Either this is a troll, or you're just very, very... underinformed. To address your first point, that the odds of a positive mutation occuring are very small, I'll refer you to the Law of Truly Large Numbers. Essentially, if you have a population (sample size) so large, unlikely things are bound to happen. With six billion humans on this planet, something that happens to only one in every million people, you end up with 6,000 very unlikely things happening. Now think of how many microscopic organisms there were when all this preliminary evolution was going on. I don't know, but I'd say it didn't take them long to surpass six billion samples. To address your second point, I'm fairly sure that whatever plant-like life first managed to live on land was asexual, thus having to have the same mutation in two different specimens that are close enough to end up mating is irrelevant.
This previous article was also about a technique for producing very small wires. These wires were grown in water, though, and the scientists were apparently interested in connections to biology. Their goal was to be able to interface with a cell without killing it. The contrasts are interesting, though. These guys are growing wires on a polymer substrate, and are more interested in microelectronics. They appear to be fabricating long, thin, wires with consisten properties. The guys building wires in water were using what appeared to me to be a kind of diffusion-limited aggregation process that produces wispy, highly branching wires with presumably much poorer electrical properties.
See my previous rant. This seems to be yet another case where a writer for this news source has put their own sci-fi spin on what is otherwise a very unremarkable bit of information. Take five minutes to read and think about the points in this article, and you'll be sorry you did. It's chock full of conceptual holes, misunderstandings, and unfounded extrapolations into the news-bite realm of absurdity. Please stop posting this yellow journalism.
Hear, hear. It's pseudo-science and poor reporting like the drivel on New Scientist that gives real science a bad name. The danger with them is that they mix the bullshit in with real science, so you've really got to be paying attention to filter out the bad stuff. I'm really getting tired of seeing submissions of articles from this site that turn out to be incredible (as in "not credible"), purely speculative, or interpreted beyond reason by some sensationalist reporter.
I did a lame research paper and classroom presentation on the Hubble Space Telescope way back in the day (read: I'm pretty sure of my info, but I'm not sure where to look for verification currently). Anyway, the result of my little grade-school investigations were that the in-orbit modifications they made improved HST significantly beyond its initial design. Actually, a little bit of looking turned up this: HST Servicing Missions. It's rather dumbed-down, but I think it'll help you draw comparisons.
In any case, there are a few things you should keep in mind. First, HST is quite old now, and past its initial proposed service lifetime, IIRC, so technology has come a long way since it went up. Second, things like this are often technologically lagging even before they go up, since it can take literally decades to plan an instrument of that size. Size is the other critical thing to keep in mind. It's (relatively) easy to build huge arrays like VLT on the ground, but try getting that into orbit:). Even if you break it up into many missions and assemble in-orbit (some early plans for NGST considered that, IIRC), it would still be a monumental task (though not impossible).
So I'd say in summary that chances are HST never could have been better than Paranal, even though it's been an awesome instrument throughout its lifetime.
Despite much reporting, the FBI has yet to actual confirm that Magic Lantern exists. Good luck finding out who the contractor is when they won't even 'fess up:(. Still it's possible to find a lot of information about the FBI's IT policies. There's an FBI congressional statement (in the context of Y2k) and a Presidential Directive that gives some starting points. Some quotes:
Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs) are encouraged to be
set up by the private sector in cooperation with the Federal
government and modeled on the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention;
A National Infrastructure Assurance Council drawn from private sector
leaders and state/local officials to provide guidance to the policy
formulation of a National Plan;
The Critical Infrastructure Assurance Office will provide support to
the National Coordinator's work with government agencies and the
private sector in developing a national plan. The office will also
help coordinate a national education and awareness program, and
legislative and public affairs.
I was under the impression that you could also determine the magnitude of the charge, but I'm not sure. I imagine it might be very difficult to determine the charge if the accretion disk radiaties so much. But a black hole certainly has a magnetic field. This Astronomy Picture of the Day had some interesting links about magnetism in an astronomical context.
Just a clarification... It sounds like maybe you're under the impression that they're hoping to detect light reflected from the planet. That may be the case, but it seems more likely that they're hoping to analyze light shining through the planet's atmosphere as it occludes the star. This technique has been used recently, apparently with good success. Umm... actually, it looks like this MSNBC article is talking about this case (planet HD 209458). So check that article out.
It should really be a Rant Stick (1d2) (+2 Insightful,-1 Troll) of *Slay* Kernel Developer... No match for my Quarterstaff of Burning (1d9) (+1 Flamebait) (Blessed), though;).
