That doesn't make any sense. What do you mean by "most significant bits"? And why would they be 0?
Breaking it down into itty bitty words because you're stupid:
Things are digital because they're made of 1's and 0's (digits a.k.a. bits). Digital music works by measuring how loud the music is, thousands of times per second, and writing that down as a number (called a "sample"). The number represents a fraction (how loud the sample really was versus the loudest possible sample) and is usually written down using 16 bits. One bit (the least significant bit) represents the the smallest possible change in loudness that we can measure. The next bit represents twice that loudness, and so on. The 16th and final bit is the most significant bit (MSB). If the MSB is a 1, that means the sound is at 50% volume or higher (again, versus the loudest possible sample). If the MSB is a 0, that means the sound is at less than 50% volume.
Now, connecting the dots because we've already established that you're very, very stupid (even for an Anonymous Coward):
Today's music is very loud. Grown-ups with fancy jobs called "sound engineers" are paid very well to do something called "dynamic range compression" to the music. "Dynamic range" is the difference between the quietest parts of the song versus the loudest parts of the song; compressing it means that even the quiet parts of the song are loud. Since the sound engineers made sure that the entire song is very loud, all or nearly all of the samples will be at 50% or greater volume. Therefore, all or nearly all of the samples will have a "1" for the MSB. Since we already know that the MSB is a 1, we don't need to write it down anymore, and we can save on space.
Ba dum bum. Now go play in traffic, or visit Digg, or something else more appropriate for your level of intellect.
WTF is the legal difference between "Americans" and "Americans talking to the enemy"? They're still Americans, and the Constitution still applies. You can't just say "ooh, So-and-so hangs out with naughty people!" and expect that to fly in the face of the First Amendment right to Freedom of Association (nevermind the other 9).
All that goes doubly so when the Executive Branch claims the power to unilaterally declare which people are "enemies" this month — a category that's gotten progressively broader and broader since 9/11. In a matter of days, it expanded from al-Qaeda to the Taliban — no tears wept there — and then onward to Saddam Hussein, and then to every Iraqi who didn't view foreign soldiers in their homeland as liberators. If those same Iraqis had been Americans repelling a Soviet invasion 30 years ago, using the same guerrilla tactics and IEDs against Soviet troops, those same Republicans would be calling them heroes and patriots, and the Soviets would be scratching their heads wondering why we didn't appreciate their wonderful gifts of communism and more efficient government. (That's not to say that democracy isn't the better system in both cases — it is — but there's no sense in trying to craft a democratic country out of a culture that's hostile to the very idea, especially by invading them first.)
It's hard to say "woman" (or "man" for that matter) in Greek without some serious cultural overtones. This word [parthenos] basically means a girl who's of age, but is not yet married (and, implied, virginal). This is the best choice, as there is no generic word for "girl/woman," and the others either imply she's married or a child.
(The link is to my HTML-tidied version of someone else's translation of "Baby Got Back" to Ancient Greek.)
Irony (situational irony, at least) is when you take an action to avoid a fate and thereby cause the very fate you intended to avoid. If the 1967 bridge collapse caused them to re-evaluate the Minneapolis bridge, tear it down, and rebuild it with a different design that was supposed to be safer but was actually more dangerous, thus causing the recent collapse — that'd be irony.
Because those on hormone [therapy] either already have a reversed sexual preference, are taking more of their gender's [predominant] hormone, or have the levels of hormone carefully regulated.
That's fucking bullshit. Read about Alan Turing sometime. One of the most brilliant computer scientists who ever lived, saved countless lives in World War II by helping to crack the German Enigma cipher, and unabashedly gay in a time when that wasn't permitted.
A few years down the road, when he was arrested and convicted in 1952 for the crime of being gay, he was forced to choose between prison time or hormone "treatments". Fearing prison, he chose the hormones. The injections used estrogen to counteract his natural testosterone levels. The lower testosterone levels reduced his libido, making him less interested in sex with men.
In effect, the injections chemically castrated him. They also had the side effect of making him grow breasts. He committed suicide two years into this inhumane treatment.
Testosterone increases libido in straight men, gay men, straight women, and lesbian women alike. Gay men do not have any identifiable differences in hormone levels. There is no blood test to identify gay men from straight men. The "unbalanced hormone" ideas about sexual orientation were disproved long ago, in the psychiatric dark ages of the 1950s and 60s. It's complete bullshit.
The Wikipedia article on semiconductors talks about the valence and conduction bands in the very first section after the Overview. Band structure exists only in quantum physics, when electrons are forbidden from having any arbitrary energy level. Classical physics is completely incapable of explaining a simple diode, because band structure doesn't exist in classical physics.
