But only if the CCD is physically the same size as a 35 mm frame.
Some of them are these days (wow! talk about low yield wafers!)
Laws of physics and economics being what they are, some day not too far away we'll have a digital camera with about 30 megapixels on a 25 x 36 mm die and it will capture the same information level that good 35mm film is capable of and it will cost less than an arm and a leg.
Re:Tech support for your family??
on
Family Tech Support
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
And that's exactly the way it ought to be. I feel so sad for these guys here who feel like they're being taken advantage of.
I liked Paul Graham's observation about italian teenagers in his article on nerd unpopularity. The italians don't have as many seriously disturbed nerdy teens, in large part because their families support each other and become the most important part of their lives.
Of course there's always Philip Greenspun's guide to Java Monkeys to support those of us who are being taken advantage of.
I helped my Fiancee buy a used laptop for her mom. Yes, I've spent several hours on "tech support" over the phone from 3000 miles away. I just feel that it's more than enough to repay them for the way they treat me when I fly out for holidays, and the interesting things I learn from them.
I also think it's worth it because they obviously get a lot out of internet access. Her mom is a library fiend, constantly checking out books on myriad topics, now she also has access to a world of information that doesn't require reserving books, or driving out in 3 feet of snow.
If you're really getting steamed about tech support, perhaps it's time to take more control over how it works?
there's nothing that beats Knoppix for ease of use, easy recovery, and local and remote administration.
I've been thinking a lot about building myself recently. I read "Why Building's Stand Up" and "Why buildings Fall Down" both by Mario Salvadori, and excellent accessible books that don't make you feel like you missed the real meat of the subject either.
I think the point made elsewhere about buildings requiring maintenance is good. You need to make the fundamental design maintainable. I personally think the goal of over 100 years of durability is not worthwhile. It is probably cheaper and better to replace your building every hundred years. Now shitty buildings that start out needing replacement are another story, but somewhere between 50 and 200 years is the max that it's worth designing for.
I'm very interested in fundamental design issues that would make building your own house economically feasible with only 1 to 4 people for labor (a typical family), and yet still provide a product that was superior in several ways, namely, modularity, strength under dynamic and static loads (such as wind and snow), aesthetics, and customizability of interior and exterior look, and ease of maintenance.
I was very interested in the "non-toxic building" article from a few days ago, not because I think the non-toxic issues are that important, but because the site really explored alternative fundamental design ideas.
Actually, true Clean Diesel does not have severe NOx emissions. That's one of the main things they are working on in the industry. Reductions of anywhere from about 15% to 70% have been achieved with various technologies. Cummins even offers a "low NOx rebuild kit" for their engines (though I don't know what "low" means to them).
You're right that up to now your average diesel still has NOx and soot problems, that doesn't mean that the technology to change all this isn't in development, it just hasn't hit the market yes, largely because there is no economic incentive as yet.
So you should pound on him? So he'd be better off dead? what?
Anyway, I like his site, and he reminds me of Ignatius J. Reilly from John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces...
He's a sort of tragicomical architecture buff, so what?
Why should we scorn him? I've never been religious, but I'm beginning to think a few "turn the other cheek"s and "love thy neighbor"s would help out around this place...
Argue all you want about the economics and politics of welfare, but don't pound this poor guy.
As for life expectancy vs toxins in the environment. Sure, we're not dying of malaria, or malnutrition, or dysentary, or what would be today's "minor" bacterial infections. Does that mean we shouldn't be looking for quality housing that produces less VOC and doesn't contain lead or cadmium or arsenic or asbestos? Come on.
Of course this guy is not normal. of course he has mental problems (if even only from relative isolation). So what? I hate to think that slashdot is full of basically mean people who want to pound on relatively helpless guys.
The average reaction is either "yeah this guy is right, we're all being poisoned" or "this guy is a nut, it's all in his head". Extremism is common in the world.
I think from reading through his web site, it's clear that:
1) This guy has spent a significant amount of time looking at interesting architectural experiments, and has done a lot to write these up in an accessible way to those who believe that there is something better possible than 2x4 stick built houses with gypsum board and vinyl flooring. Just look at his "simplicity and pavilion architecture" site.
2) Stress kills. No joke. Even if his primary problem is psychological, he suffers real physical problems from the stress caused by the psychological problems. Try living under continual stress conditions for a while (ie. barely able to pay your creditors, or on the run from the law, or being held as a POW or something), you'll see what I mean.