I've had an HP USB CD writer (8200 series) for about two years now, and have yet to actually produce a coaster (except when copying a CD that's terribly scratched or something like that). I've probably burnt about 100 CDs in the time that I've had it, and I don't recall the buffer ever even dipping below 100%. Granted, though, it can only burn at 4x, which isn't exactly fast when you've got several gigs of mp3s to burn off, but it's something that can run comfortably in the background. I imagine there are a lot of things that could be causing your buffer underruns. Maybe taxing the USB bus too much, trying to burn at a higher rate than is reliable, etc.
I couldn't be happier. This incredible encycolpedia of mathematics got me through not only a number of intimidating math courses (linear algebra, graph theory, diff-eq, etc.), but also through many hours I would have otherwise just spent reading slashdot or memepool. Finally I can go back to spending hours on end at a website actually learning something worthwhile;). This is definitely something I won't take for granted in the future. Congratulations again, Eric! Keep up the good work!
It'd be nice to see some more background; in particular what inspired them to try this. It sounds like just basic DLA. You use the EM field between the carbon "islands", then the conductive particles in suspended in the liquid move along the field lines in a somewhat Brownian manner (i.e. random, but statstically biased because of the field). Then just set it up so the particles stick to eachother. I wrote (and no doubt many others have, too) a program to simulate this. You can set up groups of attractors that follow different physical laws (e.g. inverse-square, linear, exponential), then set up particle sources (e.g. ambient sources, point sources, linear, circular, etc.). Hit "start", and you see the particles very slowly (i.e. hundreds of thousands of particles) build up into these dendritic structures. It's cool to see somebody actually doing physical work applying the theory, though.
I agree. I work in a Windows environment (Win2kPro, specifically). Cookie control is very cumbersome, but at least possible. It involves a lot of playing with the security settings. Essentially, you have to allow the sites you want (e.g. slashdot, google, etc.) to put persistent cookies on your box, then (unintuitively enough) turn cookies completely off. This leaves your current cookies still functioning, whilst denying any new ones. (Per-session cookies are another matter.)
I've found that webbugs are much more intrusive, and there's no way to control them on Windows. Or at least there wasn't, until Bugnosis came along. It's a beautiful little IE plugin. It's got a lot of options, and can be configured to essentially entirely disable webbugs while remaining totally transparent to the user. But at a click, a large amount of extra info is availble, so you can see exactly who's bugging you, etc. Only for IE5.0 and higher, but it's definitely worth it. Is there anything similar for mozilla, opera, etc.?
Why it got applied to binary numbers meant to express a simple technological function with no human-readable content whatever, I'll never understand...
Somewhat tangential, but this touches on what worries me about the approach to tearing down the DMCA that so many people (Felten, RMS, etc.) seem to be taking. The main argument seems to be essentially turning this technological innovation (in the form of code, pseudo-code, algorithms, etc.) into an "art" by way of "free speech". I was originally very persuaded by that argument (and I'm definitely still anti-DMCA), but I feel more and more that it's the wrong approach. It'll eventually end up playing into their hands. I would hope it would be as simple as drawing up a list of contradictions and absurdities in the status quo, but I suppose that wouldn't necessarily speak as strongly to most people.
As you said, our notion of what a copyright is for is antiquated; inapplicable to many of the things technology lets us do. The problem (as far as I see) is that it's going to be some years before people in positions to make law really have any basic understanding of modern information systems. Until then, the only way they can get through cases and pass bills is by making analogies to current law, flawed and inappropriate though those analogies may be.
A high-profile effort dubbed the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI), intended to be a private sector version of the kind of technology effort Hollings' plan outlines, collapsed largely because of disagreements between technology and content companies.
Umm... hasn't SDMI been failing because each proposed version of the technology has beencracked in a matter of days? (And despite the RIAA threatening the researchers with litigation, at that!) Good reporting, ZDnet!
IE5 seems to be rendering it as an XML tree because it's very choosy about exactly what namespaces it supports. Obviously, the namespace pointed to at MQQ is a perfectly valid XHTML namespace that's been around for two years as a final draft (or whatever the appropriate terminology is). Try looking at the page in Opera or Mozilla and it'll render just fine. I ran into similar problems while developing some XSLT stuff. IE5 doesn't support the much more functional version of XSLT that has string operators and whatnot. You have to dig through MSDN to find a patch that'll let IE deal with it correctly. Again, IIRC, Opera and Mozilla processed my XSLTs just fine; IE just didn't support the namespace.
