We're talking about different kinds of branding. Take a look at what kinds of ads come on television targeted at viewers 8-18. They aren't all for the kinds of things these viewers would be interested in today. That kind of marketing is too expensive unless it yields significant long-term gain.
Another example: for most consumers, an SUV is roughly the same thing, from an economics perspective, as a minivan and a few thousand dollars in cash in pocket. Consumers choose the SUV nine times out of ten these days.
Show me a general (not limited to niche markets) free-market model that tolerates moderatly irrational consumer behavior, vast information asymmetry, vast power asymmetry, and argues convincingly for decentralized wealth distribution. I'd love to read about it.
My arguments above are not class-warfare drivel. If an economic/political system does not provide reasonably uniform distribution of wealth, it's useless. I don't care how much raw wealth it generates, if it can't provide a fair standard of living for good people who are willing to learn and work, I want none of it.
It is obvious that our economic "expansion" does not help any of the people who work to achieve it. That's broken.
That's certainly impressive, and it is related to the network, but in a kind of round-about way. The box being beefy helps, because processors scale so well. But the reason MMORPGs charge per month isn't processor consumption. Network bandwidth is much costlier, and doesn't scale as swiftly.
If you take the naive approach to implementing state synchronization in a real-time system (like a video game) your server consumes upstream bandwidth proportional to the number of updates per second, times the number of participants, times the number of items synchronized. In a game, you have to synchronize each player at least, so we're talking quadratic bandwidth in just the players. That's how I did it when I had to, and we scaled to at least six players with plenty of breathing room. (Our dev team had six players. I don't think we ever brought in more testers to push it harder.:)
If you take a less naive approach, you can get that from quadratic to n*log(n). And you can get a lot of constant-time and common-case improvements (the above is all worst-case.) You can find that approach somewhere in "Game Programming Gems," IIRC.
I don't know if that has been proven as a lower bound, but I'd squint hard at anything that claims to be faster.
Can it handle 60 players who all have line of site to each other? That's a tough stress test.:) I'd be blown away if they can do that over the Internet, and probably still impressed on a LAN. (I'm feeling too lazy to break out my calculation-envelopes.:)
> I'm going to spend the savings here at home anyway.
Yeah. On more of the cheapest foreign goods that take skilled jobs out of our childrens hands. Great. Little Billy can grow up to be a sales clerk, because that's the only job Americans are good for anymore: selling stuff to Americans. That'll keep the dollar strong.
Why is it so sheik to be a libertarian these days, anyway? Adam Smith is dead, literally and figuratively. His models don't work in the information and power asymmetric world we live in, no matter how well they worked in agrarian America.
Example: If branding as a marketing technique can yield positive gains then consumers are not rational as per his assumptions. Banding works. Therefore, one of the key assumptions behind the free market model fails: rationality. QED. The other assumptions are just as trivially broken today as well. Symmetry of information. Right. Go fish.
Twenty percent of the people in this country control eighty-five percent of the resources. But that's nothing: the top one percent owns fourty percent of the resources. And these aren't the hardest workers, and they aren't the smartest people, either. I've met enough of them to know. They just have always had enough money to make more of it. It's the new monarchy, not meritocracy.
The GDP grows, yet jobs disappear, and average salaries drop. More people enter the workforce than leave it. So where the hell do those earnings go? Not to the people who earned them. Their jobs get cut, or they take a paycut, or they're getting paid a dollar an hour.
Don't you feel robbed by your free market? That alchemy of the 21st centry?
Civic pride. Keeping your dollars as close to you as possible, by giving them to companies that are close to you, keeps that money within your local economy, ultimately benefiting you as well. What 'close' means can vary a lot. It can mean buying books from your local bookstore instead of B&N, so more of that capital goes to the same guy who may spend it at the very company you work for. Or may buy coffee from the coffee shop you like, keeping it in business.
Or it could mean, as it does here, keeping money and jobs within your country. Keeping the trade deficit less up (can't say down, can we?) Researching which companies outsource and giving them your patronage instead of buying a Dell might keep a laid off Dell techie with three more years experience than you from getting a job you otherwise would have been given.