3) There really are toxic environmental issues that we should be aware of. For example, for the longest time Atrazine was a popular approved weedkiller. People thought DDT was a good idea at one point. People even though smoking was harmless at one point.
Pressure treated lumber IS dangerous, primarily for those who cut it, but leaching levels in the soil are measureable. That's why it's being phased out. Formaldehyde offgassing levels CAN be measured. No it's simply NOT true that standard forced air heaters exchange the air several times an hour, that would be WAY too expensive.
Take a look at the contents of a water resistant drywall spackling compound container some day. We had our bathroom done recently and I still can't be in that room for very long. I just hope when the swanstone goes up over it, it seals in the damn chemicals.
Often people claim that things are completely safe, but these claims are based on expected usage. All you have to do is put a piece of software in the hands of one of your users to know how easily people can do the unexpected...
Toxicology is about studying the levels of toxins that produce statistically unmeasureable effects. But LOTS of things confound statistics to make measuring effects difficult.
Oh and by the way there are major differences between the toxicity of volatile organic compounds and the toxicity of minerals like arsenic embedded in adobe. For one, you can't avoid VOC's by simply not licking your walls.
Does this guy have a real problem? Sure. What is it, biochemical or psychological? Are you all philosophical dualists or can we agree that psychological problems can have biochemical origins?
Anyway, I just want to thank this guy for putting together an interesting web site...to hell with the rest of you who feel they have to debunk his illness.
You can run a diesel directly from vegetable oil provided you heat the oil enough to change the viscosity, that's the original reason the diesel was invented.
On the other hand, you just can't realistically and economically produce enough vegetable oil to anywhere near meet even a small fraction of our current energy needs.
I saw an excellent website on this, linked from slashdot, but I don't remember how to get there.
In particular it seems that the Shannon limit only limits the amount of data exchangeable between 2 points in space. Even with simple relaying the total bandwidth available for n people scales with sqrt(n). In other words, while the individual's bandwidth still goes to zero, the total bandwidth is unlimited.
There are more advanced schemes which already scale linearly in highly specific situations.
Practically speaking, our capacity to transmit data over radio frequency propagation is at least several orders of magnitude above what is currently allowed by law.
The gasoline IC engine may in fact be near end of life, but diesel is definitely not.
In fact, a modern diesel engine with direct fuel injection and regenerating particulate filter rivals or may surpass Compressed Natural Gas "clean air vehicles".
In many parts of the US, electricity is principally generated using coal, natural gas, and diesel anyway, then 50-70 percent of the energy is thrown away as waste heat and of the remainder 12 percent is lost in transmission, of the remainder that makes it to your recharging station the battery cycle consumes 20 percent or so. In the end the best of all feasible electric cars is getting 40% thermal efficiency and is carrying an enormous amount of extra weight in batteries.
Clean Diesel hybrid vehicles with ozone catalysts on their radiators would do wonders for consumer adoption of more env. friendly technology, and all the technology is available TODAY.
Well, there's risk cost combined with value of money. Poor people's demand for money is MUCH higher than rich people's. An extra dollar an extra day early means one day you aren't hungry (if you buy at McDonalds at least).
It's ridiculous to think that poor people pay more for things. Poor people pay more for credit. For "things" they simply either don't buy them, or tend to buy the cheapest ones available.
Wow, the statistics on porn from voyeurweb were extremely interesting.
Now here's something I'd like to know, how much electricity is used in the viewing and distribution of porn over the web? And while we're at it, how much in the distribution of printed porn?
Is the web increasing or decreasing the environmental impact of porn?
And while we're at it, how many dollars per day are spent on porn?
It would also be interesting to compare per capita results for other less inhibited countries, such as scandanavian countries, or germany, france, etc.
The fact is, the US is clearly using a tremendous amount of resources distributing porn. How much better off would we all be (in terms of resources available for other purposes) if we weren't all so sexually frustrated?
Anyone have at a porn company have the power bill?
Ok, back from lunch, here's some actual numbers. It doesn't look as bad as it first did.
Let's say everything costs 1 dollar, Tokens are $10 if they win, 0 if not. P(win) =.1, so expected value of a token is $1
Var(TokenVal) = p*1-p*$10 = $0.90
Everything is independent, so variances and means add.
