I don't know how Apple does it, but the Mail client that came with OS X has some amazing anti-spam widget running. With essentially no training it misidentifies maybe 1 spam in a hundred, or two hundred (I get about 50 spam a day). I keep looking for good email in the spamcan and almost never see anything there except announcements from companies I've done business with in the past (pseudospam). I haven't had to deal with any really nasty spam in my inbox for months, no joke.
Does anyone know how Apple has pulled this one off?
...my first thought was that CM was a woman. Ada Lovelace not withstanding, female intellectuals had a hard time being taken seriously until just recently (perhaps up to the 1940s.) I don't know if that was more or less the case in ascestral Scotland, but it was not uncommon for women and girls to publish their writings anonymously or pseudonymously, thus to remain utterly unknown even if their ideas did go on to have lives of their own.
Of course, nobody knows either way regarding CM and likely never will know. But it is worth pausing for a moment and reflecting on not only the random nature of fame and recognition, but also how many great discoveries we certainly have lost over the centuries because someone was not allowed to write, or speak or even to dream.
I don't know if things have changed much even now, but it has always been my greatest hope that the ubiquitous Internet would serve to unlock some of that untapped and otherwise lost human potential. IP laws, software patents, and the thugs seeking to control the flow of information aside, there are surely a lot of new voices out there to be heard, and new ideas they can share with us to help take us to the next great era of discovery and global progress. In the shadow of looming wars and unrest, AIDS and WMDs, and all the other noise of our discontent it is comforting to think that this might indeed be so.
I don't see this issue being a big deal. The idea of giving objective grades (as opposed to subjective evaluations) for higher education is a new idea in the big scheme of things, borrowed perhaps from primary education. It used to be (200 years ago and longer) that you debated your peers to show ability, disputed your professors instead of taking an exam, and then had to convince a review board that you knew your stuff to graduate, and after that you had to use your knowledge effectively and not just cite it on your resume on your way to the corner office. None of that was graded other than "well argued". I imagine there is nothing more terrifying than a half dozen old people glaring at you over their bifocals and asking you tough questions and barking at you when you faulter.
So is life after the fall of objective grades a horror? The writer of this op-ed bit says that he is not sure he or his peers are up to the task of educating without tests and grades. I wonder what that really means? Does it mean that he is not ready to talk to students in small groups and engage them intellectually? That he is not ready to challenge each mind individually in a setting of peers? That he is not able to evaluate a student's progress just by knowing them as a person and their work as a whole?
The factory method of teaching (which is what he is lamenting as it passes) had serious flaws. Students never really did buy the notion that periodic test scores and grades meant squat (and rampant cheating didn't help.) The factory method might have had its place in recent centuries when we needed so very many "learned" workers to support our exploding industrial revolution. But does that still hold? Does any of this matter now?
If grades are dead then let them be buried. If students need a motivation to achieve, let the marketplace provide it as once it did, when a person of letters stood out on their talents and not their papers. The future belongs to the smart ones, and we can all tell who they are just by talking to them. And the rest? Back to the fields.
It's more than a little cool. Just 20 years ago something this technically sophisticated would have sounded impossible. Heck 20 years ago it might have cost NASA $500K, taken 2 years to develop, had half the features, and suffered a systems failure 17 seconds after launch.
We're jaded. We have no real sense of the size of things anymore. Rocket Guy is still talking about launching himself 30 miles straight up in a home-made rocket. Let's hope he does and he survives. But I'll predict now that the day after the event everyone here will shrug, bitch about his web server being/.ed, and say "it's been done before."
Don't hear too much about anyone using these 'sploits, and they've been around forever. Anyone out there running a PHP site been whacked around this way?
But I'll admit I do have register_globals turned off. Some doors you just can't imagine leaving wide open.
"Bullshit" was the first thing that crossed my mind, actually. I've been scanning this discussion looking for anyone else of a like mind.
The bug in question was first reported in a public forum. Anyone who wanted to could go in there and say anything they liked. There are people out there who like to spread M$ FUD, as a religious duty. The only way I'm going to buy these reports is when Apple is able to replicate them. It should not be too hard to do so once they know what to look for.
The browser wars are on again, people. The M$ FUD machine is going to start churning out poop. Get your shovel and start digging.
It wasn't always like this. About 200 years ago there was this enormous burst of engineering activity associated with the Industrial Revolution. Engineers in metalurgy, chemisty, power systems, control systems, manufacturing and all the heavy industries were the darlings of the era. They were supermen (and they were men by and large) who were lifting the world into a brighter tomorrow.