Going out of your way to support companies whose policies you support is an admirable thing to do. It encourages corporate values that go beyond shareholder value, in a culture where corporate ethics need a lot of shaking up.
Others who've replied have been a little off, but they raise good points. F90 is around, which is more feature-rich than F77, but pretty close to backwards compatible. No one switches over to F90. Why?
Well.. F90 supports pointers.
Yep. That's it, really. F90 has pointers. Not having pointers is why F77 can compile to greased lightning on crack. This is critical when your supercomputer time (variable expense) is at a premium with respect to your salaried coder's time (fixed expense) and you're working off a grant (with finite cash but loose deadlines.)
And yes, I'm young and I still know Fortran. Like my father and his father before him.
> Pure capitalism prohibits the government from forcibly seizing one persons property to transfer to another person.
You mean taxation?
The benefits of taxation are never spread perfectly evenly so it is unlikely that a system of taxation has ever existed that did not forcefully transer one person's value to another.
Right. And capitalism is an abstract idea, it can prohibit a government from doing nothing.
> The only alternative to capitalism is rationing, otherwise known as the government deciding what products you should have, and handing them over.
That's not true at all. Capitalism is just a way of relating to money. Capital is money that you can invest to get more money. You couldn't do that in the USSR because things like speculating were illegal.
You couldn't do that under Feudalism because peasants were bound to the lord and any payment they accepted from anyone else would likely land them in trouble with that lord.
Feudalism != rationing.
You can't do that in most tribal systems for a number of reasons. Chiefly: it's probably dangerous/improper to get wealthier than the chief.
Many tribal systems don't ration.
I don't know enough about other economic systems to comment on them, but capitalism is not about money. It's about money as a means of production.
My Dad's a structural engineer in California. He has a standing promise from a former client (in the gambling industry) that if his building falls during an earthquake, he's coming after my Dad with a can of gasoline.
I think my Dad thinks of it as a calculated risk. He engineered to 3x spec, and he doesn't expect to ever hear from the guy.
Not flamebait at all, as a second year grad student whose research focuses on security, I think my position on the matter is pretty well-informed. Multics predates C, was an operating system, and had no known buffer overflow vulnerabilities.
That's because it was written in a language that made them less likely to appear. Not impossible. Just less prone. Well-designed standard APIs for example. Imagine that.
The way pointers and arrays are interchangable in C is pretty dangerous too. Makes it impossible for the compiler to do bounds checking. Why do you need retarded stuff like that for a low level language? Are all low level programmers just too lazy to cast properly? I hope not!
Everything you say is correct. But I think sometimes people point out that fact so they can instantly decredit a claim that is discomforting for them to consider without giving it too much thought. Remember, wherever there is causation, there will be correlation, so correlation isn't such a bad place to start looking.
Here's a sociological study that tries to construct causal relationships based on interviews with subjects. If the original poster is reading this, he might want to consider looking going up a directory or two and poking around that website:
Blindly looking for clusters of points in a large set of data doesn't show causal relationships. It's harder than that. But some sciences do try to show it. Sociology is big on that, so is molecular Biology, from what I've seen of it.
Some other people have posted the one-word version of this, but there's more to it...
Maxis got the same treatment. EA is closing down operations in Walnut Creek, and moving them to some place on the S.F. Peninsula.
Walnut Creek is about two hours away from there in morning traffic, AFAIK. Sucks to be at Origin more, but it sucks to be at Maxis too.
But the main post made it sound worse than I think it actually is. It's not like Origin is going away just yet. Who knows? They could pull through relocating across three states.
The problem with the antitrust cases against MS so far have been that they've taken place after the illegal activity. I feel pretty strongly that Google should sue for a preliminary injunction against MS promoting any new search engine via any media embedded in the client (desktop icons, homepage, et cetera.) Such a judgement might come along in time for it to be useful, and it would leave them on much more even footing.