Actually, the current hypothesis is that the apoptosis in hypoxia (drowning, heart attack, stroke) is triggered because the rush of fresh oxygen overwhelms what the cell is capable of dealing with, poisoning the cell and irreparably damaging the DNA.
Oxygen is a poison, as you may or may not know. Our cells can only use it because they create various enzymes, such as superoxide dismutase, that clean up the mess made by stray oxygen before it can do too much damage. Take away those enzymes, and oxygen radicals damage proteins, lipids, DNA, RNA... anything they can get their greedy hands on. Oxygen radicals are such effective poisons that white blood cells (neutrophils especially) use superoxide and peroxide to annihilate invading bacteria, shredding them apart and destroying their cell membranes.
When a cell becomes quiescent because of a lack of oxygen, it no longer has the resources to produce those protective enzymes. This guarantees that the cell will be overwhelmed if normal oxygen levels are restored abruptly. Apoptosis is the only logical thing for the cell to do in that scenario, and blocking apoptosis will only cause those irreparably damaged cells to linger on and do damage to the survivors.
It's the same 2 or 3 people because those are the bank characters for the guilds running whichever dungeon the epics came from. Those aren't professional gold farmers. Running a dungeon takes some skill and a lot of coordination, which makes dungeon runs a gamble — and thanks to quotas, that means the gold farmers are gambling with their own wages.
People in guilds who run dungeons might sell their gold on the side, but they're not the ones working in a Chinese sweatshop where all the WoW accounts are online 24 hours a day.
Gold farmers don't auction thier boe drops either, because thier character shift partner will steal thier AH items and just vendor them to meet thier own sweatshop quota.
If that's the case, then it damages the game economy even worse than if they auctioned their green BoEs. In that case, greens would also be subject to the same inflation that blues and purples are.
Either way, there's no flood of "uber rare items" washing through the game economy thanks to gold farming — in direct contradiction of the OP's bogus claim.
But in a world where content is ultimately digital, even the "analog hole" can be acceptable, with good equipment.
For instance, any audio that comes off a CD ultimately derives from 16-bit linear samples recorded at 44.1 kHz. A high-quality analog-to-digital converter can easily record the analog signal coming out of the speaker/headphone wires and convert that back to equivalent bits. (The bits probably won't be identical, because the input sampling is probably not in phase with the digital-to-analog converter in the CD player. But human ears don't hear phase, so it's really the same sound.)
Because you can perfectly recover a digital signal by sampling its analog equivalent using the same sampling parameters, infinite analog-analog copies are possible without further degradation if you resample between each pair of analog copies. (It's the same principle by which all digital circuits are built using only analog components, like transistors.)
What's more, since the second digital copy has no DRM silliness, you can just copy that directly. Only the first person in the chain has to own a high-quality analog-digital converter. Even unbreakable DRM, if it were possible to exist, would ultimately fail.
Which puts us exactly where the piracy scene is today. (Do you honestly think the pirate scene would actually say, "Harry Potter 7 is only available on HD-Ray? Gosh darn it, that DRM system isn't broken yet, so we'll just have to skip that one"?)
Gold farmers don't simply farm gold. While they are killing mobs they are also accumulating drops. So while they are increasing the supply of the gold they are at the exact same time increasing the supply of uber rare items. [...]
I call bullshit. Gold farmers don't farm Molten Core every night; they farm areas with lots of weak mobs that they can AoE to death. Blue drops from garden-variety mobs are almost unheard of, so the result is that the green "Bastard Foo of the Whale" drops are overrepresented (and thus cheaper than they otherwise would be) while the blue and rarer drops are underrepresented (and thus more expensive).
While, yes, farmers do occasionally participate in the market economy in a beneficial way, the vast majority of gold farmer activity is a nuisance at best. (Thank Blizzard for using instanced dungeons, or it'd be far worse.)
Oh, and I should add that the new article rather misrepresents what Bruce Schneier said about the system when it last made the rounds. Bruce's point was that, although it's a clunky and horrible system, quantum crypto is slightly more clunky and horrible. Therefore, on the off chance that it happens to be secure — Bruce didn't say one way or another, since he doesn't know enough physics to analyze it — it might make a good substitute.
Not only does this not add any new information to the 2005/. article, it also leaves out all the discussion that happened last time.
Specifically, some Slashdotters pointed out that, due to the speed of light, Eve can tap the line in two places at once and watch the "instant" change in the circuit propagate from sender to receiver. You don't even need a full man-in-the-middle to crack this.
I haven't yet read the Illuminatus books myself, but the Principia Discordia does a good job of explaining this by example.
The whole point of the Law of Fives is that the Law of Fives is never wrong. No matter how completely unrelated some numbers are, you can always jumble the numbers around until they look orderly.
The point made by Discordianism is that the human brain operates on principles just as silly as the Law of Fives and, as such, everything that looks "orderly" to a human being is really just chaos sifted through the filter of perception.