Does anyone today beleive that engineers will improve the world from here on? OK, which ones? Chemists making new pesticides? Petroleum engineers drilling new wells in wildlife refuges? How about molecular biologists? That is the 3 of them who aren't already working on WMD and cloning humans.
Yes, I'm being mean. And I'm actually a scientist (if you count an MS degree from a small State college.) I'm making the point that this is how the engineering field is being portrayed, and even where they are headed.
Who really wants to be part of a machine like that?
Regedit is justifiably obscure. ReaderRabbit isn't. Who do you think is buying the computer systems and software that are driving the tech economy? Unix admins? Heck no, it's my wife grabbing cheap edutainment software for our kids at the discount warehouse.
When that stuff has "Runs on Linux" added to the system requirements just under "Runs on MacOS" which is just under "Runs on Windows" THEN Linux will have arrived. Doesn't matter a fetid dingo kidney if you think ReaderRabbit is big time or not. It's just the tip of the lovely iceberg.
Actually I hadn't given any thought to it, but you are probably right regarding email spam that is just a link delivery mechanism, which these days is the majority. They can forge the email address of origin and not loose anything because they are directing traffic to a web site.
Spammers may be only part of the reason why these companies are going to some serious effort to reduce bot activity. There might be some other threats, either to their technology or their reputations, that they have recognized and are trying to counter but haven't yet told us about. The truth of why Turing tests are being put up as barriers might be more "interesting" than we're imagining at present. I can think of a few interesting legal issues if an actual person has to open an account, or if the companies can make a credible case that this is what is happening. Deflects some awkward embarrassment should their service be fingered for aiding certain kinds of criminal activity.
Yeah I know; how can you sleep at night being so fscking paranoid.
These Turing tests do not stop spam. They discourage spammers from using bogus Hotmail etc accounts to originate spam from. They do this by making it incrementally more expensive to create the accounts; rather than using a bot to create an account a second you have to use a human to create accounts by the minute. So 60 times the effort.
But I don't think that translates into 60 times the cost. The Turing tests are interesting but I don't think that the creation of the accounts ever was a bottleneck in the process in sending spam. You could get a high school kid to create all the accounts you would need for a month in about an hour, and pay him in pr0n.
If the truth were known, Hotmail and Yahoo are just trying to decrease server loads. I bet that when bots create accounts they create hundreds or thousands more than are used, which take up server resources during creation and later as the accounts eat up storage. With Turing tests it is more likely that not too many will be laying around waiting to be used.
If there is a legal ramification to transfering the email account then it is just one more in a long line of ethical and possibly legal lapses spammers engage in. For example, though IANAL it seems to me that sending explicit pornographic images to an email account belonging to a minor should land you in jail about as quickly as would handing the stuff out in "dead tree" form outside the school the kid goes to. Sure nobody is prosecuting that, but it's probably illegal and is certainly immoral. Thus I don't think they care much about the email account transfer question.
Years ago they started taking pay phones out of poor neighborhoods. Why? Because drug dealers were using them to take orders and sell drugs. Advocates for the poor said removing pay phones would not stop drug dealing and would only hurt poor folk who could not afford phones in their homes and used pay phones instead.
Now everyone uses cell phones to buy and sell drugs. And the poor folk STILL don't have pay phones because now there is not money in maintaining them.
Oh wait...this just in...local governments are now taking down cell towers in and around poor neighborhoods so drug dealers cannot use cell phones to take orders and sell drugs. Advocates for the poor are claiming this will only hurt poor people, who cannot afford phones in their home and instead buy prepaid throw away cell phones.
Re:Credible?
on
Tai Chi Robots
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I had a doubt too. I searched on the name of the professor, Kejie Li, and not only is that a real professor in China (at one time Professor at Beijing Institute of Technology, China) Kejie Li even gave a talk to the 2001 IEEE International Symposium on Computational Intelligent for Robotics and Automation, in Banff National Park, Canada, titled "Humanoid Walk Control with Feedforward Dynamic". OK, so they didn't advertise a robot doing Tai Chi at the symposium but they've clearly been up to something. Pretty cool if you ask me.
Yes, I've wondered the same thing. If the US could, with little more than sliderules and some brainy scientists, essentially invent nuclear weapons from whole cloth then why can't every other single nation on earth?
To answer my own question, the stakes are much higher now and everyone is watching. Fifty years ago the US was in a conventional war against several enemies and by no means was the outcome certain at first. The atomic weapon was proposed on entirely theoretical grounds as a possible means to manage the war, if not end it. If it worked that is, which Einstein and his fellows suggested to Roosevelt that it might. The President bought it, gave them anything they needed include utter secrecy during wartime, and they played around with it. Nobody was watching them, nobody knew what the hell they were up to, and nobody cared.