Does anybody else remember reading a Rolling Stone article (I won't vouch for the general quality of the publication, but this particular article was very interesting.) about the career of one of the major players in the LSD market? One of his unfortunately shady associates (his main dealer, I think) bought and pimped out an old missile silo, if memory serves me correctly. The guy was eventually arrested, and of course all of his property went up for sale. Is this the same silo?
Looking at the display of "Major International Internet Routes", I'm left with the same disappointment in the apparent quality of this publication. The legend is almost worthless, in that it adds almost nothing to my understanding of the graph. I'm still left to just make a ballpark estimate of how big the San Francisco pipe is. The stylized geographic elements are chunky and distract from the data being displayed. The lack of any distinction between pipes makes them get visually lost every time they intersect. It obscures interesting bits, such as the fact that Tokyo is connected by all three pipes to the US. It fails to give an overall picture of how much bandwidth is coming out of Tokyo, since two pipes are merged and one is left off by itself. This seems terribly amateur to me. Ugh!
Ever since reading Edward Tufte's books on visualization of data, I've looked at graphs, charts, and diagrams such as those in this report with a much more critical eye. It really bothers me that people get away with distorting data so terribly. For example, take a look at that first chart of "Interregional Internet Bandwidth". The numbers seem to have almost nothing to do with how they displayed the data, aside from the general correlation between thickness of the line and the size of the number. Your eye is tricked into comparing the areas of some of the lines because of how absurdly thick the US / Europe one is. And the spread of data makes it impossible for the vague correlation of data to be meaningful. There's no way that Latin America / Europe line is 1/2000 of the thickness of the US / Europe line. It bothers me that "executives" will be making decisions based on poor data displays like this.
Don't be absurd. Read what I said. If you still see that attitude somewhere in my comment, read it again. Repeat this process until you either starve to death or get a clue. I don't appreciate your trivialization of the pain that I feel, little though it may compare to the pain of those more directly affected by the attacks.
I do not claim to have the "truth". I have what I believe, I have what I know, I have what I suspect, I have what I've heard. What fault do you find in what I said? Do you disagree that the people who died in the attacks were victims? Perhaps you're offended that I didn't also include the many of us who feel deeply and personally wounded by the attack, those of us who lost loved ones, really any citizen of our country. Perhaps you don't believe that our country could have done nothing from a foreign-policy standpoint to have prevented this. In any case, I am offended by your apparent naivete.
I wish I could feel safe being so naive as to say something like that. I hope you don't believe that the only role our country has played in this nightmare is as a victim. Certainly everyone who died in the attacks Tuesday was a victim, and purely a victim. But you can't just close your eyes, cover your ears, and pretend that our country has played no role but that of a victim.
Yeah, the past tense definitely wasn't appropriate. It's not a complete transition yet, but my impression is that it's becoming ever more prevalent. I remember reading recently how Adobe has reworked their software license (the click-wrap during install, at least) to make it obvious that you're not buying their product. You're buying a license to use their product. All you own is a little plastic disc and a chunk of dead tree. This is handy for Adobe since (IIRC) you can't resell the product. Wish I had more facts to back up my case, but I'm sure some people here have more evidence than I could ever come up with.
Arrrgggg... it's "viruses", not "virii". You can't just change any -us to a -ii to make a plural (there's no latin plural for virus; it would be like saying "furnitures" in english). I'm so tired of correcting people on this, but some force compells me to. I guess I'll just keep it brief, and refer you to this page, with much more information than I'll ever care to reproduce (and an interesting read).
Slashdot Mirror
Either this is a troll, or you're just very, very... underinformed. To address your first point, that the odds of a positive mutation occuring are very small, I'll refer you to the Law of Truly Large Numbers. Essentially, if you have a population (sample size) so large, unlikely things are bound to happen. With six billion humans on this planet, something that happens to only one in every million people, you end up with 6,000 very unlikely things happening. Now think of how many microscopic organisms there were when all this preliminary evolution was going on. I don't know, but I'd say it didn't take them long to surpass six billion samples. To address your second point, I'm fairly sure that whatever plant-like life first managed to live on land was asexual, thus having to have the same mutation in two different specimens that are close enough to end up mating is irrelevant.
This previous article was also about a technique for producing very small wires. These wires were grown in water, though, and the scientists were apparently interested in connections to biology. Their goal was to be able to interface with a cell without killing it. The contrasts are interesting, though. These guys are growing wires on a polymer substrate, and are more interested in microelectronics. They appear to be fabricating long, thin, wires with consisten properties. The guys building wires in water were using what appeared to me to be a kind of diffusion-limited aggregation process that produces wispy, highly branching wires with presumably much poorer electrical properties.