(This is, of course, the opposite extreme of the Intelligent Design types who believe everything in the universe was placed there with a purpose, and thus has an underlying order. The capital-T Truth is somewhere in the middle, having brunch with Ludwig Boltzmann and Claude Shannon.)
A mutation-resistant virus is easy enough. dsDNA viruses are quite stable, and most of them function by adding their own chromosomes to the nucleus, without altering the host DNA. The result is that they rely on the same DNA polymerase and proofreading enzymes that the cell uses for its own replication. The poxviruses, for instance, are a reasonable template for fashioning an HIV counter-virus, as they generally replicate in this manner.
One major challenge would be figuring out how to reliably recognize an HIV infection-in-progress: since HIV is a ssRNA retrovirus, it mutates quite rapidly. There are very few genes or proteins that can be reliably targeted, but portions of the HIV genome are conserved, so it's not hopeless. (HIV mutates so rapidly that the grandparent poster's suggestion of adapting to new mutations using computer simulations is unrealistic. In a single HIV-infected patient, new minor strains emerge on a daily basis.)
That raises the question of what to do once an HIV infection is encountered. Since HIV (as a retrovirus) operates by irreversibly incorporating its genome into the host DNA, any counter-virus would presumably operate by triggering apoptosis when it co-infected a cell with HIV. An alternative would be to silence HIV gene expression, rendering the cell infected but dormant and non-infectious.
Another major challenge would be replication. Most viruses destroy the host cell when they replicate. Even the ones that don't rip the cell membrane open will generally deplete the cell's energy reserves and kill it indirectly. The counter-virus replication rate would be a careful balance between ensuring that there are enough viral particles to infect all HIV-infected cells, versus taxing the HIV-free host cells to the point of causing disease.
Another challenge would be immune system evasion. Since one goal is for the counter-virus to have a low mutation rate (to prevent it from becoming a disease in its own right) the counter-virus would be ill-equipped to evade the adaptive immune system. One option would be to code for the viral coat on a highly variable ssRNA strand, while the replication and counter-viral genes remain on more stable dsDNA; such mixed-genome viruses, although rare, do exist in nature. Another option would be to investigate Adeno-Associated Virus, which the immune system essentially gives a free pass to since it is so "well-behaved"; the counter-virus could mimic AAV's viral coat and recognition signals. The adaptive immune system eventually targets even AAV, but since HIV attacks the adaptive immune system, the mimicry might be enough to buy time for the counter-virus to put a serious dent in the HIV count.
It'd be difficult in the extreme, and it would require years of computer time to figure out how everything fits together, but it's at least conceivable with current technology to modify an existing virus for the purpose.
Have y'all ever used GNU/Linux on the desktop? I think Linux makes for an amazing server OS but makes me vomit on the desktop.
I do. I have for 7 years, in fact. I remember the excitement (in the positive sense) of downloading new point releases of KDE 2.x and looking for the new features. I remember every release being an improvement, often a huge one, over the previous one.
And I also remember first installing Debian and being awed by apt-get. I remember finding out GNOME was the default on Debian, then finding out that GNOME was actually pretty damn good itself and there wasn't really any need to apt-get install kde. Since then, GNOME itself has gotten even better.
As you can probably guess, I have no idea what you're talking about.
Unless you're uploading more than 100MB of photos a month, there's no need to pay for a Pro account on Flickr. Storage space is unlimited, there's no bandwidth charges, and they allow <img> tag embedding so long as the photo links back to the photo's Flickr page.
That's not to discount the do-it-yourself option, but if Flickr happens to provide everything you need, why bother installing software on your webserver? (Especially considering you'll need to keep an ear out for security updates, probably by subscribing to a mailing list. PHP-written programs have earned a reputation for insecurity for a reason, but security updates are a reality for web-facing programs in any language.)
Earth telescopes with optical resolving power comparable to Hubble have to use adaptive optics of some sort. Because adaptive optics requires a guide star of some sort — to measure the deformation caused by Earth's atmosphere and physically re-shape the mirror to cancel that deformation — you can't just point the telescope in any direction you choose. There has to be a bright star in the field of view for the adaptive optics to measure. Artificial guide stars, which use lasers that are reflected back to the ground by the atmosphere, help the problem somewhat but aren't as good as the real thing, since they don't penetrate the entire atmosphere.
The use of a guide star also means that the telescope is only useful for a very narrow field of view. The only deformation measured is what's between the guide star and the telescope, so the wider your angle is, the fuzzier the picture gets, and the longer your exposure time is, the worse the problem gets. It's simply impossible to take photos like the Hubble Ultra Deep Field with a ground-based telescope: even if we had lots of bright guide stars to measure the deformation over the entire field of view, there's no physical shape the mirror can be in that will cancel out deformation in multiple directions at the same time. It's just not possible.