They did not know it would even work, failure would not have been the worst thing imaginable, and success might not make a lot of difference if the war went badly in other ways.
In the end, the thing literally and figuratively blew them all away. The rest is history.
Fast forward. Having an unsanctioned nuclear weapons program today can bring the superpowers down on you like a plague, and even start a lethal if conventional war that will destroy your way of life for a century. Atomic weapons themselves are bottled up, and the blueprints as well as the materials and technology. Any individual employed on an atomic weapons program in a superpower nation is a valued State slave, and they know it. Spies are everywhere looking mostly for evidence of nuclear proliferation. Realistically only the most oppressive, isolated nations on earth can hope to maintain the military-style secrecy and paranoia that the Manhattan Project enjoyed in its day, but they are all under surveillance and embargoes of several kinds and brainy people flee from those places at the first chance. Only staunch allies of superpowers can get, via simple diplomacy and with diplomatic secrecy, access to ready-made technology and materials (like oh for example, India and Israel as strategic allies of the US, Korean of Russia, and Iraq of...well someone...France? Russia?) and then borrow the know-how in the form of visiting scientists.
The world is not as it was. Ideas do not flow as freely as once they did, in part because some of those ideas can kill hundreds of millions of people in a few hours. We did not know that 60 years ago on the even of global war, but we know it now and we are afraid. Some toys simply are not to be played with, though I wonder how we will ever get this particularly nasty toy back into the toybox.
Well OK, it has happened before. Britian, France and Germany, though powerful and strategic, are not world powers anymore. Sure that has a little to do with centuries of mind-numbing warfare, internal decay and global exhaustion. But it also has something to do with the rise of the US economy and military might as brainy peolple from those same countries fled to a free-er country.
But will India be able to trump the US? US interests are looking to India to make money. They are keeping a good deal of control, taking all the profits, and exporting few tangible assets. India is being used, it is not being built up, by these efforts. They can build themselves up in the process...but toward what? Individual wealth and the growth of the middle class is my first guess. A south asia Switzerland. That is hard to export, hard to parlay into a global position. Like the Swiss, they will earn a reputation but they will not overtake anyone.
Of course, the Swiss don't have 1 billion people and nuclear weapons...but those are not global assets they are national liabilities either of which could drive the nation into ruin.
So a mixed bag overall. But of course I wish them the best.
Someone could mod that funny. But what makes it really funny is that it strikes so close to the truth. Too bad we don't have a "Frighteningly Funny" category. Or a "Funny But True" category.
Probably the PARAM technology is a civilian offshoot of the original military/defence effort, which itself gave them atomic weapons. So in that regard the civilian technology is not only harmless wrt WMDs, it is actually a sensible and peaceful application of technology they have had all along. Something similar happened in the US, including regarding the DarpaNet.
As for exporting PARAM to Canada...well...I think that calls for open war on both countries.
That's a joke, people. India is a vital US ally. And the US is practically a southern province of Canada (heh...me funny.)
hmmmm...maybe. We still don't know what the raw performance of these dia-chips will be. No doubt you are thinking "oh, 1000 degC, that is great for overclocking." But do you really want the equivalent of a blast furnace on your desktop? And, what kind of logic board and surface traces will be able to manage that kind of heat? The answer is, none at all.
These are very special duty devices. They will end up in the exhaust manifold of your car, not the logic board of your PC. They will be built and deployed to resist failure under heat, and might not run even as fast as what you can buy today; clock speed will probably not even make it into the requirements document.
So this is no answer to Moore's Law, more like Murphy's Law; trying to get something that is far less likely to go wrong in places where traditional chips go wrong all the time. Thus we can extend the technology we know well (digital computing) into new places (harsh environments.) It will be interesting to see what they do with that...launch a compact space probe into the corona of the sun? Drop one into an erupting volcano to float around and send data? Lots of stuff comes to mind.
Since you bring it up, nobody knows what would happen if M$ folded up. But I can tell you this much, before M$ came along companies were churning out revolutionary software and services, and M$ still haven't added much to the mix. On the way to buying everything in sight and vaporwareing their way to infamy they have certainly killed off some interesting products that came too close to their core interests. If you don't think that's true then you don't understand fully why they are being called on the carpet as a monopoly.
People think that rich companies are good for the economy. If Big Blue had killed the PC somehow would our economy be better now? IBM was rich, still is, so why not kill the PC? Or how about the Bell system. Got their asses kicked, and good thing. Otherwise do you seriously think your silly cell phone technology would have ever taken off? The Bell system was rich, but that didn't make for a great economy and fabulous options in personal communications. Did it.