So for a million transactions (worth a million dollars) you have approximately a normal distribution with
Mean = $1,000,000 Var = $900,000 StdDev = sqrt(900,000) =approx= $1000. So six sigma below the mean is only 1,000,000 - 6,000
Almost no business will be payed less than $994,000 for a million dollars worth of business, or more than $1,006,000.
Of course at first there will be a few people who get charged several times in a row up front but if they use it at least 25 times they'll have the same statistics as anyone else.
Still doesn't solve the big problem everyone's pointing out: Why would anyone use this??? ie. chicken and egg.
As I see it this only works if it randomizes both the purchaser and the seller. Here's why.
The main problem with micropayment systems is that recordkeeping costs money. Peppercoin can't aggregate the payments for a month and bill you at the end of the month, because that creates a recordkeeping burden that makes their system cost just as much as any other.
2) How to ensure true fair coinflips?
There are ways to do this with a little clever algebra... Basically what happens is that each person contributes some data, the data gets combined in a way that no-one can pre-compute the outcome, and the result is a fair uniform distributed random number.
3) The standard deviation
Basically what we're talking about is a binomial distribution of payments. Let's use the example given: probability of payment is 1/10, payment amount is $10, and price of good is $1. In the average everything works out.
Now here's the catch. The average will come out right, but if these are independent events (no covariance) then the variance of the sum is the sum of the variances. so your risk is growing linearly with the number of transactions! So for 1 million businesses each doing 1 million dollars in business, there are a few who would not get paid more than say $100k
Hah, off topic, but when I first saw it, I thought your sig for the PKD foundation was probably something about Philip K Dick and perhaps was a group looking for a cure for Schizophrenia or some other mental illness.
I'm sure Polycystic Kidney Disease is bad and it's great that there's a group trying to cure it, but it wasn't as interesting.
The assumption that a tax on something is a good way to "Pay for the cost" of cleaning up byproducts is highly suspect.
1) Taxes are paid by the consumers and manufacturers in proportion to the elasticity of consumer demand, so in this case pretty much "collectively".
2) Taxes are rarely used to do what they are supposedly for: ie. cleaning up things. These taxes would undoubtedly be used for prisons, drug wars, social security, and medicaid leaving us to clean things up anyway out of remaining pocket change.
3) The reduction in demand for some consumer electronics due to price disincentives might be quite high, but there are lifetime issues that are fundamental to the technology industry. eg. A 1980's laserdisc player is just not very useful today. Scanners from 4 years ago provide far less quality than those purchased this year. etc.
4) My biggest concern is that the investment of labor, capital, and resources in electronics may have led to an economy where fundamental necessities or high priority items are relatively more expensive in terms of hours worked than in the past (such as housing, food, clothing, certain machines), but we are able to suck it up because we can get so much "more" with our marginal remaining money, which is used for entertainment and enjoyment via cheap consumer electronics.
Is the real cost of the electronics boom that we can't afford to live comfortably, work less, or commute less, because we have overinvested in electronics production and entertainment?
I certainly have a share of electronic gadgets, but I'm willing to bet that I'm below the 30th percentile for slashdot readers, and below 50th percentile for consumers in general (note I have only ever had one second hand TV shared between 4 people for example).
Can we afford to keep investing in electronics production at ever faster rates at the expense of other forms of production, or will we wake up one day with even larger debts, and even larger rent, utilities, and food bills, and wonder why it is that we can't live the quality of life that people in the 60's had? Note that this is a consequence of production meeting the market desires. It's the market desires that seem out of whack to me.
Of course lots of this have to do with population density increases, especially housing and food costs.
Ionizing mutagenesis is not the only method to induce cancer.
Ignorance of biology is unfortunately causing a lot of otherwise well informed physicists and engineers to make these statements like: "it cannot break chemical bonds and cause genetic mutations".
The fact of the matter is that it is entirely theoretically possible to cause mutation and cancer by selective heating of enzymes in cells. Namely you simply have to denature or inactivate the enzymes responsible for DNA repair (DNA is damaged all the time) or inactivate the enzymes responsible for apoptosis or other important cellular functions. This can be done by selective heating, which is in fact exactly what microwaves do. Even if you don't wind up with a cancerous tumor you might wind up with a "benign" brain tumor. Not fun.
There is no theoretical argument about ionization that will make this problem go away. It can only be determined by experimentation and epidemiology.
Several people have mentioned the CDC data, and other statistical data on deaths and injuries from firearms.