The problems that the article describes — FTP, IM file transfers, etc. — have exactly the same problems under NATless IPv4 stateful firewalls. The Internet hasn't fallen over yet, therefore the problem is overblown.
The solution in Linux has generally been application-specific kernel modules (ip_conntrack_ftp,...) that tell the state engine (ip_conntrack) to expect related traffic. They might've finally added a user-mode interface since last time I looked, but that doesn't actually solve the problem since any user-mode program is still forced to sniff forwarded traffic for known applications.
The more elegant solution would be for each application to indicate a related connection in a way that all stateful firewalls along the route could understand. Sort of like UPnP, except UPnP only talks to a single local NAT, not every firewall along the route. However, this more elegant solution hasn't yet been invented, for IPv4 or IPv6.
As I understand it, the moral rights clauses are because some jurisdictions (Japan being prominent, IIRC) don't allow the author to waive moral rights: the right to go back on the license and say, "Hey, I don't like what you're doing with my work". In those jurisdictions, any copyright license that purported to waive them, or that even failed to mention them by name, would be laughed out of court and held unenforceable.
That was the biggest catalyst behind the creation of the newer, per-country CC licenses. That way, saner copyright jurisdictions like the United States — egad, I never thought I'd say that — can skip the weird verbiage about an author being forced to retain rights "for his own good".
The military, and a lot of male-dominated hierarchies with a military mindset (e.g. FBI, law enforcement), have had a scary habit of concocting some sort of gay drama about every perpetrator they investigate. This seemed to come into play on a noticeable level starting circa the mid-to-late 1980s.
Two quick examples: Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber? Gay lover of Terry Nichols, according to the FBI. The initial FBI profile of the Atlanta Olympic bomber? Gay, despite the fact that the actual bomber later targeted gay nightclubs and abortion clinics.
Never trust anything that law enforcement or the military says in their initial psychological profile. Those things are flaky enough as-is. However, that applies doubly if the profile tries to turn the whole crime into a gay lovers' quarrel, or a gay jilted lover, or whatever pet homophobic theory they've concocted this week.
And no, the jilted gay lover theory was later proven to be complete hokum. Hartwig's name was posthumously cleared of all criminal wrongdoing (including homosexuality). The final theory is that it was an accident caused by a static electricity buildup.
Back to the subject at hand, I don't think it's a bad idea. With gay men, jealousy tends to be tempered by potential. Since your ex's new boyfriend is also a potential sex partner down the road, things are often much more... interesting than simple "angry confrontation" jealousy.
Also, though I should note that this is more due to artifacts of Western culture than anything inherent in being a gay man, but gay men tend to be a lot more open to the idea of three-ways or even standing non-monogamous arrangements (e.g. polyamory) than the average straight male. While such situations are by no means more stable than monogamy, their modes of failure tend to be less explosive because they diffuse jealousy.
(Background: this outlook comes from the status of gay men as "cultural outsiders" — in particular, as outsiders excluded due to sexual politics. Because people naturally build communities, gay men are in direct cultural contact with fellow outsiders, such as the polyamory movement and the BDSM crowd. Even a gay man who isn't himself interested in the idea is still quite likely A. to be familiar with such concepts and B. to have a live-and-let-live attitude regarding them.)
IMO, IRV breaks down too often. It's not quite as bad as Two-Round Runoff (the system that led to the Chirac/LePen faceoff a few years back in France), and of course it's a hell of a lot better than Plurality. However, it does have problems with instability, especially if there aren't exactly two "top" parties. When the 3rd-place party gets popular enough to rival the 2nd-place, IRV painfully fails the Monotonicity criterion — meaning that voting for your favorite candidate can sometimes make him lose. While less stagnant than plurality, the resulting system still has a lot of inertia.
Condorcet, OTOH, is a bit more mathematically sensible — especially the Schulze "beatpath" version. It's guaranteed to select the candidate that the most people can live with, and like IRV it's 100% clone-proof (i.e. similar candidates don't hurt or help each other). The only downside is that understanding how Condorcet works requires an understanding of logic that is beyond a good proportion of the voting public — which means that the voting public won't be able to verify the counting process themselves, which undermines confidence in the results.
As far as simple voting methods go, Approval is a fairly nice substitute. Essentially, Approval is similar to Plurality, except "vote for one" becomes "vote for one or more": you check off every candidate you think would do an OK job, and the winner is counted the same as before. It has a fairly crappy worst-case scenario, but if the voters are using some fairly common-sense tactics, it's nearly as good as Condorcet. Even in the worst case, it also passes the Monotonicity criterion, and it's 100% clone-proof.
The gerrymandering problem... yeah. Gerrymandering needs to go. Sadly, I have fewer ideas on how to fix that.