It might be hard to get though because such a judgement would necessarily drive a wedge between MS's network services (MSN, messenger, passport, hotmail, et cetera) and their OS/application software. For example, it might mean that if MS wanted to embed their new search engine in MSN, they couldn't use it as IE's default homepage anymore. They'd have to pick between using MSN to promote the search engine and using IE to promote MSN.
I think that would be a Good Thing, but a judge could see it as a strong argument against such an injunction.
To what standard do you hold your president for day-to-day communications? Armed messengers with one-time-pads for every communique?
I'm guessing the president uses conventional phone lines for voice, except in special circumstances. Compared to that, properly encrypted e-mail doesn't look too bad.
If you have the resources to task an intern with swapping public keys over a secure channel (out of band) with everyone you care to chat with, e-mail can be made quite secure with respect to authenticity, integrity, and privacy.
Bush, like all modern presidents, has the Secret Service doing the same job of sorting through mail from the public. That's necessary. And I don't think it's odd at all if he has people read stuff to him while he's trying to do something else. If he's really that busy, more power to him.
But if the cabinet member who wrote the report is sitting there in front of you, and you make him read it aloud, that's a different story alltogether. That is a meeting. You don't have anywhere else to be, or anything else to do until it's over. Oral dictation is much slower than reading, so you're only wasting everybody's time.
Because it's not about time, it's either about lacking certain skills, or the presence of someone who lacks sufficient discipline to stay on task and absorb the material independently.
> Always be careful who you let do your thinking for you.
That's not fair at all. I trust an author to check his facts, so when I cite things put forth in a book as facts, I expect to be taken seriously. I'm no publishing expert, but I understand some publishers employ "fact checkers" to make sure they don't get sued.
Moore does accuse Bush of being illiterate in that book, but I didn't buy it at the time. It really is kind of far fetched when you only have those two bits of information to go on. I'd even go so far as to say that Moore came off as an ass. But nothing has come out to refute his accusation. Far from it.
If Jr doesn't "trust" e-mail, I call that a highly suspicious pattern. I can't imagine going without instantaneous, securable, asynchronous global communication, and my life is (hopefully) less demanding. But I'm still waiting on that link.
My understanding is that much of Eastern Europe is way behind in acquisition of new tech. Few people have a computer at all, and of those who do, fewer are state of the art.
I think you're right, that these computers could be put to a much better use, but I don't think that use is folding.
Re:Yet another way to turn the nickle
on
The Borg MegaCube
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· Score: 1
A big reason why there are so many discs for each season is that consumers are more willing to shell out $$$ for DVD compilations if the disc count is high. It has nothing to do with how much content you're buying anymore beyond an ever-eroding threshold of credibility.
-Lux
Re:Practice makes nondeterministic. :)
on
Can You Raed Tihs?
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· Score: 1
I can actually hear the u/bi difference now after about a year of listening to people speak it. But you're right, in much the same way an English reader can skim text with the interior letters mangled, a Russian listener can decipher pretty much any mangling of vowels in a Russian word. That simplifies getting to a basic level of understanding with the language, but probably postpones mastery.
I'd rather be an English speaker learning Russian than a Russian speaker learning English.:)
Sisors. Scissors. Scicors. Cissors? Seriously, our language could use some linguists.:)
By making a typo, you supposedly agree that if their site overflows a buffer in your browser and wipes your HD, they are not liable.
Okay, terrible example for many reasons, but I still think it's pretty laughable that they claim that the "user" agrees to certain terms of service by "utilizing" this little piece of indirection.
When one is learning to read a new language, it is a deterministic, serial process, the letters are scanned in order as you sound out the word based on the rules you know. I'm trying to learn Russian now, so I'm getting reacquanted with the proccess.
Deterministic serial processing is what computers are good at.
Human brains are neural nets, which are much better at massively parallel, nondeterministic computation. Try this: pick a random word on this page. The meaning sprang to mind, right? No left to right scanning needed? I notice that at about the same moment that my eyes focus on the first letter of a word, the meaning springs to mind.