It should be noted that these samples have what is called (ironically) "survivorship bias". When you look at mutual fund performance, you see very few funds that do badly every year in a row for many years, because those managers get fired! Only the funds that do about average or better stay around.
Similarly you don't go to the police departments and hospitals and see records of the number of people who are healthy and walking around after foiling a violent crime attempt by having a firearm. They don't report to hospitals or police...
Very few people (other than Kleck) have tried with any real statistical methods to measure the number of people for whom having a gun meant nothing happened to them on that potentially very tragic day when they used it to scare off an attacker.
According to Kleck's data, that number is extremely high.
The correlation between gun injury and gun ownership is built into the datasets that are being used by the CDC and others. One example is that people who live in dangerous neighborhoods, or who sell drugs, or who hang out with friends who belong to gangs also tend to buy guns "for protection".
Furthermore, of the people who live in relatively safe areas who buy guns, very few of them will ever need to fire their gun, even if they do use it to prevent an attack. Almost all people who use guns defensively never fire a shot.
The fact that guns are more likely to kill due to Suicide and Accident has everything to do with how effective they are at stopping attacks without ever firing a shot, much less killing the attacker.
Klecks' book "Armed" (referenced below) deals with this issue quite well.
What is good about these books is that they both represent responsible fact-finding based research across a large amount of data and over fairly long periods of time, in addition neither of the researchers had biased funding (though some try to accuse Lott) nor did they have a significant bone to pick starting out.
Kleck began with a modest bias towards gun laws, and against widespread gun ownership, and reversed himself after in depth research.
Lott began with the idea that criminals should behave in a fundamentally economic way towards risk, and basically proved his point, but had no real gun related bias to begin with.
These are both social science results from a utilitarian standpoint. There are many who argue from a philosophical rights standpoint, that even if guns overall impose a cost on society, that cost must be born, just like the costs of free speech and non-incrimination, and non search and seizure rights are born.
The combination of a philosophical position that guns are a right, and the utilitarian position that more guns in the hands of normal citizens mean less crime and less cost, provides a powerful argument for decreasing the legal complexity of gun ownership, incorporating the second amendment upon the states under the fourteenth amendment, and allowing for widespread concealed carry by law abiding citizens (non-felons).
The Journal of the American Medical Association and the CDC have both decided to take a "medical epidemic" approach to gun violence. I believe that Kleck has something good to say about this in "Armed".
Don't knock the Baysian approach until you've tried it.
As Paul Graham said, the thing about spam that can't change is the message. If they start sending things that don't have spam like messages in them, they're no longer spam.
Since the spam messages are relatively easily recognized by simple naive Bayesian approaches, these filters work very well.
I use bogofilter from ESR in a procmail script. the first thing the procmail script does is bogofilter, if it classifies as spam, I put in in "spam" otherwise it passes through to my other filters.
I never lose anything. Spam never gets through, and the false positives are all things like auto-replies from online ordering, or people who were dumb enough to put html attachment stuff into an email list. These happen only a few per month.
I get about a hundred spams per week in the spam folder. I use mutt, and when i delete them I have mut automatically add the spams to the database.
it works. It doesn't save my bandwidth but it saves me having to do anything about spam.
fftw (the Fastest Fourier Transform in the West library) is written in C by a OCAML program. Ie. they wrote an OCAML program to do symbolic manipulations to optimize mathematical relations and then dump C code that implements those optimized conditions.
When did someone sit down and say "we want to make a product that does something like ".
That's the date from which you should start counting, not the day the first code was written.
But yes, small projects with well understood problems (such as a compiler, or a new optimization pass) develop faster than large projects with various miscellaneous business, technical, and user constraints.
Slashdot Mirror
But only if the CCD is physically the same size as a 35 mm frame.
Some of them are these days (wow! talk about low yield wafers!)
Laws of physics and economics being what they are, some day not too far away we'll have a digital camera with about 30 megapixels on a 25 x 36 mm die and it will capture the same information level that good 35mm film is capable of and it will cost less than an arm and a leg.
And that's exactly the way it ought to be. I feel so sad for these guys here who feel like they're being taken advantage of.
I liked Paul Graham's observation about italian teenagers in his article on nerd unpopularity. The italians don't have as many seriously disturbed nerdy teens, in large part because their families support each other and become the most important part of their lives.
Of course there's always Philip Greenspun's guide to Java Monkeys to support those of us who are being taken advantage of.