Slashdot Mirror
Breaking it down into itty bitty words because you're stupid:
Things are digital because they're made of 1's and 0's (digits a.k.a. bits). Digital music works by measuring how loud the music is, thousands of times per second, and writing that down as a number (called a "sample"). The number represents a fraction (how loud the sample really was versus the loudest possible sample) and is usually written down using 16 bits. One bit (the least significant bit) represents the the smallest possible change in loudness that we can measure. The next bit represents twice that loudness, and so on. The 16th and final bit is the most significant bit (MSB). If the MSB is a 1, that means the sound is at 50% volume or higher (again, versus the loudest possible sample). If the MSB is a 0, that means the sound is at less than 50% volume.
Now, connecting the dots because we've already established that you're very, very stupid (even for an Anonymous Coward):
Today's music is very loud. Grown-ups with fancy jobs called "sound engineers" are paid very well to do something called "dynamic range compression" to the music. "Dynamic range" is the difference between the quietest parts of the song versus the loudest parts of the song; compressing it means that even the quiet parts of the song are loud. Since the sound engineers made sure that the entire song is very loud, all or nearly all of the samples will be at 50% or greater volume. Therefore, all or nearly all of the samples will have a "1" for the MSB. Since we already know that the MSB is a 1, we don't need to write it down anymore, and we can save on space.
Ba dum bum. Now go play in traffic, or visit Digg, or something else more appropriate for your level of intellect.
Stupid people. Ruining jokes since 500kYA.
WTF is the legal difference between "Americans" and "Americans talking to the enemy"? They're still Americans, and the Constitution still applies. You can't just say "ooh, So-and-so hangs out with naughty people!" and expect that to fly in the face of the First Amendment right to Freedom of Association (nevermind the other 9).
All that goes doubly so when the Executive Branch claims the power to unilaterally declare which people are "enemies" this month — a category that's gotten progressively broader and broader since 9/11. In a matter of days, it expanded from al-Qaeda to the Taliban — no tears wept there — and then onward to Saddam Hussein, and then to every Iraqi who didn't view foreign soldiers in their homeland as liberators. If those same Iraqis had been Americans repelling a Soviet invasion 30 years ago, using the same guerrilla tactics and IEDs against Soviet troops, those same Republicans would be calling them heroes and patriots, and the Soviets would be scratching their heads wondering why we didn't appreciate their wonderful gifts of communism and more efficient government. (That's not to say that democracy isn't the better system in both cases — it is — but there's no sense in trying to craft a democratic country out of a culture that's hostile to the very idea, especially by invading them first.)
Quoth the footnotes to The maiden has a well-formed butt, by the Much-Mixing One, the calvaryman:
It's hard to say "woman" (or "man" for that matter) in Greek without some serious cultural overtones. This word [parthenos] basically means a girl who's of age, but is not yet married (and, implied, virginal). This is the best choice, as there is no generic word for "girl/woman," and the others either imply she's married or a child.
(The link is to my HTML-tidied version of someone else's translation of "Baby Got Back" to Ancient Greek.)
Irony (situational irony, at least) is when you take an action to avoid a fate and thereby cause the very fate you intended to avoid. If the 1967 bridge collapse caused them to re-evaluate the Minneapolis bridge, tear it down, and rebuild it with a different design that was supposed to be safer but was actually more dangerous, thus causing the recent collapse — that'd be irony.
Because those on hormone [therapy] either already have a reversed sexual preference, are taking more of their gender's [predominant] hormone, or have the levels of hormone carefully regulated.
That's fucking bullshit. Read about Alan Turing sometime. One of the most brilliant computer scientists who ever lived, saved countless lives in World War II by helping to crack the German Enigma cipher, and unabashedly gay in a time when that wasn't permitted.
A few years down the road, when he was arrested and convicted in 1952 for the crime of being gay, he was forced to choose between prison time or hormone "treatments". Fearing prison, he chose the hormones. The injections used estrogen to counteract his natural testosterone levels. The lower testosterone levels reduced his libido, making him less interested in sex with men.
In effect, the injections chemically castrated him. They also had the side effect of making him grow breasts. He committed suicide two years into this inhumane treatment.
Testosterone increases libido in straight men, gay men, straight women, and lesbian women alike. Gay men do not have any identifiable differences in hormone levels. There is no blood test to identify gay men from straight men. The "unbalanced hormone" ideas about sexual orientation were disproved long ago, in the psychiatric dark ages of the 1950s and 60s. It's complete bullshit.
The Wikipedia article on semiconductors talks about the valence and conduction bands in the very first section after the Overview. Band structure exists only in quantum physics, when electrons are forbidden from having any arbitrary energy level. Classical physics is completely incapable of explaining a simple diode, because band structure doesn't exist in classical physics.