See my previous rant. This seems to be yet another case where a writer for this news source has put their own sci-fi spin on what is otherwise a very unremarkable bit of information. Take five minutes to read and think about the points in this article, and you'll be sorry you did. It's chock full of conceptual holes, misunderstandings, and unfounded extrapolations into the news-bite realm of absurdity. Please stop posting this yellow journalism.
Hear, hear. It's pseudo-science and poor reporting like the drivel on New Scientist that gives real science a bad name. The danger with them is that they mix the bullshit in with real science, so you've really got to be paying attention to filter out the bad stuff. I'm really getting tired of seeing submissions of articles from this site that turn out to be incredible (as in "not credible"), purely speculative, or interpreted beyond reason by some sensationalist reporter.
</RANT>
In any case, there are a few things you should keep in mind. First, HST is quite old now, and past its initial proposed service lifetime, IIRC, so technology has come a long way since it went up. Second, things like this are often technologically lagging even before they go up, since it can take literally decades to plan an instrument of that size. Size is the other critical thing to keep in mind. It's (relatively) easy to build huge arrays like VLT on the ground, but try getting that into orbit :). Even if you break it up into many missions and assemble in-orbit (some early plans for NGST considered that, IIRC), it would still be a monumental task (though not impossible).
So I'd say in summary that chances are HST never could have been better than Paranal, even though it's been an awesome instrument throughout its lifetime.
I was under the impression that you could also determine the magnitude of the charge, but I'm not sure. I imagine it might be very difficult to determine the charge if the accretion disk radiaties so much. But a black hole certainly has a magnetic field. This Astronomy Picture of the Day had some interesting links about magnetism in an astronomical context.
Just a clarification... It sounds like maybe you're under the impression that they're hoping to detect light reflected from the planet. That may be the case, but it seems more likely that they're hoping to analyze light shining through the planet's atmosphere as it occludes the star. This technique has been used recently, apparently with good success. Umm... actually, it looks like this MSNBC article is talking about this case (planet HD 209458). So check that article out.
It should really be a Rant Stick (1d2) (+2 Insightful,-1 Troll) of *Slay* Kernel Developer... No match for my Quarterstaff of Burning (1d9) (+1 Flamebait) (Blessed), though ;).
I've had an HP USB CD writer (8200 series) for about two years now, and have yet to actually produce a coaster (except when copying a CD that's terribly scratched or something like that). I've probably burnt about 100 CDs in the time that I've had it, and I don't recall the buffer ever even dipping below 100%. Granted, though, it can only burn at 4x, which isn't exactly fast when you've got several gigs of mp3s to burn off, but it's something that can run comfortably in the background. I imagine there are a lot of things that could be causing your buffer underruns. Maybe taxing the USB bus too much, trying to burn at a higher rate than is reliable, etc.
I couldn't be happier. This incredible encycolpedia of mathematics got me through not only a number of intimidating math courses (linear algebra, graph theory, diff-eq, etc.), but also through many hours I would have otherwise just spent reading slashdot or memepool. Finally I can go back to spending hours on end at a website actually learning something worthwhile ;). This is definitely something I won't take for granted in the future. Congratulations again, Eric! Keep up the good work!
It'd be nice to see some more background; in particular what inspired them to try this. It sounds like just basic DLA. You use the EM field between the carbon "islands", then the conductive particles in suspended in the liquid move along the field lines in a somewhat Brownian manner (i.e. random, but statstically biased because of the field). Then just set it up so the particles stick to eachother. I wrote (and no doubt many others have, too) a program to simulate this. You can set up groups of attractors that follow different physical laws (e.g. inverse-square, linear, exponential), then set up particle sources (e.g. ambient sources, point sources, linear, circular, etc.). Hit "start", and you see the particles very slowly (i.e. hundreds of thousands of particles) build up into these dendritic structures. It's cool to see somebody actually doing physical work applying the theory, though.
I've found that webbugs are much more intrusive, and there's no way to control them on Windows. Or at least there wasn't, until Bugnosis came along. It's a beautiful little IE plugin. It's got a lot of options, and can be configured to essentially entirely disable webbugs while remaining totally transparent to the user. But at a click, a large amount of extra info is availble, so you can see exactly who's bugging you, etc. Only for IE5.0 and higher, but it's definitely worth it. Is there anything similar for mozilla, opera, etc.?