I helped my Fiancee buy a used laptop for her mom. Yes, I've spent several hours on "tech support" over the phone from 3000 miles away. I just feel that it's more than enough to repay them for the way they treat me when I fly out for holidays, and the interesting things I learn from them.
I also think it's worth it because they obviously get a lot out of internet access. Her mom is a library fiend, constantly checking out books on myriad topics, now she also has access to a world of information that doesn't require reserving books, or driving out in 3 feet of snow.
If you're really getting steamed about tech support, perhaps it's time to take more control over how it works?
there's nothing that beats Knoppix for ease of use, easy recovery, and local and remote administration.
I've been thinking a lot about building myself
recently. I read "Why Building's Stand Up" and "Why buildings Fall
Down" both by Mario Salvadori, and excellent accessible books that
don't make you feel like you missed the real meat of the subject
either.
I think the point made elsewhere about buildings requiring maintenance
is good. You need to make the fundamental design maintainable. I
personally think the goal of over 100 years of durability is not
worthwhile. It is probably cheaper and better to replace your building
every hundred years. Now shitty buildings that start out needing
replacement are another story, but somewhere between 50 and 200 years
is the max that it's worth designing for.
I'm very interested in fundamental design issues that would make
building your own house economically feasible with only 1 to 4 people
for labor (a typical family), and yet still provide a product that was
superior in several ways, namely, modularity, strength under dynamic
and static loads (such as wind and snow), aesthetics, and
customizability of interior and exterior look, and ease of
maintenance.
I was very interested in the "non-toxic building" article from a few
days ago, not because I think the non-toxic issues are that important,
but because the site really explored alternative fundamental design
ideas.
Actually, true Clean Diesel does not have severe NOx emissions. That's one of the main things they are working on in the industry. Reductions of anywhere from about 15% to 70% have been achieved with various technologies. Cummins even offers a "low NOx rebuild kit" for their engines (though I don't know what "low" means to them).
You're right that up to now your average diesel still has NOx and soot problems, that doesn't mean that the technology to change all this isn't in development, it just hasn't hit the market yes, largely because there is no economic incentive as yet.
So you should pound on him? So he'd be better off dead? what?
Anyway, I like his site, and he reminds me of Ignatius J. Reilly from John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces...
He's a sort of tragicomical architecture buff, so what?
Why should we scorn him? I've never been religious, but I'm beginning to think a few "turn the other cheek"s and "love thy neighbor"s would help out around this place...
Argue all you want about the economics and politics of welfare, but don't pound this poor guy.
As for life expectancy vs toxins in the environment. Sure, we're not dying of malaria, or malnutrition, or dysentary, or what would be today's "minor" bacterial infections. Does that mean we shouldn't be looking for quality housing that produces less VOC and doesn't contain lead or cadmium or arsenic or asbestos? Come on.
Of course this guy is not normal. of course he has mental problems (if even only from relative isolation). So what? I hate to think that slashdot is full of basically mean people who want to pound on relatively helpless guys.
The average reaction is either "yeah this guy is right, we're all being poisoned" or "this guy is a nut, it's all in his head". Extremism is common in the world.
I think from reading through his web site, it's clear that:
1) This guy has spent a significant amount of time looking at interesting architectural experiments, and has done a lot to write these up in an accessible way to those who believe that there is something better possible than 2x4 stick built houses with gypsum board and vinyl flooring. Just look at his "simplicity and pavilion architecture" site.
2) Stress kills. No joke. Even if his primary problem is psychological, he suffers real physical problems from the stress caused by the psychological problems. Try living under continual stress conditions for a while (ie. barely able to pay your creditors, or on the run from the law, or being held as a POW or something), you'll see what I mean.
3) There really are toxic environmental issues that we should be aware of. For example, for the longest time Atrazine was a popular approved weedkiller. People thought DDT was a good idea at one point. People even though smoking was harmless at one point.
Pressure treated lumber IS dangerous, primarily for those who cut it, but leaching levels in the soil are measureable. That's why it's being phased out. Formaldehyde offgassing levels CAN be measured. No it's simply NOT true that standard forced air heaters exchange the air several times an hour, that would be WAY too expensive.
Take a look at the contents of a water resistant drywall spackling compound container some day. We had our bathroom done recently and I still can't be in that room for very long. I just hope when the swanstone goes up over it, it seals in the damn chemicals.
Often people claim that things are completely safe, but these claims are based on expected usage. All you have to do is put a piece of software in the hands of one of your users to know how easily people can do the unexpected...
