Linux will win the desktop war? There is no desktop war. Microsoft owns the desktop. Apple is nipping at their dominance. Linux is not even on the map. There isn't a war, not even a battle.
I just spend a couple of days trying to choose a few books in this area. My interest was as a computer guy needing to get filled in on the bio side of things.
Here are the books I ended up ordering:
Every normal paper bill has a serial number on it. ATMs could easily scan each bill as it is handed out, associating the person's account with that bill. When merchants turn in bills they can be scanned again. Or merchants can have point-of-sale bill scanners (to detect funny-money, of course). Clear all this data in a central location, apply some fuzzy-logic, and you have a prety damn good idea of who spent money where.
How many times do they need to find bills from your ATM withdrawl in the pot dealer's deposit bag before they knock on your door?
This idea was written up at DEC SRC years ago if I am not mistaken.
I've long thought there was a way to make televised gaming appeal to a wide audience, and make some gaming company a lot of cash along the way...
The crux of the idea is that it is possible to make games look stunning for television. Sure, the xbox can generate some pretty graphics. But, that is a cheap consumer device rendering in real time. Why not record telemetry from "live" games, and render Final-Fantasy-quality versions offline for later televised viewing? Survivor has made it clear that you can successfully air a show long after it is taped, as long as the outcome is kept a secret.
Imagine the beautiful imagery a powerful rendering farm could generate for the televised version of the game. Offline rendering also affords the opportunity to select camera angles and lay on interesting commentary, etc. Shows like Survivor and Junkyard Wars are much better due to the quality editing which helps to highlight (manufacture) story lines and competitive tension. You also don't need to air every second of the game. Editing could make a tedious multi-hour marathon session into an engaging 30-minute TV show.
Create a multiplayer game, ala Quake, where players can compete in different interesting arenas, but the basic controls are always the same. Players compete in a series of online tournaments to qualify for the big televised championship. The "home version" used for these online qualifiers renders at normal xbox/PC/etc levels of detail, of course.
The top 10 online players are invited to the televised competition every week/month/quarter (they may even play it from their living rooms). They compete inside a new, never before seen, arena. Every move, shot, hit, collision, etc is recorded (this is the telemetry). This telemetry is fed into a high-end rendering farm. An editing team selects camera angles and creates scenes. They overlay music and commentary, perhaps even add audio from the players' mics. The show could be ready to air within a very short time (days or less) if desired.
Shortly after this new arena airs on TV in all its render-farm glory, it is released as a "home version". This new arena is then used for the online qualifiers to select the next round of competitors for the TV show.
This is probably way too much detail, but it's an idea that I've been kicking around for awhile.
Presumably, the authors have some test computation(*) they run against each image that reveals if it contains steno. Take that test function, and put it into a browser plugin. Every image downloaded by the browser is tested. Hits for steno are then posted to some central public website log, for all (including law enforcement) to see.
Users install the plugin as an altruistic act, much as they choose to run the SETI@Home screensaver. In fact, this thing could just be a screensaver that runs against all images in the browser cache during idle time. You would get moderate coverage of the web, but would likely miss tiny, unpopular pages. Unfortunately, these are likely to be the kind of contrived pages that would be used to post steno'd images.
Or call the cool gang at Google or Inktomi and have them crawl and test a large fraction of the web as a service to their country. Their customers would probably be cool with stale searches for a couple weeks if they explained why. The gov't could build a big cluster to do this themselves for very little money (couple $100k).
This is actually a project that could help locate real live terrorist steno, if any exists and has not already been pulled down. If they went to the trouble of using steno, the data is certainly encrypted. But, I'm sure some interesting traffic analysis would be possible.
What are the moral implications of such a project? If image file steno is always detectable given enough effort, do its users really have any expectation of secrecy? How long before the anon-remailer crowd starts generating tons of steno background noise all over the web, so everyone can hide more easily?