As you said, our notion of what a copyright is for is antiquated; inapplicable to many of the things technology lets us do. The problem (as far as I see) is that it's going to be some years before people in positions to make law really have any basic understanding of modern information systems. Until then, the only way they can get through cases and pass bills is by making analogies to current law, flawed and inappropriate though those analogies may be.
Umm... hasn't SDMI been failing because each proposed version of the technology has been cracked in a matter of days? (And despite the RIAA threatening the researchers with litigation, at that!) Good reporting, ZDnet!
IE5 seems to be rendering it as an XML tree because it's very choosy about exactly what namespaces it supports. Obviously, the namespace pointed to at MQQ is a perfectly valid XHTML namespace that's been around for two years as a final draft (or whatever the appropriate terminology is). Try looking at the page in Opera or Mozilla and it'll render just fine. I ran into similar problems while developing some XSLT stuff. IE5 doesn't support the much more functional version of XSLT that has string operators and whatnot. You have to dig through MSDN to find a patch that'll let IE deal with it correctly. Again, IIRC, Opera and Mozilla processed my XSLTs just fine; IE just didn't support the namespace.
Does anybody else remember reading a Rolling Stone article (I won't vouch for the general quality of the publication, but this particular article was very interesting.) about the career of one of the major players in the LSD market? One of his unfortunately shady associates (his main dealer, I think) bought and pimped out an old missile silo, if memory serves me correctly. The guy was eventually arrested, and of course all of his property went up for sale. Is this the same silo?
Looking at the display of "Major International Internet Routes", I'm left with the same disappointment in the apparent quality of this publication. The legend is almost worthless, in that it adds almost nothing to my understanding of the graph. I'm still left to just make a ballpark estimate of how big the San Francisco pipe is. The stylized geographic elements are chunky and distract from the data being displayed. The lack of any distinction between pipes makes them get visually lost every time they intersect. It obscures interesting bits, such as the fact that Tokyo is connected by all three pipes to the US. It fails to give an overall picture of how much bandwidth is coming out of Tokyo, since two pipes are merged and one is left off by itself. This seems terribly amateur to me. Ugh!
Ever since reading Edward Tufte's books on visualization of data, I've looked at graphs, charts, and diagrams such as those in this report with a much more critical eye. It really bothers me that people get away with distorting data so terribly. For example, take a look at that first chart of "Interregional Internet Bandwidth". The numbers seem to have almost nothing to do with how they displayed the data, aside from the general correlation between thickness of the line and the size of the number. Your eye is tricked into comparing the areas of some of the lines because of how absurdly thick the US / Europe one is. And the spread of data makes it impossible for the vague correlation of data to be meaningful. There's no way that Latin America / Europe line is 1/2000 of the thickness of the US / Europe line. It bothers me that "executives" will be making decisions based on poor data displays like this.
Don't be absurd. Read what I said. If you still see that attitude somewhere in my comment, read it again. Repeat this process until you either starve to death or get a clue. I don't appreciate your trivialization of the pain that I feel, little though it may compare to the pain of those more directly affected by the attacks.
I do not claim to have the "truth". I have what I believe, I have what I know, I have what I suspect, I have what I've heard. What fault do you find in what I said? Do you disagree that the people who died in the attacks were victims? Perhaps you're offended that I didn't also include the many of us who feel deeply and personally wounded by the attack, those of us who lost loved ones, really any citizen of our country. Perhaps you don't believe that our country could have done nothing from a foreign-policy standpoint to have prevented this. In any case, I am offended by your apparent naivete.
I wish I could feel safe being so naive as to say something like that. I hope you don't believe that the only role our country has played in this nightmare is as a victim. Certainly everyone who died in the attacks Tuesday was a victim, and purely a victim. But you can't just close your eyes, cover your ears, and pretend that our country has played no role but that of a victim.
Yeah, the past tense definitely wasn't appropriate. It's not a complete transition yet, but my impression is that it's becoming ever more prevalent. I remember reading recently how Adobe has reworked their software license (the click-wrap during install, at least) to make it obvious that you're not buying their product. You're buying a license to use their product. All you own is a little plastic disc and a chunk of dead tree. This is handy for Adobe since (IIRC) you can't resell the product. Wish I had more facts to back up my case, but I'm sure some people here have more evidence than I could ever come up with.
Sorry, just can't stand to see a good quote gone wrong.
Arrrgggg... it's "viruses", not "virii". You can't just change any -us to a -ii to make a plural (there's no latin plural for virus; it would be like saying "furnitures" in english). I'm so tired of correcting people on this, but some force compells me to. I guess I'll just keep it brief, and refer you to this page, with much more information than I'll ever care to reproduce (and an interesting read).