I think this is a fascinating hack because it may be giving us clues about how our brain accomplishes the task of breaking up the task of reading a word to leverage it's strengths against the problem at hand.
I think most security professionals would agree that a worm infection attempt constitutes an attack on a system. Therefore, I have more than a little skepticism about these results, given recent events.
I'm guessing they're only counting intrusion attempts that involved humans on the other end of the wire. That's pretty misleading.
Sounds more like a job offer than a grant. They're very different things.
If I were to take a job with some acronym, I would probably be working at a secured site, and not be allowed to talk about my work.
However, I am a grad student working at a university. My research is being funded by a military grant, but the checks come from the university. I will be allowed to publish my findings. In fact, there is a good chance my code will be GPLed some time in the next couple of years, although it is copyrighted by the university, so I don't have complete control over that.
Speaking of my code, I should get back to that and stop reading/.:)
The best thing to do, I think, would be to cap tech patents at seven years, so that companies have to keep frantically coming up with new tech. Wastes more on lawyers -- it costs a couple of thousand per patent, and more patents would have to be produced to compensate -- but that at least alleviates some of the effect.
I've been thinking about this, and I disagree. I think the fundamental problem is that the way the system works now, more patents are better for big companies. Always. One way to alleviate that is to rework the economics a bit.
If bad patents can be made into a liability, industry self-regulation may emerge. One way to do this would be to impose a stiff fine for patents that get struck down. Combined with a streamlined review process that is cheap for the challenger, this could make the patent system bareable.
However it gets done, the solution needs to continue to reward good patents without encouraging spurious ones. We need fewer patents, not more.
Slashdot Mirror
We're talking about different kinds of branding. Take a look at what kinds of ads come on television targeted at viewers 8-18. They aren't all for the kinds of things these viewers would be interested in today. That kind of marketing is too expensive unless it yields significant long-term gain.
Another example: for most consumers, an SUV is roughly the same thing, from an economics perspective, as a minivan and a few thousand dollars in cash in pocket. Consumers choose the SUV nine times out of ten these days.
Show me a general (not limited to niche markets) free-market model that tolerates moderatly irrational consumer behavior, vast information asymmetry, vast power asymmetry, and argues convincingly for decentralized wealth distribution. I'd love to read about it.
My arguments above are not class-warfare drivel. If an economic/political system does not provide reasonably uniform distribution of wealth, it's useless. I don't care how much raw wealth it generates, if it can't provide a fair standard of living for good people who are willing to learn and work, I want none of it.
It is obvious that our economic "expansion" does not help any of the people who work to achieve it. That's broken.
That's certainly impressive, and it is related to the network, but in a kind of round-about way. The box being beefy helps, because processors scale so well. But the reason MMORPGs charge per month isn't processor consumption. Network bandwidth is much costlier, and doesn't scale as swiftly.
:)
:) I'd be blown away if they can do that over the Internet, and probably still impressed on a LAN. (I'm feeling too lazy to break out my calculation-envelopes. :)
If you take the naive approach to implementing state synchronization in a real-time system (like a video game) your server consumes upstream bandwidth proportional to the number of updates per second, times the number of participants, times the number of items synchronized. In a game, you have to synchronize each player at least, so we're talking quadratic bandwidth in just the players. That's how I did it when I had to, and we scaled to at least six players with plenty of breathing room. (Our dev team had six players. I don't think we ever brought in more testers to push it harder.
If you take a less naive approach, you can get that from quadratic to n*log(n). And you can get a lot of constant-time and common-case improvements (the above is all worst-case.) You can find that approach somewhere in "Game Programming Gems," IIRC.
I don't know if that has been proven as a lower bound, but I'd squint hard at anything that claims to be faster.
Can it handle 60 players who all have line of site to each other? That's a tough stress test.
> I'm going to spend the savings here at home anyway.
Yeah. On more of the cheapest foreign goods that take skilled jobs out of our childrens hands. Great. Little Billy can grow up to be a sales clerk, because that's the only job Americans are good for anymore: selling stuff to Americans. That'll keep the dollar strong.
