90% of U.S. Bills confirms this to be true
Yet the government often tried to try (yes, prosecute = to try a case) people for being drug couriers/smugglers/kingpins because the money found on their person had drug residue on it. Unfortunately, the penetrance of drug residue on money is so high that there is not a reliable way to link the person's drug use with the drugs found on the money. See statistics 101 to figure that out.
The name "linux" is not as toxic as the brand name "microsoft". Microsoft has the "(almost prime) mover advantage" of being the 800-pound gorilla after out-maneuvering IBM in their contract for MS-DOS for the IBM PC. Many people think very poorly of Microsoft products, yet MS does not realize this and keeps branding things with MS, or Windows 8 or Windows RT, because it knows that its brand name is well known.
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The brand-name "Linux" is very poorly known. It's so poorly known that it's ludicrous to posit the idea that there's a toxicity to attaching that brand name to software or to hardware products containing that software. Google didn't use the name for whatever reasons they had. My guess in "reading google's mind" is that they saw no advantage to adding the linux brandname to what they sell, not that they saw a disadvantage to adding the name.
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Religions have brandnames. Why do you think "Christian Science" and the "Mormons" == "Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter Day Saints" both co-opt Christian nomenclature in the names of their religions? To get people to buy in that this religion is not different from the other religion (even if it really is in fact quite different).
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So if Linux or even GNU/Linux (praise be to RMS, all hail gnu and yaks [yaks = yet another kind software] ) had any sort of cachet or style or fashionability to them, companies would be stampeding to brand their products as having "GNU inside" or "linux internalized just for U!". Intel and MS pay a lot for their ads. Google has gone the way of Hershey candy bars and switched over from "we're so well known that we don't have to advertise" into "we better splash our brand name out there so people pick us!" There is no corporate marketing entity behind Linux, so there is no prime director behind the brand name or promotional aspects of it. That gives it a floppy directionless kind of vibe.
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Will that lack of pointed focus kill GNU and Linux? Or will it be the saving grace for GNU and Linux? I vote on the saving side. It's the same arguments made for the GPL. Some say the GPL will kill all software that is GPL'ed. Others say GPL means the software will survive while non-GPL software won't fare as well as BSD and proprietary code-bases get co-opted and hidden by corporations and brands. I vote on the side of GPL surviving. But even GPL has been divided into the GPL 2 vs. the GPL 3 camps by Tivo-ization.
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Brand name fights are about marketing and building market awareness and publicity. Google wants you to believe that buying their ads and their adwords will help you succeed. If someone tries to sell you on the importance of branding, look to see what else they are trying to sell you. What they're trying to sell you is either a marketing campaign or some of their services. Don't be sidetracked.
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Content is more important than form. Well, form needs to be clean and crap-free, but a beautiful shiny-candy-coated interface over crap is still just candy-coated-crap. Don't eat it. Make the content good, and let the others fight over branding and 1st place.
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Keep GNU good. Keep Linux good. The Linux "brand" is NOT toxic. Those who tell you that it is toxic are trying to sell you something.
Strangely, after getting 45 mod points on monday, I haven't gotten any mod points since then. It's enough to make a girl paranoid! Is it something I said? Did you stop getting an excessively large number of mod points too?
oopsie. Sorry, I misread the Tegra SoC "system on a chip" thing and my brain interpreted it as GPU stream processing. But hey, more opensourcing of video drivers is good in general.
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Dude! You think cocaine is not addictive? You're completely wrong. It is addictive because of its effect on the mesolimbic reward pathway. I link you to wikipedia's article on cocaine because the medical articles I found are behind paywalls and you might not be able to get to them unless you're on a university network that has medical journal access like UCSD does: Data from The Lancet suggests cocaine is ranked both the 2nd most addictive and the 2nd most harmful of 20 popular recreational drugs.
another quote from the same article:
It is addictive because of its effect on the mesolimbic reward pathway.You are wrong. Cocaine IS addictive.
So now there's a medical use for those frickin' sharks with laser beams! The only confound while doing the longitudinal study will be whether the rats were scared straight from addiction by the laser beam or by being confronted by the shark in the first place. So an extra experiment will have to be done using sharks that do not have laser beam capabilities.
;>)
Now the only problem is in getting the tiny little scuba suits for the rats, or the very large land-shark suits for the sharks (that have the appropriate wavelength-transparent ports [quartz glass? sapphire glass?] to let the IR laser through)...
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So this is good for investigational experiments, but I don't see how it would be useful for clinical and therapeutic uses in humans unless you insert the optogenetic materials into the brain regions you're interested in ahead of time.
So phoronix had the news yesterday about an open-source wrapper to AMD's concession to open-source "AMD Releases UVD Engine Source Code" for the kernel-level wrapper code, and today, NVidia open sources the 3-d driver for Tegra. That's progress. I use the Nvidia binary blob on my debian distro hardware, and the Nvidia blob with the knoppix live-boot system, as Nouveau does not work well enough on my hardware. I hope this will help Nouveau a lot.
That's a great point. Form is separate from content. The point of a movie is not just its content, but also in the stylistic presentation form it uses to deliver that content. I've seen movies that had a nice "story" behind it but with poor execution of the plot by the actors or timing and editing of the scenes. I've also seen movies produced and directed by music video directors and by Michael Baye that are beautifully styled and paced and so well lit and with gorgeous sweeping camera movements that actually go with the underlying scene and with good music that punctuates and emphasizes the action but the content of the plot and the storyline is crap.