You like M$, you can have them. You want to Be Like Bill, have at it. It's just money, it's not progress. Some of us still know the difference.
Actually you wi/ould havn/willn-dropped ASP already/soonest, and in fact I right now am holding a copy of your rather excellent review on PHP5-RC3 dated last summer and titled "What you could/id expect from the past/soon PHP5 final release, which will/wasn released yestermorrow."
That minor eccentric wobble you all just felt in the Earth's axis of rotation is Douglas Adams spinning in his grave.:-)
We all know about "Google Bombing". This is the same thing, "Amazon Bombing", and involving public perceptions and trust being leveraged over the Internet. Amazon is a huge retail presence, and on top of that they have a public interface to their product review/promotion API! Cha-ching...the sound of money.
But the same thing happened when the snake oil salesman rode his wagon into town in the 1800's. There would be a plant, a shill, in the crowd who on cue would get all hysterical about the presentation and appear buy 6 bottles. Cha-ching...the oil flowed.
But then again, some celebrity going on about how great some gadget or pill is isn't so different; just playing on your goofy, unquestioning trust.
Trust is the ultimate sales API, and goes straight to the brain stem. Your instincts are used against you and...cha-ching...everywhere the sound of money.
Recall, AMD just said they are done trying to up clock speeds all the time. Now Intel is outting themselves, too. The fact that these companies are not saying things like "we need to go to other materials to get higher clock speeds" is because 1) it costs huge $$$ to research and develop new materials, 2) it costs serious $$$ to change fabs to use new materials, 3) NOBODY (no, not even you) wants to continue to pay for increased clocks when there is almost zero benefit in real applications.
Moore's Law is not dead. What is dead is the need for Moore's Law. I am not alone in noticing that, after 20 years of regular performance increases, things are now pretty good on the desktop, and excellent in the server room. Real changes now need to be in software and services. Further, high-performance computing is going the route of multiple cores per CPU, multiple CPUs per box, and clusters of boxes. The latter is probably the biggest innovation since Ethernet. So, who needs Moore's Law?
Intel and AMD know *all* this. They want out of the clock race, and yesterday. They want to get into the next level of things, which is defining services and uses for their existing products. They are seeing the end of the glamour years of the CPU and the rise of the era of information applicances, which *must* be portable. Users *will* be far more sensitive to battery life and perceptions of performance (latency and ease of use) and far less sensitive to theoretical performance measures.
Flame me if you like, but the geek appeal of personal computers is disappearing. Sure there will be people who fiddle with CPUs as a hobby, just as they did 30 years ago when the Apple computer was born to serve a small group of hobbyists. But is that the mainstream? Is that going to support Intel and AMD in their race? Are those companies going to promote a revolution in fab technology, to the tune of half a trillion dollars in investment and technology between them, just to support geeky hobbyists? They could, but they won't, because that is not the future. It is the past.
The future will still be interesting, mind you, but the challenge has changed. A phone that fits in your rear molar and runs off chemical reactions with your own saliva looks far more lucrative to these companies than a CPU that runs at 100Ghz and consumes as much power as an appartment complex.
It does not require collapse, though yes that would make things more desperate. Just long-term shifts in values and modes of travel/commerce/communications/etc would be enough to do the job. You cannot make people care about these things if they think that, in their own time, it does not matter. The same way that the railroads replacing the stagecoach led to ghost towns in the US West, with much loss of local custom and understanding, so too would inevitable shifts of dialect, technical focus, locations of major cities, changes in life style, etc. lead to less interest or familiarity with events in the dim past, or areas of geological interest. People embrace change and then they just don't care about what came before.
Just look at our own history. Even granting that paper and movable type are recent inventions, history is shallow. Not to point figures, but the Egyptians themselves eventually had no idea what was written on the walls of the tombs of their own kings. Their civilization had slowly blown away on the dust and nobody missed it. The British came along and resurrected Egyption history because the British had a colonialist mindset and were curious about the Egyptian realm. The Egyptians themselves did not preserve much until the issue was made clear, and they have done an admirable job since. What the future holds in these regards cannot easily be extrapolated from the past, but if the past is any indication we will forget a great deal before we take any interest in recalling it, and then we will recall but imperfectly.
The original Domesday Book was an inventory that became a history. It was more about taxation than anything else, was written to serve its authors and none other, and it's survival was an accident. More often what happens is things are just lost and then the knowledge of their original existence is lost as well. Laserdisks are less viable over the ages than even the hieroglyphs of great tombs. Thus I am not optimistic.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know how Apple does it, but the Mail client that came with OS X has some amazing anti-spam widget running. With essentially no training it misidentifies maybe 1 spam in a hundred, or two hundred (I get about 50 spam a day). I keep looking for good email in the spamcan and almost never see anything there except announcements from companies I've done business with in the past (pseudospam). I haven't had to deal with any really nasty spam in my inbox for months, no joke.