Actually, the current hypothesis is that the apoptosis in hypoxia (drowning, heart attack, stroke) is triggered because the rush of fresh oxygen overwhelms what the cell is capable of dealing with, poisoning the cell and irreparably damaging the DNA.
Oxygen is a poison, as you may or may not know. Our cells can only use it because they create various enzymes, such as superoxide dismutase, that clean up the mess made by stray oxygen before it can do too much damage. Take away those enzymes, and oxygen radicals damage proteins, lipids, DNA, RNA... anything they can get their greedy hands on. Oxygen radicals are such effective poisons that white blood cells (neutrophils especially) use superoxide and peroxide to annihilate invading bacteria, shredding them apart and destroying their cell membranes.
When a cell becomes quiescent because of a lack of oxygen, it no longer has the resources to produce those protective enzymes. This guarantees that the cell will be overwhelmed if normal oxygen levels are restored abruptly. Apoptosis is the only logical thing for the cell to do in that scenario, and blocking apoptosis will only cause those irreparably damaged cells to linger on and do damage to the survivors.
It's the same 2 or 3 people because those are the bank characters for the guilds running whichever dungeon the epics came from. Those aren't professional gold farmers. Running a dungeon takes some skill and a lot of coordination, which makes dungeon runs a gamble — and thanks to quotas, that means the gold farmers are gambling with their own wages.
People in guilds who run dungeons might sell their gold on the side, but they're not the ones working in a Chinese sweatshop where all the WoW accounts are online 24 hours a day.
If that's the case, then it damages the game economy even worse than if they auctioned their green BoEs. In that case, greens would also be subject to the same inflation that blues and purples are.
Either way, there's no flood of "uber rare items" washing through the game economy thanks to gold farming — in direct contradiction of the OP's bogus claim.
But in a world where content is ultimately digital, even the "analog hole" can be acceptable, with good equipment.
For instance, any audio that comes off a CD ultimately derives from 16-bit linear samples recorded at 44.1 kHz. A high-quality analog-to-digital converter can easily record the analog signal coming out of the speaker/headphone wires and convert that back to equivalent bits. (The bits probably won't be identical, because the input sampling is probably not in phase with the digital-to-analog converter in the CD player. But human ears don't hear phase, so it's really the same sound.)
Because you can perfectly recover a digital signal by sampling its analog equivalent using the same sampling parameters, infinite analog-analog copies are possible without further degradation if you resample between each pair of analog copies. (It's the same principle by which all digital circuits are built using only analog components, like transistors.)
What's more, since the second digital copy has no DRM silliness, you can just copy that directly. Only the first person in the chain has to own a high-quality analog-digital converter. Even unbreakable DRM, if it were possible to exist, would ultimately fail.
Which puts us exactly where the piracy scene is today. (Do you honestly think the pirate scene would actually say, "Harry Potter 7 is only available on HD-Ray? Gosh darn it, that DRM system isn't broken yet, so we'll just have to skip that one"?)
I call bullshit. Gold farmers don't farm Molten Core every night; they farm areas with lots of weak mobs that they can AoE to death. Blue drops from garden-variety mobs are almost unheard of, so the result is that the green "Bastard Foo of the Whale" drops are overrepresented (and thus cheaper than they otherwise would be) while the blue and rarer drops are underrepresented (and thus more expensive).
While, yes, farmers do occasionally participate in the market economy in a beneficial way, the vast majority of gold farmer activity is a nuisance at best. (Thank Blizzard for using instanced dungeons, or it'd be far worse.)
Oh, and I should add that the new article rather misrepresents what Bruce Schneier said about the system when it last made the rounds. Bruce's point was that, although it's a clunky and horrible system, quantum crypto is slightly more clunky and horrible. Therefore, on the off chance that it happens to be secure — Bruce didn't say one way or another, since he doesn't know enough physics to analyze it — it might make a good substitute.
Not only does this not add any new information to the 2005 /. article, it also leaves out all the discussion that happened last time.
Specifically, some Slashdotters pointed out that, due to the speed of light, Eve can tap the line in two places at once and watch the "instant" change in the circuit propagate from sender to receiver. You don't even need a full man-in-the-middle to crack this.
I haven't yet read the Illuminatus books myself, but the Principia Discordia does a good job of explaining this by example.
The whole point of the Law of Fives is that the Law of Fives is never wrong. No matter how completely unrelated some numbers are, you can always jumble the numbers around until they look orderly.
The point made by Discordianism is that the human brain operates on principles just as silly as the Law of Fives and, as such, everything that looks "orderly" to a human being is really just chaos sifted through the filter of perception.
(This is, of course, the opposite extreme of the Intelligent Design types who believe everything in the universe was placed there with a purpose, and thus has an underlying order. The capital-T Truth is somewhere in the middle, having brunch with Ludwig Boltzmann and Claude Shannon.)