Why is it so sheik to be a libertarian these days, anyway? Adam Smith is dead, literally and figuratively. His models don't work in the information and power asymmetric world we live in, no matter how well they worked in agrarian America.
Example:
If branding as a marketing technique can yield positive gains then consumers are not rational as per his assumptions. Banding works. Therefore, one of the key assumptions behind the free market model fails: rationality. QED. The other assumptions are just as trivially broken today as well. Symmetry of information. Right. Go fish.
Twenty percent of the people in this country control eighty-five percent of the resources. But that's nothing: the top one percent owns fourty percent of the resources. And these aren't the hardest workers, and they aren't the smartest people, either. I've met enough of them to know. They just have always had enough money to make more of it. It's the new monarchy, not meritocracy.
The GDP grows, yet jobs disappear, and average salaries drop. More people enter the workforce than leave it. So where the hell do those earnings go? Not to the people who earned them. Their jobs get cut, or they take a paycut, or they're getting paid a dollar an hour.
Don't you feel robbed by your free market? That alchemy of the 21st centry?
Civic pride. Keeping your dollars as close to you as possible, by giving them to companies that are close to you, keeps that money within your local economy, ultimately benefiting you as well. What 'close' means can vary a lot. It can mean buying books from your local bookstore instead of B&N, so more of that capital goes to the same guy who may spend it at the very company you work for. Or may buy coffee from the coffee shop you like, keeping it in business.
Or it could mean, as it does here, keeping money and jobs within your country. Keeping the trade deficit less up (can't say down, can we?) Researching which companies outsource and giving them your patronage instead of buying a Dell might keep a laid off Dell techie with three more years experience than you from getting a job you otherwise would have been given.
Going out of your way to support companies whose policies you support is an admirable thing to do. It encourages corporate values that go beyond shareholder value, in a culture where corporate ethics need a lot of shaking up.
Others who've replied have been a little off, but they raise good points. F90 is around, which is more feature-rich than F77, but pretty close to backwards compatible. No one switches over to F90. Why?
Well.. F90 supports pointers.
Yep. That's it, really. F90 has pointers. Not having pointers is why F77 can compile to greased lightning on crack. This is critical when your supercomputer time (variable expense) is at a premium with respect to your salaried coder's time (fixed expense) and you're working off a grant (with finite cash but loose deadlines.)
And yes, I'm young and I still know Fortran. Like my father and his father before him.
> Pure capitalism prohibits the government from forcibly seizing one persons property to transfer to another person.
You mean taxation?
The benefits of taxation are never spread perfectly evenly so it is unlikely that a system of taxation has ever existed that did not forcefully transer one person's value to another.
Right. And capitalism is an abstract idea, it can prohibit a government from doing nothing.
> The only alternative to capitalism is rationing, otherwise known as the government deciding what products you should have, and handing them over.
That's not true at all. Capitalism is just a way of relating to money. Capital is money that you can invest to get more money. You couldn't do that in the USSR because things like speculating were illegal.
You couldn't do that under Feudalism because peasants were bound to the lord and any payment they accepted from anyone else would likely land them in trouble with that lord.
Feudalism != rationing.
You can't do that in most tribal systems for a number of reasons. Chiefly: it's probably dangerous/improper to get wealthier than the chief.
Many tribal systems don't ration.
I don't know enough about other economic systems to comment on them, but capitalism is not about money. It's about money as a means of production.
Makes me think a gig my Father once had.
My Dad's a structural engineer in California. He has a standing promise from a former client (in the gambling industry) that if his building falls during an earthquake, he's coming after my Dad with a can of gasoline.
I think my Dad thinks of it as a calculated risk. He engineered to 3x spec, and he doesn't expect to ever hear from the guy.
Not flamebait at all, as a second year grad student whose research focuses on security, I think my position on the matter is pretty well-informed. Multics predates C, was an operating system, and had no known buffer overflow vulnerabilities.