Does anyone know how Apple has pulled this one off?
...my first thought was that CM was a woman. Ada Lovelace not withstanding, female intellectuals had a hard time being taken seriously until just recently (perhaps up to the 1940s.) I don't know if that was more or less the case in ascestral Scotland, but it was not uncommon for women and girls to publish their writings anonymously or pseudonymously, thus to remain utterly unknown even if their ideas did go on to have lives of their own.
Of course, nobody knows either way regarding CM and likely never will know. But it is worth pausing for a moment and reflecting on not only the random nature of fame and recognition, but also how many great discoveries we certainly have lost over the centuries because someone was not allowed to write, or speak or even to dream.
I don't know if things have changed much even now, but it has always been my greatest hope that the ubiquitous Internet would serve to unlock some of that untapped and otherwise lost human potential. IP laws, software patents, and the thugs seeking to control the flow of information aside, there are surely a lot of new voices out there to be heard, and new ideas they can share with us to help take us to the next great era of discovery and global progress. In the shadow of looming wars and unrest, AIDS and WMDs, and all the other noise of our discontent it is comforting to think that this might indeed be so.
I don't see this issue being a big deal. The idea of giving objective grades (as opposed to subjective evaluations) for higher education is a new idea in the big scheme of things, borrowed perhaps from primary education. It used to be (200 years ago and longer) that you debated your peers to show ability, disputed your professors instead of taking an exam, and then had to convince a review board that you knew your stuff to graduate, and after that you had to use your knowledge effectively and not just cite it on your resume on your way to the corner office. None of that was graded other than "well argued". I imagine there is nothing more terrifying than a half dozen old people glaring at you over their bifocals and asking you tough questions and barking at you when you faulter.
So is life after the fall of objective grades a horror? The writer of this op-ed bit says that he is not sure he or his peers are up to the task of educating without tests and grades. I wonder what that really means? Does it mean that he is not ready to talk to students in small groups and engage them intellectually? That he is not ready to challenge each mind individually in a setting of peers? That he is not able to evaluate a student's progress just by knowing them as a person and their work as a whole?
The factory method of teaching (which is what he is lamenting as it passes) had serious flaws. Students never really did buy the notion that periodic test scores and grades meant squat (and rampant cheating didn't help.) The factory method might have had its place in recent centuries when we needed so very many "learned" workers to support our exploding industrial revolution. But does that still hold? Does any of this matter now?
If grades are dead then let them be buried. If students need a motivation to achieve, let the marketplace provide it as once it did, when a person of letters stood out on their talents and not their papers. The future belongs to the smart ones, and we can all tell who they are just by talking to them. And the rest? Back to the fields.
a) "Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang"
or
b) "Christine"
It's more than a little cool. Just 20 years ago something this technically sophisticated would have sounded impossible. Heck 20 years ago it might have cost NASA $500K, taken 2 years to develop, had half the features, and suffered a systems failure 17 seconds after launch.
/.ed, and say "it's been done before."
We're jaded. We have no real sense of the size of things anymore. Rocket Guy is still talking about launching himself 30 miles straight up in a home-made rocket. Let's hope he does and he survives. But I'll predict now that the day after the event everyone here will shrug, bitch about his web server being
Don't hear too much about anyone using these 'sploits, and they've been around forever. Anyone out there running a PHP site been whacked around this way?
But I'll admit I do have register_globals turned off. Some doors you just can't imagine leaving wide open.
"Bullshit" was the first thing that crossed my mind, actually. I've been scanning this discussion looking for anyone else of a like mind.
The bug in question was first reported in a public forum. Anyone who wanted to could go in there and say anything they liked. There are people out there who like to spread M$ FUD, as a religious duty. The only way I'm going to buy these reports is when Apple is able to replicate them. It should not be too hard to do so once they know what to look for.
The browser wars are on again, people. The M$ FUD machine is going to start churning out poop. Get your shovel and start digging.
It wasn't always like this. About 200 years ago there was this enormous burst of engineering activity associated with the Industrial Revolution. Engineers in metalurgy, chemisty, power systems, control systems, manufacturing and all the heavy industries were the darlings of the era. They were supermen (and they were men by and large) who were lifting the world into a brighter tomorrow.