Toxicology is about studying the levels of toxins that produce statistically unmeasureable effects. But LOTS of things confound statistics to make measuring effects difficult.
Oh and by the way there are major differences between the toxicity of volatile organic compounds and the toxicity of minerals like arsenic embedded in adobe. For one, you can't avoid VOC's by simply not licking your walls.
Does this guy have a real problem? Sure. What is it, biochemical or psychological? Are you all philosophical dualists or can we agree that psychological problems can have biochemical origins?
Anyway, I just want to thank this guy for putting together an interesting web site...to hell with the rest of you who feel they have to debunk his illness.
You can run a diesel directly from vegetable oil provided you heat the oil enough to change the viscosity, that's the original reason the diesel was invented.
On the other hand, you just can't realistically and economically produce enough vegetable oil to anywhere near meet even a small fraction of our current energy needs.
I saw an excellent website on this, linked from slashdot, but I don't remember how to get there.
You should read some of the articles linked at David Reed's web site:
In particular it seems that the Shannon limit only limits the amount of data exchangeable between 2 points in space. Even with simple relaying the total bandwidth available for n people scales with sqrt(n). In other words, while the individual's bandwidth still goes to zero, the total bandwidth is unlimited.
There are more advanced schemes which already scale linearly in highly specific situations.
Practically speaking, our capacity to transmit data over radio frequency propagation is at least several orders of magnitude above what is currently allowed by law.
The gasoline IC engine may in fact be near end of life, but diesel is definitely not.
In fact, a modern diesel engine with direct fuel injection and regenerating particulate filter rivals or may surpass Compressed Natural Gas "clean air vehicles".
Clean Diesel has a lot of practical promise.
In many parts of the US, electricity is principally generated using coal, natural gas, and diesel anyway, then 50-70 percent of the energy is thrown away as waste heat and of the remainder 12 percent is lost in transmission, of the remainder that makes it to your recharging station the battery cycle consumes 20 percent or so. In the end the best of all feasible electric cars is getting 40% thermal efficiency and is carrying an enormous amount of extra weight in batteries.
Clean Diesel hybrid vehicles with ozone catalysts on their radiators would do wonders for consumer adoption of more env. friendly technology, and all the technology is available TODAY.
Well, there's risk cost combined with value of money. Poor people's demand for money is MUCH higher than rich people's. An extra dollar an extra day early means one day you aren't hungry (if you buy at McDonalds at least).
It's ridiculous to think that poor people pay more for things. Poor people pay more for credit. For "things" they simply either don't buy them, or tend to buy the cheapest ones available.
Wow, the statistics on porn from voyeurweb were extremely interesting.
Now here's something I'd like to know, how much electricity is used in the viewing and distribution of porn over the web? And while we're at it, how much in the distribution of printed porn?
Is the web increasing or decreasing the environmental impact of porn?
And while we're at it, how many dollars per day are spent on porn?
It would also be interesting to compare per capita results for other less inhibited countries, such as scandanavian countries, or germany, france, etc.
The fact is, the US is clearly using a tremendous amount of resources distributing porn. How much better off would we all be (in terms of resources available for other purposes) if we weren't all so sexually frustrated?
Anyone have at a porn company have the power bill?
Floating point numbers are by their nature inexact. it is impossible to make them exact, though you can make them arbitrarily high precision.
When people need exact answers they do exact math using a combination of symbolic computations and arbitrary sized integers and rationals.
ie. the answer you might get from doing an operation like sqrt(2) would be "sqrt(2)", doing an operation like area_of_circle(r=1) would be "Pi"
an operation like 2^128/3^45 would be some ratio of enormous integers expressed as x/y where x and y are the integers 2^128 and 3^45
does that help?
Ok, back from lunch, here's some actual numbers. It doesn't look as bad as it first did.
.1, so expected value of a token is $1
Let's say everything costs 1 dollar,
Tokens are $10 if they win, 0 if not.
P(win) =
Var(TokenVal) = p*1-p*$10 = $0.90
Everything is independent, so variances and means add.
So for a million transactions (worth a million dollars) you have approximately a normal distribution with
Mean = $1,000,000
Var = $900,000
StdDev = sqrt(900,000) =approx= $1000. So six sigma below the mean is only 1,000,000 - 6,000
Almost no business will be payed less than $994,000 for a million dollars worth of business, or more than $1,006,000.