A mutation-resistant virus is easy enough. dsDNA viruses are quite stable, and most of them function by adding their own chromosomes to the nucleus, without altering the host DNA. The result is that they rely on the same DNA polymerase and proofreading enzymes that the cell uses for its own replication. The poxviruses, for instance, are a reasonable template for fashioning an HIV counter-virus, as they generally replicate in this manner.
One major challenge would be figuring out how to reliably recognize an HIV infection-in-progress: since HIV is a ssRNA retrovirus, it mutates quite rapidly. There are very few genes or proteins that can be reliably targeted, but portions of the HIV genome are conserved, so it's not hopeless. (HIV mutates so rapidly that the grandparent poster's suggestion of adapting to new mutations using computer simulations is unrealistic. In a single HIV-infected patient, new minor strains emerge on a daily basis.)
That raises the question of what to do once an HIV infection is encountered. Since HIV (as a retrovirus) operates by irreversibly incorporating its genome into the host DNA, any counter-virus would presumably operate by triggering apoptosis when it co-infected a cell with HIV. An alternative would be to silence HIV gene expression, rendering the cell infected but dormant and non-infectious.
Another major challenge would be replication. Most viruses destroy the host cell when they replicate. Even the ones that don't rip the cell membrane open will generally deplete the cell's energy reserves and kill it indirectly. The counter-virus replication rate would be a careful balance between ensuring that there are enough viral particles to infect all HIV-infected cells, versus taxing the HIV-free host cells to the point of causing disease.
Another challenge would be immune system evasion. Since one goal is for the counter-virus to have a low mutation rate (to prevent it from becoming a disease in its own right) the counter-virus would be ill-equipped to evade the adaptive immune system. One option would be to code for the viral coat on a highly variable ssRNA strand, while the replication and counter-viral genes remain on more stable dsDNA; such mixed-genome viruses, although rare, do exist in nature. Another option would be to investigate Adeno-Associated Virus, which the immune system essentially gives a free pass to since it is so "well-behaved"; the counter-virus could mimic AAV's viral coat and recognition signals. The adaptive immune system eventually targets even AAV, but since HIV attacks the adaptive immune system, the mimicry might be enough to buy time for the counter-virus to put a serious dent in the HIV count.
It'd be difficult in the extreme, and it would require years of computer time to figure out how everything fits together, but it's at least conceivable with current technology to modify an existing virus for the purpose.
Have y'all ever used GNU/Linux on the desktop? I think Linux makes for an amazing server OS but makes me vomit on the desktop.
I do. I have for 7 years, in fact. I remember the excitement (in the positive sense) of downloading new point releases of KDE 2.x and looking for the new features. I remember every release being an improvement, often a huge one, over the previous one.
And I also remember first installing Debian and being awed by apt-get. I remember finding out GNOME was the default on Debian, then finding out that GNOME was actually pretty damn good itself and there wasn't really any need to apt-get install kde. Since then, GNOME itself has gotten even better.
As you can probably guess, I have no idea what you're talking about.
If that's the case, they're sure not up-front about that. Sneaky.
Unless you're uploading more than 100MB of photos a month, there's no need to pay for a Pro account on Flickr. Storage space is unlimited, there's no bandwidth charges, and they allow <img> tag embedding so long as the photo links back to the photo's Flickr page.
That's not to discount the do-it-yourself option, but if Flickr happens to provide everything you need, why bother installing software on your webserver? (Especially considering you'll need to keep an ear out for security updates, probably by subscribing to a mailing list. PHP-written programs have earned a reputation for insecurity for a reason, but security updates are a reality for web-facing programs in any language.)
Earth telescopes with optical resolving power comparable to Hubble have to use adaptive optics of some sort. Because adaptive optics requires a guide star of some sort — to measure the deformation caused by Earth's atmosphere and physically re-shape the mirror to cancel that deformation — you can't just point the telescope in any direction you choose. There has to be a bright star in the field of view for the adaptive optics to measure. Artificial guide stars, which use lasers that are reflected back to the ground by the atmosphere, help the problem somewhat but aren't as good as the real thing, since they don't penetrate the entire atmosphere.
The use of a guide star also means that the telescope is only useful for a very narrow field of view. The only deformation measured is what's between the guide star and the telescope, so the wider your angle is, the fuzzier the picture gets, and the longer your exposure time is, the worse the problem gets. It's simply impossible to take photos like the Hubble Ultra Deep Field with a ground-based telescope: even if we had lots of bright guide stars to measure the deformation over the entire field of view, there's no physical shape the mirror can be in that will cancel out deformation in multiple directions at the same time. It's just not possible.