Does anyone today beleive that engineers will improve the world from here on? OK, which ones? Chemists making new pesticides? Petroleum engineers drilling new wells in wildlife refuges? How about molecular biologists? That is the 3 of them who aren't already working on WMD and cloning humans.
Yes, I'm being mean. And I'm actually a scientist (if you count an MS degree from a small State college.) I'm making the point that this is how the engineering field is being portrayed, and even where they are headed.
Who really wants to be part of a machine like that?
I'm for blaming the the Dilbert comix.
Mod it funny, but I'm only half joking.
Regedit is justifiably obscure. ReaderRabbit isn't. Who do you think is buying the computer systems and software that are driving the tech economy? Unix admins? Heck no, it's my wife grabbing cheap edutainment software for our kids at the discount warehouse.
When that stuff has "Runs on Linux" added to the system requirements just under "Runs on MacOS" which is just under "Runs on Windows" THEN Linux will have arrived. Doesn't matter a fetid dingo kidney if you think ReaderRabbit is big time or not. It's just the tip of the lovely iceberg.
Actually I hadn't given any thought to it, but you are probably right regarding email spam that is just a link delivery mechanism, which these days is the majority. They can forge the email address of origin and not loose anything because they are directing traffic to a web site.
Spammers may be only part of the reason why these companies are going to some serious effort to reduce bot activity. There might be some other threats, either to their technology or their reputations, that they have recognized and are trying to counter but haven't yet told us about. The truth of why Turing tests are being put up as barriers might be more "interesting" than we're imagining at present. I can think of a few interesting legal issues if an actual person has to open an account, or if the companies can make a credible case that this is what is happening. Deflects some awkward embarrassment should their service be fingered for aiding certain kinds of criminal activity.
Yeah I know; how can you sleep at night being so fscking paranoid.
These Turing tests do not stop spam. They discourage spammers from using bogus Hotmail etc accounts to originate spam from. They do this by making it incrementally more expensive to create the accounts; rather than using a bot to create an account a second you have to use a human to create accounts by the minute. So 60 times the effort.
But I don't think that translates into 60 times the cost. The Turing tests are interesting but I don't think that the creation of the accounts ever was a bottleneck in the process in sending spam. You could get a high school kid to create all the accounts you would need for a month in about an hour, and pay him in pr0n.
If the truth were known, Hotmail and Yahoo are just trying to decrease server loads. I bet that when bots create accounts they create hundreds or thousands more than are used, which take up server resources during creation and later as the accounts eat up storage. With Turing tests it is more likely that not too many will be laying around waiting to be used.
If there is a legal ramification to transfering the email account then it is just one more in a long line of ethical and possibly legal lapses spammers engage in. For example, though IANAL it seems to me that sending explicit pornographic images to an email account belonging to a minor should land you in jail about as quickly as would handing the stuff out in "dead tree" form outside the school the kid goes to. Sure nobody is prosecuting that, but it's probably illegal and is certainly immoral. Thus I don't think they care much about the email account transfer question.
social engineering is stupid:
Years ago they started taking pay phones out of poor neighborhoods. Why? Because drug dealers were using them to take orders and sell drugs. Advocates for the poor said removing pay phones would not stop drug dealing and would only hurt poor folk who could not afford phones in their homes and used pay phones instead.
Now everyone uses cell phones to buy and sell drugs. And the poor folk STILL don't have pay phones because now there is not money in maintaining them.
Oh wait...this just in...local governments are now taking down cell towers in and around poor neighborhoods so drug dealers cannot use cell phones to take orders and sell drugs. Advocates for the poor are claiming this will only hurt poor people, who cannot afford phones in their home and instead buy prepaid throw away cell phones.
I had a doubt too. I searched on the name of the professor, Kejie Li, and not only is that a real professor in China (at one time Professor at Beijing Institute of Technology, China) Kejie Li even gave a talk to the 2001 IEEE International Symposium on Computational Intelligent for Robotics and Automation, in Banff National Park, Canada, titled "Humanoid Walk Control with Feedforward Dynamic". OK, so they didn't advertise a robot doing Tai Chi at the symposium but they've clearly been up to something. Pretty cool if you ask me.
Yes, I've wondered the same thing. If the US could, with little more than sliderules and some brainy scientists, essentially invent nuclear weapons from whole cloth then why can't every other single nation on earth?
To answer my own question, the stakes are much higher now and everyone is watching. Fifty years ago the US was in a conventional war against several enemies and by no means was the outcome certain at first. The atomic weapon was proposed on entirely theoretical grounds as a possible means to manage the war, if not end it. If it worked that is, which Einstein and his fellows suggested to Roosevelt that it might. The President bought it, gave them anything they needed include utter secrecy during wartime, and they played around with it. Nobody was watching them, nobody knew what the hell they were up to, and nobody cared. They did not know it would even work, failure would not have been the worst thing imaginable, and success might not make a lot of difference if the war went badly in other ways.