Of course at first there will be a few people who get charged several times in a row up front but if they use it at least 25 times they'll have the same statistics as anyone else.
Still doesn't solve the big problem everyone's pointing out: Why would anyone use this??? ie. chicken and egg.
Everyone else is chiming in so why not me?
1) How this is different.
As I see it this only works if it randomizes both the purchaser and the seller. Here's why.
The main problem with micropayment systems is that recordkeeping costs money. Peppercoin can't aggregate the payments for a month and bill you at the end of the month, because that creates a recordkeeping burden that makes their system cost just as much as any other.
2) How to ensure true fair coinflips?
There are ways to do this with a little clever algebra... Basically what happens is that each person contributes some data, the data gets combined in a way that no-one can pre-compute the outcome, and the result is a fair uniform distributed random number.
3) The standard deviation
Basically what we're talking about is a binomial distribution of payments. Let's use the example given: probability of payment is 1/10, payment amount is $10, and price of good is $1. In the average everything works out.
Now here's the catch. The average will come out right, but if these are independent events (no covariance) then the variance of the sum is the sum of the variances. so your risk is growing linearly with the number of transactions! So for 1 million businesses each doing 1 million dollars in business, there are a few who would not get paid more than say $100k
!!!
gotta go, but someone check my math here!
He wasn't talking about encryption as much as signing.
Imagine that your emailer fires off a bounce with instructions to everyone who sends you an email that isn't SIGNED.
If you get a SIGNED email then you can filter it into ones signed by someone you know and ones signed by someone you don't know.
If spammers start signing their emails they are much easier to target legally.
Hah, off topic, but when I first saw it, I thought your sig for the PKD foundation was probably something about Philip K Dick and perhaps was a group looking for a cure for Schizophrenia or some other mental illness.
I'm sure Polycystic Kidney Disease is bad and it's great that there's a group trying to cure it, but it wasn't as interesting.
The assumption that a tax on something is a good way to "Pay for the cost" of cleaning up byproducts is highly suspect.
1) Taxes are paid by the consumers and manufacturers in proportion to the elasticity of consumer demand, so in this case pretty much "collectively".
2) Taxes are rarely used to do what they are supposedly for: ie. cleaning up things. These taxes would undoubtedly be used for prisons, drug wars, social security, and medicaid leaving us to clean things up anyway out of remaining pocket change.
3) The reduction in demand for some consumer electronics due to price disincentives might be quite high, but there are lifetime issues that are fundamental to the technology industry. eg. A 1980's laserdisc player is just not very useful today. Scanners from 4 years ago provide far less quality than those purchased this year. etc.
4) My biggest concern is that the investment of labor, capital, and resources in electronics may have led to an economy where fundamental necessities or high priority items are relatively more expensive in terms of hours worked than in the past (such as housing, food, clothing, certain machines), but we are able to suck it up because we can get so much "more" with our marginal remaining money, which is used for entertainment and enjoyment via cheap consumer electronics.
Is the real cost of the electronics boom that we can't afford to live comfortably, work less, or commute less, because we have overinvested in electronics production and entertainment?
I certainly have a share of electronic gadgets, but I'm willing to bet that I'm below the 30th percentile for slashdot readers, and below 50th percentile for consumers in general (note I have only ever had one second hand TV shared between 4 people for example).
Can we afford to keep investing in electronics production at ever faster rates at the expense of other forms of production, or will we wake up one day with even larger debts, and even larger rent, utilities, and food bills, and wonder why it is that we can't live the quality of life that people in the 60's had? Note that this is a consequence of production meeting the market desires. It's the market desires that seem out of whack to me.
Of course lots of this have to do with population density increases, especially housing and food costs.
Ionizing mutagenesis is not the only method to induce cancer.
Ignorance of biology is unfortunately causing a lot of otherwise well informed physicists and engineers to make these statements like: "it cannot break chemical bonds and cause genetic mutations".
The fact of the matter is that it is entirely theoretically possible to cause mutation and cancer by selective heating of enzymes in cells. Namely you simply have to denature or inactivate the enzymes responsible for DNA repair (DNA is damaged all the time) or inactivate the enzymes responsible for apoptosis or other important cellular functions. This can be done by selective heating, which is in fact exactly what microwaves do. Even if you don't wind up with a cancerous tumor you might wind up with a "benign" brain tumor. Not fun.
There is no theoretical argument about ionization that will make this problem go away. It can only be determined by experimentation and epidemiology.