That's because it was written in a language that made them less likely to appear. Not impossible. Just less prone. Well-designed standard APIs for example. Imagine that.
The way pointers and arrays are interchangable in C is pretty dangerous too. Makes it impossible for the compiler to do bounds checking. Why do you need retarded stuff like that for a low level language? Are all low level programmers just too lazy to cast properly? I hope not!
We need C like we need more buffer overflow vulnerabilities!
Let the miserable wretch die, or overhaul it to be type safe.
There are some things that are better buried.
Everything you say is correct. But I think sometimes people point out that fact so they can instantly decredit a claim that is discomforting for them to consider without giving it too much thought. Remember, wherever there is causation, there will be correlation, so correlation isn't such a bad place to start looking.
f 00 /family.html
Here's a sociological study that tries to construct causal relationships based on interviews with subjects. If the original poster is reading this, he might want to consider looking going up a directory or two and poking around that website:
http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/users/goguen/courses/275
Blindly looking for clusters of points in a large set of data doesn't show causal relationships. It's harder than that. But some sciences do try to show it. Sociology is big on that, so is molecular Biology, from what I've seen of it.
Some other people have posted the one-word version of this, but there's more to it...
Maxis got the same treatment. EA is closing down operations in Walnut Creek, and moving them to some place on the S.F. Peninsula.
Walnut Creek is about two hours away from there in morning traffic, AFAIK. Sucks to be at Origin more, but it sucks to be at Maxis too.
But the main post made it sound worse than I think it actually is. It's not like Origin is going away just yet. Who knows? They could pull through relocating across three states.
Yeah, OK, I guess they're screwed.
The problem with the antitrust cases against MS so far have been that they've taken place after the illegal activity. I feel pretty strongly that Google should sue for a preliminary injunction against MS promoting any new search engine via any media embedded in the client (desktop icons, homepage, et cetera.) Such a judgement might come along in time for it to be useful, and it would leave them on much more even footing.
It might be hard to get though because such a judgement would necessarily drive a wedge between MS's network services (MSN, messenger, passport, hotmail, et cetera) and their OS/application software. For example, it might mean that if MS wanted to embed their new search engine in MSN, they couldn't use it as IE's default homepage anymore. They'd have to pick between using MSN to promote the search engine and using IE to promote MSN.
I think that would be a Good Thing, but a judge could see it as a strong argument against such an injunction.
To what standard do you hold your president for day-to-day communications? Armed messengers with one-time-pads for every communique?
I'm guessing the president uses conventional phone lines for voice, except in special circumstances. Compared to that, properly encrypted e-mail doesn't look too bad.
If you have the resources to task an intern with swapping public keys over a secure channel (out of band) with everyone you care to chat with, e-mail can be made quite secure with respect to authenticity, integrity, and privacy.
Bush, like all modern presidents, has the Secret Service doing the same job of sorting through mail from the public. That's necessary. And I don't think it's odd at all if he has people read stuff to him while he's trying to do something else. If he's really that busy, more power to him.
But if the cabinet member who wrote the report is sitting there in front of you, and you make him read it aloud, that's a different story alltogether. That is a meeting. You don't have anywhere else to be, or anything else to do until it's over. Oral dictation is much slower than reading, so you're only wasting everybody's time.
Because it's not about time, it's either about lacking certain skills, or the presence of someone who lacks sufficient discipline to stay on task and absorb the material independently.
> Always be careful who you let do your thinking for you.
That's not fair at all. I trust an author to check his facts, so when I cite things put forth in a book as facts, I expect to be taken seriously. I'm no publishing expert, but I understand some publishers employ "fact checkers" to make sure they don't get sued.
Moore does accuse Bush of being illiterate in that book, but I didn't buy it at the time. It really is kind of far fetched when you only have those two bits of information to go on. I'd even go so far as to say that Moore came off as an ass. But nothing has come out to refute his accusation. Far from it.
If Jr doesn't "trust" e-mail, I call that a highly suspicious pattern. I can't imagine going without instantaneous, securable, asynchronous global communication, and my life is (hopefully) less demanding. But I'm still waiting on that link.