In the end, the thing literally and figuratively blew them all away. The rest is history.
Fast forward. Having an unsanctioned nuclear weapons program today can bring the superpowers down on you like a plague, and even start a lethal if conventional war that will destroy your way of life for a century. Atomic weapons themselves are bottled up, and the blueprints as well as the materials and technology. Any individual employed on an atomic weapons program in a superpower nation is a valued State slave, and they know it. Spies are everywhere looking mostly for evidence of nuclear proliferation. Realistically only the most oppressive, isolated nations on earth can hope to maintain the military-style secrecy and paranoia that the Manhattan Project enjoyed in its day, but they are all under surveillance and embargoes of several kinds and brainy people flee from those places at the first chance. Only staunch allies of superpowers can get, via simple diplomacy and with diplomatic secrecy, access to ready-made technology and materials (like oh for example, India and Israel as strategic allies of the US, Korean of Russia, and Iraq of...well someone...France? Russia?) and then borrow the know-how in the form of visiting scientists.
The world is not as it was. Ideas do not flow as freely as once they did, in part because some of those ideas can kill hundreds of millions of people in a few hours. We did not know that 60 years ago on the even of global war, but we know it now and we are afraid. Some toys simply are not to be played with, though I wonder how we will ever get this particularly nasty toy back into the toybox.
Well OK, it has happened before. Britian, France and Germany, though powerful and strategic, are not world powers anymore. Sure that has a little to do with centuries of mind-numbing warfare, internal decay and global exhaustion. But it also has something to do with the rise of the US economy and military might as brainy peolple from those same countries fled to a free-er country.
But will India be able to trump the US? US interests are looking to India to make money. They are keeping a good deal of control, taking all the profits, and exporting few tangible assets. India is being used, it is not being built up, by these efforts. They can build themselves up in the process...but toward what? Individual wealth and the growth of the middle class is my first guess. A south asia Switzerland. That is hard to export, hard to parlay into a global position. Like the Swiss, they will earn a reputation but they will not overtake anyone.
Of course, the Swiss don't have 1 billion people and nuclear weapons...but those are not global assets they are national liabilities either of which could drive the nation into ruin.
So a mixed bag overall. But of course I wish them the best.
Someone could mod that funny. But what makes it really funny is that it strikes so close to the truth. Too bad we don't have a "Frighteningly Funny" category. Or a "Funny But True" category.
Oh well...it was just funny then.
Probably the PARAM technology is a civilian offshoot of the original military/defence effort, which itself gave them atomic weapons. So in that regard the civilian technology is not only harmless wrt WMDs, it is actually a sensible and peaceful application of technology they have had all along. Something similar happened in the US, including regarding the DarpaNet.
As for exporting PARAM to Canada...well...I think that calls for open war on both countries.
That's a joke, people. India is a vital US ally. And the US is practically a southern province of Canada (heh...me funny.)
hmmmm...maybe. We still don't know what the raw performance of these dia-chips will be. No doubt you are thinking "oh, 1000 degC, that is great for overclocking." But do you really want the equivalent of a blast furnace on your desktop? And, what kind of logic board and surface traces will be able to manage that kind of heat? The answer is, none at all.
These are very special duty devices. They will end up in the exhaust manifold of your car, not the logic board of your PC. They will be built and deployed to resist failure under heat, and might not run even as fast as what you can buy today; clock speed will probably not even make it into the requirements document.
So this is no answer to Moore's Law, more like Murphy's Law; trying to get something that is far less likely to go wrong in places where traditional chips go wrong all the time. Thus we can extend the technology we know well (digital computing) into new places (harsh environments.) It will be interesting to see what they do with that...launch a compact space probe into the corona of the sun? Drop one into an erupting volcano to float around and send data? Lots of stuff comes to mind.
But not overclocking.
Since you bring it up, nobody knows what would happen if M$ folded up. But I can tell you this much, before M$ came along companies were churning out revolutionary software and services, and M$ still haven't added much to the mix. On the way to buying everything in sight and vaporwareing their way to infamy they have certainly killed off some interesting products that came too close to their core interests. If you don't think that's true then you don't understand fully why they are being called on the carpet as a monopoly.
People think that rich companies are good for the economy. If Big Blue had killed the PC somehow would our economy be better now? IBM was rich, still is, so why not kill the PC? Or how about the Bell system. Got their asses kicked, and good thing. Otherwise do you seriously think your silly cell phone technology would have ever taken off? The Bell system was rich, but that didn't make for a great economy and fabulous options in personal communications. Did it.