The problems that the article describes — FTP, IM file transfers, etc. — have exactly the same problems under NATless IPv4 stateful firewalls. The Internet hasn't fallen over yet, therefore the problem is overblown.
The solution in Linux has generally been application-specific kernel modules (ip_conntrack_ftp, ...) that tell the state engine (ip_conntrack) to expect related traffic. They might've finally added a user-mode interface since last time I looked, but that doesn't actually solve the problem since any user-mode program is still forced to sniff forwarded traffic for known applications.
The more elegant solution would be for each application to indicate a related connection in a way that all stateful firewalls along the route could understand. Sort of like UPnP, except UPnP only talks to a single local NAT, not every firewall along the route. However, this more elegant solution hasn't yet been invented, for IPv4 or IPv6.
As I understand it, the moral rights clauses are because some jurisdictions (Japan being prominent, IIRC) don't allow the author to waive moral rights: the right to go back on the license and say, "Hey, I don't like what you're doing with my work". In those jurisdictions, any copyright license that purported to waive them, or that even failed to mention them by name, would be laughed out of court and held unenforceable.
That was the biggest catalyst behind the creation of the newer, per-country CC licenses. That way, saner copyright jurisdictions like the United States — egad, I never thought I'd say that — can skip the weird verbiage about an author being forced to retain rights "for his own good".
*snicker*
The military, and a lot of male-dominated hierarchies with a military mindset (e.g. FBI, law enforcement), have had a scary habit of concocting some sort of gay drama about every perpetrator they investigate. This seemed to come into play on a noticeable level starting circa the mid-to-late 1980s.
Two quick examples: Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber? Gay lover of Terry Nichols, according to the FBI. The initial FBI profile of the Atlanta Olympic bomber? Gay, despite the fact that the actual bomber later targeted gay nightclubs and abortion clinics.
Never trust anything that law enforcement or the military says in their initial psychological profile. Those things are flaky enough as-is. However, that applies doubly if the profile tries to turn the whole crime into a gay lovers' quarrel, or a gay jilted lover, or whatever pet homophobic theory they've concocted this week.
And no, the jilted gay lover theory was later proven to be complete hokum. Hartwig's name was posthumously cleared of all criminal wrongdoing (including homosexuality). The final theory is that it was an accident caused by a static electricity buildup.
Back to the subject at hand, I don't think it's a bad idea. With gay men, jealousy tends to be tempered by potential. Since your ex's new boyfriend is also a potential sex partner down the road, things are often much more... interesting than simple "angry confrontation" jealousy.
Also, though I should note that this is more due to artifacts of Western culture than anything inherent in being a gay man, but gay men tend to be a lot more open to the idea of three-ways or even standing non-monogamous arrangements (e.g. polyamory) than the average straight male. While such situations are by no means more stable than monogamy, their modes of failure tend to be less explosive because they diffuse jealousy.
(Background: this outlook comes from the status of gay men as "cultural outsiders" — in particular, as outsiders excluded due to sexual politics. Because people naturally build communities, gay men are in direct cultural contact with fellow outsiders, such as the polyamory movement and the BDSM crowd. Even a gay man who isn't himself interested in the idea is still quite likely A. to be familiar with such concepts and B. to have a live-and-let-live attitude regarding them.)
The solution to that is easy: sex robots. They never say no, they're always available, and they'll always tell you it was the best they ever had.
Are you sure about that?
IMO, IRV breaks down too often. It's not quite as bad as Two-Round Runoff (the system that led to the Chirac/LePen faceoff a few years back in France), and of course it's a hell of a lot better than Plurality. However, it does have problems with instability, especially if there aren't exactly two "top" parties. When the 3rd-place party gets popular enough to rival the 2nd-place, IRV painfully fails the Monotonicity criterion — meaning that voting for your favorite candidate can sometimes make him lose. While less stagnant than plurality, the resulting system still has a lot of inertia.
Condorcet, OTOH, is a bit more mathematically sensible — especially the Schulze "beatpath" version. It's guaranteed to select the candidate that the most people can live with, and like IRV it's 100% clone-proof (i.e. similar candidates don't hurt or help each other). The only downside is that understanding how Condorcet works requires an understanding of logic that is beyond a good proportion of the voting public — which means that the voting public won't be able to verify the counting process themselves, which undermines confidence in the results.
As far as simple voting methods go, Approval is a fairly nice substitute. Essentially, Approval is similar to Plurality, except "vote for one" becomes "vote for one or more": you check off every candidate you think would do an OK job, and the winner is counted the same as before. It has a fairly crappy worst-case scenario, but if the voters are using some fairly common-sense tactics, it's nearly as good as Condorcet. Even in the worst case, it also passes the Monotonicity criterion, and it's 100% clone-proof.
The gerrymandering problem... yeah. Gerrymandering needs to go. Sadly, I have fewer ideas on how to fix that.