* Jr. himself stated that he doesn't read the newspaper.
Links
* In his book "Stupid White Men," Michael Moore claims that Bush has cabinet members read their reports to him.
* Moore also claims that Jr's parents heavily favor illiteracy foundations in their charitable contributions.
If you can find a link to that report that says Jr doesn't "trust" e-mail, I'd really like to check it out. Googling hasn't turned it up for me.
My understanding is that much of Eastern Europe is way behind in acquisition of new tech. Few people have a computer at all, and of those who do, fewer are state of the art.
I think you're right, that these computers could be put to a much better use, but I don't think that use is folding.
A big reason why there are so many discs for each season is that consumers are more willing to shell out $$$ for DVD compilations if the disc count is high. It has nothing to do with how much content you're buying anymore beyond an ever-eroding threshold of credibility.
-Lux
I can actually hear the u/bi difference now after about a year of listening to people speak it. But you're right, in much the same way an English reader can skim text with the interior letters mangled, a Russian listener can decipher pretty much any mangling of vowels in a Russian word. That simplifies getting to a basic level of understanding with the language, but probably postpones mastery.
I'd rather be an English speaker learning Russian than a Russian speaker learning English.
Sisors. Scissors. Scicors. Cissors? Seriously, our language could use some linguists.
This is hillarious!! They have a TOS!
By making a typo, you supposedly agree that if their site overflows a buffer in your browser and wipes your HD, they are not liable.
Okay, terrible example for many reasons, but I still think it's pretty laughable that they claim that the "user" agrees to certain terms of service by "utilizing" this little piece of indirection.
-Lux
When one is learning to read a new language, it is a deterministic, serial process, the letters are scanned in order as you sound out the word based on the rules you know. I'm trying to learn Russian now, so I'm getting reacquanted with the proccess.
Deterministic serial processing is what computers are good at.
Human brains are neural nets, which are much better at massively parallel, nondeterministic computation. Try this: pick a random word on this page. The meaning sprang to mind, right? No left to right scanning needed? I notice that at about the same moment that my eyes focus on the first letter of a word, the meaning springs to mind.
I think this is a fascinating hack because it may be giving us clues about how our brain accomplishes the task of breaking up the task of reading a word to leverage it's strengths against the problem at hand.
-Lux
Canadan, Limey, it's all the same thing:m l
http://www.theonion.com/3935/top_story.ht
Besides, it's easy to get confused when ya'll talk so funny.
I think most security professionals would agree that a worm infection attempt constitutes an attack on a system. Therefore, I have more than a little skepticism about these results, given recent events.
I'm guessing they're only counting intrusion attempts that involved humans on the other end of the wire. That's pretty misleading.
-Lux
Sounds more like a job offer than a grant. They're very different things.
/. :)
If I were to take a job with some acronym, I would probably be working at a secured site, and not be allowed to talk about my work.
However, I am a grad student working at a university. My research is being funded by a military grant, but the checks come from the university. I will be allowed to publish my findings. In fact, there is a good chance my code will be GPLed some time in the next couple of years, although it is copyrighted by the university, so I don't have complete control over that.
Speaking of my code, I should get back to that and stop reading
-Lux
The best thing to do, I think, would be to cap tech patents at seven years, so that companies have to keep frantically coming up with new tech. Wastes more on lawyers -- it costs a couple of thousand per patent, and more patents would have to be produced to compensate -- but that at least alleviates some of the effect.
I've been thinking about this, and I disagree. I think the fundamental problem is that the way the system works now, more patents are better for big companies. Always. One way to alleviate that is to rework the economics a bit.
If bad patents can be made into a liability, industry self-regulation may emerge. One way to do this would be to impose a stiff fine for patents that get struck down. Combined with a streamlined review process that is cheap for the challenger, this could make the patent system bareable.
However it gets done, the solution needs to continue to reward good patents without encouraging spurious ones. We need fewer patents, not more.