You like M$, you can have them. You want to Be Like Bill, have at it. It's just money, it's not progress. Some of us still know the difference.
Actually you wi/ould havn/willn-dropped ASP already/soonest, and in fact I right now am holding a copy of your rather excellent review on PHP5-RC3 dated last summer and titled "What you could/id expect from the past/soon PHP5 final release, which will/wasn released yestermorrow."
:-)
That minor eccentric wobble you all just felt in the Earth's axis of rotation is Douglas Adams spinning in his grave.
We all know about "Google Bombing". This is the same thing, "Amazon Bombing", and involving public perceptions and trust being leveraged over the Internet. Amazon is a huge retail presence, and on top of that they have a public interface to their product review/promotion API! Cha-ching...the sound of money.
But the same thing happened when the snake oil salesman rode his wagon into town in the 1800's. There would be a plant, a shill, in the crowd who on cue would get all hysterical about the presentation and appear buy 6 bottles. Cha-ching...the oil flowed.
But then again, some celebrity going on about how great some gadget or pill is isn't so different; just playing on your goofy, unquestioning trust.
Trust is the ultimate sales API, and goes straight to the brain stem. Your instincts are used against you and...cha-ching...everywhere the sound of money.
Recall, AMD just said they are done trying to up clock speeds all the time. Now Intel is outting themselves, too. The fact that these companies are not saying things like "we need to go to other materials to get higher clock speeds" is because 1) it costs huge $$$ to research and develop new materials, 2) it costs serious $$$ to change fabs to use new materials, 3) NOBODY (no, not even you) wants to continue to pay for increased clocks when there is almost zero benefit in real applications.
Moore's Law is not dead. What is dead is the need for Moore's Law. I am not alone in noticing that, after 20 years of regular performance increases, things are now pretty good on the desktop, and excellent in the server room. Real changes now need to be in software and services. Further, high-performance computing is going the route of multiple cores per CPU, multiple CPUs per box, and clusters of boxes. The latter is probably the biggest innovation since Ethernet. So, who needs Moore's Law?
Intel and AMD know *all* this. They want out of the clock race, and yesterday. They want to get into the next level of things, which is defining services and uses for their existing products. They are seeing the end of the glamour years of the CPU and the rise of the era of information applicances, which *must* be portable. Users *will* be far more sensitive to battery life and perceptions of performance (latency and ease of use) and far less sensitive to theoretical performance measures.
Flame me if you like, but the geek appeal of personal computers is disappearing. Sure there will be people who fiddle with CPUs as a hobby, just as they did 30 years ago when the Apple computer was born to serve a small group of hobbyists. But is that the mainstream? Is that going to support Intel and AMD in their race? Are those companies going to promote a revolution in fab technology, to the tune of half a trillion dollars in investment and technology between them, just to support geeky hobbyists? They could, but they won't, because that is not the future. It is the past.
The future will still be interesting, mind you, but the challenge has changed. A phone that fits in your rear molar and runs off chemical reactions with your own saliva looks far more lucrative to these companies than a CPU that runs at 100Ghz and consumes as much power as an appartment complex.
It does not require collapse, though yes that would make things more desperate. Just long-term shifts in values and modes of travel/commerce/communications/etc would be enough to do the job. You cannot make people care about these things if they think that, in their own time, it does not matter. The same way that the railroads replacing the stagecoach led to ghost towns in the US West, with much loss of local custom and understanding, so too would inevitable shifts of dialect, technical focus, locations of major cities, changes in life style, etc. lead to less interest or familiarity with events in the dim past, or areas of geological interest. People embrace change and then they just don't care about what came before.
Just look at our own history. Even granting that paper and movable type are recent inventions, history is shallow. Not to point figures, but the Egyptians themselves eventually had no idea what was written on the walls of the tombs of their own kings. Their civilization had slowly blown away on the dust and nobody missed it. The British came along and resurrected Egyption history because the British had a colonialist mindset and were curious about the Egyptian realm. The Egyptians themselves did not preserve much until the issue was made clear, and they have done an admirable job since. What the future holds in these regards cannot easily be extrapolated from the past, but if the past is any indication we will forget a great deal before we take any interest in recalling it, and then we will recall but imperfectly.
The original Domesday Book was an inventory that became a history. It was more about taxation than anything else, was written to serve its authors and none other, and it's survival was an accident. More often what happens is things are just lost and then the knowledge of their original existence is lost as well. Laserdisks are less viable over the ages than even the hieroglyphs of great tombs. Thus I am not optimistic.