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When both form and content deliver something beautiful, it's a wonderful movie. I like Ebert's side commentaries and I also like that he was part of some schlocky movie writing in the 1960s.
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Ebert wrote the scripts for Who Killed Bambi?, a 1978 movie about the Sex Pistols that ultimately was not made because the financiers did not like what was in the script. Ebert's screenplay for the movie is on his blog. Bizarre.
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He also wrote the for "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls," a movie for which he wrote the screenplay in 1969.
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"These drills are generally conducted during off-peak hours to minimize disruption, and generally last a minute," said Kristin Lee, a spokeswoman for the agency. The agency conducts a range of security exercises, not all of them in public, to train checkpoint officers, she said.
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Understood, I said. But still, am I, a citizen, required to stop motionless when the T.S.A. officers yell "freeze"?
It seems like a way to get people to start being subjugated and to prove compliance with any authority figure, regardless of whether or not that "so-called authority figure" has any right to assert that sort of, or any sort of, power at all.
Stress can make people laugh or giggle, even if they don't want to. If people are walking around thinking to themselves "oh my, I better not make any bomb jokes or even accidentally say a word like 'bomb'", it's just like an admonishment that requests "Don't think about penguins!".
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The admonishment alone inserts thought about penguins into your head. So consciously thinking "don't say anything stupid" could make your brain ask itself "stupid things such as what?" and then your brain cooks up examples and a genuinely nervous person innocently blurts out "so, what do you think, that i have a bomb in there?"
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And then the excitement begins. This is ridiculous thought-porn torture, people, as part of security theater. And we buy tickets for that security theater every time we purchase a seat on an airliner. We pay to be subjected to this humiliation and useless piece of proof of our obeisance to group-think. It's like the idiotic "Freeze!" tactic exercises being performed at various airports: TSA Freeze Drill links
http://blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com/valleyfever/2012/09/tsa_freeze_drill_videod_at_sky.php
http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/read.main/5103484/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/28/tsa-all-stop-drill_n_1923683.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km0awE1Q2HA
Cochlear implants are required for some deaf patients, and those are the implants that require surgery. This PR bulletin from the Fraunhoffer institute is very cool, but it's like the retinal implants for vision, actually it's not even up to the level of retinal implants which are at least currently being tested. This implant system only has had its individual parts created.
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Those individual components have not yet been put together to make a full hearing aid. This is just a proof of concept or feasibility study thus far. They still have to select the materials that will be used for the long term implantation. An assembled version may be ready next year. As for the extremely small size claimed, that small size is just for the "electroacoustic transducer" (the details in the PDF file says it's a piezoelectric micro-actuator). And the round window is already the part of the ear that bulges in and out as the oval window accepts input from the stapedius. So this adds pressure on the other side of the fluid column. Experts are currently testing a first working prototype in the laboratory. Results have been positive to date. "The individual components of the hearing aid have all been developed. The next step is to optimize and assemble them," says Kaltenbacher. The implant must measure up to high requirements: the material must be encased so the body tolerates it and it has to remain stable over long periods -- after all, hearing aid implants should last at least ten years. The optimized individual components should be ready by June of this year; testing of the overall system is planned for 2014.
Very nice comparison, and I agree with you about the silliness of dumping quality engineers to increase the profit level or save a little money. It's a short term gain for a much worse long term loss. I didn't know about all of those Saab innovations. Thanks for the details.
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But the summary is a test that is 99% accurate (for both true positives and true negatives) with the zombie incidence rate shown would have
whereas a test that is 99.9% accurate would have
the possibility that a positive test result being a true positive of only 2/3 = 66.66%for the incidence of Zombies (Mad Human disease) given in that student's example.
re: One of these days slashdotters will fall out of love with google and see them for who they really are. /. and fsdn to post on /. and I can't vote articles up or down unless I enable google-fu / google-analytics / google-api and I don't allow that.
:>)
This slashdotter already has fallen out of love with google. I've got no google accounts and google-crap is noscripted out and DNS-blocked. I only have to allow
I hope we get to that winning stage soon! ;>)
Or read "If On a Winter's Night, A Traveler..." by Italo Calvino. It's interesting and written in second-person narrative. In other words, the book is about you, the reader. Rather cool.
Thanks for the detailed reply. I'm fairly new to a lot of this, but still very interested in it. I'm also writing X11 code, using Xlib routines rather than an overlying window manager style thing. I'm not a masochist, I'm just trying to learn the details from some good X examples. I've written some OpenGL stuff also. And I'm interested in learning the details from the ground up and from the high-level abstractions down. Get the devil in the details squeezed from above and below, if I can. Again, thanks for outlining the layers.
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I was also trying to learn the kernel drivers for some frame-buffer stuff for intel, as my dad bought an el-cheapo notebook. I can get X running just fine with Knoppix 7.04 and 7.05 for the notebook itself (which has 1024x600 pixels), but when you also try to use the hdmi output, it doesn't work. You always get a 1024x600 window with noisy (nonblinking) trash pixels around it on the HDMI screen to the full extent of the HDMI screen's pixel dimensions. I tried to see if I could inject (poke values directly into the video-buffer ram) some pixels outside of the recognized screen area, and thus learn how the memory mapping of the screen is capable of throwing the extraneous pixels on the HDMI screen, but the Xorg X display driver is only putting the display's pixels on the truncated 1024x600 window on the upper left. It's frustrating. (it's a walmart special Acer netbook, with the intel chip and the integrated video chip, 97xx maybe I don't remember off of the top of my head.)