I think you're thinking of ECB (electronic code book). CBC xors the previous block output with the current plaintext before encrypting I believe.
So if you change a letter every block after that is changed...
Several people have mentioned the CDC data, and other statistical data on deaths and injuries from firearms.
It should be noted that these samples have what is called (ironically) "survivorship bias". When you look at mutual fund performance, you see very few funds that do badly every year in a row for many years, because those managers get fired! Only the funds that do about average or better stay around.
Similarly you don't go to the police departments and hospitals and see records of the number of people who are healthy and walking around after foiling a violent crime attempt by having a firearm. They don't report to hospitals or police...
Very few people (other than Kleck) have tried with any real statistical methods to measure the number of people for whom having a gun meant nothing happened to them on that potentially very tragic day when they used it to scare off an attacker.
According to Kleck's data, that number is extremely high.
The correlation between gun injury and gun ownership is built into the datasets that are being used by the CDC and others. One example is that people who live in dangerous neighborhoods, or who sell drugs, or who hang out with friends who belong to gangs also tend to buy guns "for protection".
Furthermore, of the people who live in relatively safe areas who buy guns, very few of them will ever need to fire their gun, even if they do use it to prevent an attack. Almost all people who use guns defensively never fire a shot.
The fact that guns are more likely to kill due to Suicide and Accident has everything to do with how effective they are at stopping attacks without ever firing a shot, much less killing the attacker.
Klecks' book "Armed" (referenced below) deals with this issue quite well.
These two books are the best scholarly study to date. Rather than the obligatory amazon links, here's some links to Codys in Berkeley.
Armed
More Guns Less Crime
What is good about these books is that they both represent responsible fact-finding based research across a large amount of data and over fairly long periods of time, in addition neither of the researchers had biased funding (though some try to accuse Lott) nor did they have a significant bone to pick starting out.
Kleck began with a modest bias towards gun laws, and against widespread gun ownership, and reversed himself after in depth research.
Lott began with the idea that criminals should behave in a fundamentally economic way towards risk, and basically proved his point, but had no real gun related bias to begin with.
These are both social science results from a utilitarian standpoint. There are many who argue from a philosophical rights standpoint, that even if guns overall impose a cost on society, that cost must be born, just like the costs of free speech and non-incrimination, and non search and seizure rights are born.
The combination of a philosophical position that guns are a right, and the utilitarian position that more guns in the hands of normal citizens mean less crime and less cost, provides a powerful argument for decreasing the legal complexity of gun ownership, incorporating the second amendment upon the states under the fourteenth amendment, and allowing for widespread concealed carry by law abiding citizens (non-felons).
The Journal of the American Medical Association and the CDC have both decided to take a "medical epidemic" approach to gun violence. I believe that Kleck has something good to say about this in "Armed".
In addition, "Doctors for Sensible Gun Laws" is a group specifically formed to provide an opposing position on this topic.
Don't knock the Baysian approach until you've tried it.
As Paul Graham said, the thing about spam that can't change is the message. If they start sending things that don't have spam like messages in them, they're no longer spam.
Since the spam messages are relatively easily recognized by simple naive Bayesian approaches, these filters work very well.
I use bogofilter from ESR in a procmail script. the first thing the procmail script does is bogofilter, if it classifies as spam, I put in in "spam" otherwise it passes through to my other filters.
I never lose anything. Spam never gets through, and the false positives are all things like auto-replies from online ordering, or people who were dumb enough to put html attachment stuff into an email list. These happen only a few per month.
I get about a hundred spams per week in the spam folder. I use mutt, and when i delete them I have mut automatically add the spams to the database.
it works. It doesn't save my bandwidth but it saves me having to do anything about spam.
Whoops, not even close to exact.
Pi is "irrational" meaning it is not the ratio of any two integers (such as 22 and 7).
22/7 is about 3.1429 pi is closer to 3.14159
Back to the drawing board.
unison for one.
fftw (the Fastest Fourier Transform in the West library) is written in C by a OCAML program. Ie. they wrote an OCAML program to do symbolic manipulations to optimize mathematical relations and then dump C code that implements those optimized conditions.
dunno what else. Try looking at their web site.
When did someone sit down and say "we want to make a product that does something like ".
That's the date from which you should start counting, not the day the first code was written.
But yes, small projects with well understood problems (such as a compiler, or a new optimization pass) develop faster than large projects with various miscellaneous business, technical, and user constraints.