(*) Their test function looks pretty basic. Since this is a distributed idea, it could probably do a more detailed analysis. Someone correct me, but even very sophisticated image file steno is detectable if you do the correct analysis, right?
PS: Ebay is a horrible choice. I believe you need to provide a credit card # to become a seller. Ebay wants a fairly strong notion of seller identity, so they can identify and remove people who lie/cheat.
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Linux will win the desktop war? There is no desktop war. Microsoft owns the desktop. Apple is nipping at their dominance. Linux is not even on the map. There isn't a war, not even a battle.
Human Molecular Genetics 2: Looks to be a great primer on all the biology background.
Bioinformatics: A Practical Guide...: This book is a detailed tour of the online databases and existing tools for analysis of genes and proteins.
Algorithms on Strings, Trees and Sequences: This is a book for real computer science types who want to do high-performance implementations of new tools.
How many times do they need to find bills from your ATM withdrawl in the pot dealer's deposit bag before they knock on your door?
This idea was written up at DEC SRC years ago if I am not mistaken.
The crux of the idea is that it is possible to make games look stunning for television. Sure, the xbox can generate some pretty graphics. But, that is a cheap consumer device rendering in real time. Why not record telemetry from "live" games, and render Final-Fantasy-quality versions offline for later televised viewing? Survivor has made it clear that you can successfully air a show long after it is taped, as long as the outcome is kept a secret.
Imagine the beautiful imagery a powerful rendering farm could generate for the televised version of the game. Offline rendering also affords the opportunity to select camera angles and lay on interesting commentary, etc. Shows like Survivor and Junkyard Wars are much better due to the quality editing which helps to highlight (manufacture) story lines and competitive tension. You also don't need to air every second of the game. Editing could make a tedious multi-hour marathon session into an engaging 30-minute TV show.
Create a multiplayer game, ala Quake, where players can compete in different interesting arenas, but the basic controls are always the same. Players compete in a series of online tournaments to qualify for the big televised championship. The "home version" used for these online qualifiers renders at normal xbox/PC/etc levels of detail, of course.
The top 10 online players are invited to the televised competition every week/month/quarter (they may even play it from their living rooms). They compete inside a new, never before seen, arena. Every move, shot, hit, collision, etc is recorded (this is the telemetry). This telemetry is fed into a high-end rendering farm. An editing team selects camera angles and creates scenes. They overlay music and commentary, perhaps even add audio from the players' mics. The show could be ready to air within a very short time (days or less) if desired.
Shortly after this new arena airs on TV in all its render-farm glory, it is released as a "home version". This new arena is then used for the online qualifiers to select the next round of competitors for the TV show.
This is probably way too much detail, but it's an idea that I've been kicking around for awhile.
Screw that. Just build a protocol client that advertises all of them and generates the .wav file on-the-fly whenever one is requested.
Users install the plugin as an altruistic act, much as they choose to run the SETI@Home screensaver. In fact, this thing could just be a screensaver that runs against all images in the browser cache during idle time. You would get moderate coverage of the web, but would likely miss tiny, unpopular pages. Unfortunately, these are likely to be the kind of contrived pages that would be used to post steno'd images.
Or call the cool gang at Google or Inktomi and have them crawl and test a large fraction of the web as a service to their country. Their customers would probably be cool with stale searches for a couple weeks if they explained why. The gov't could build a big cluster to do this themselves for very little money (couple $100k).
This is actually a project that could help locate real live terrorist steno, if any exists and has not already been pulled down. If they went to the trouble of using steno, the data is certainly encrypted. But, I'm sure some interesting traffic analysis would be possible.
What are the moral implications of such a project? If image file steno is always detectable given enough effort, do its users really have any expectation of secrecy? How long before the anon-remailer crowd starts generating tons of steno background noise all over the web, so everyone can hide more easily?
(*) Their test function looks pretty basic. Since this is a distributed idea, it could probably do a more detailed analysis. Someone correct me, but even very sophisticated image file steno is detectable if you do the correct analysis, right?
PS: Ebay is a horrible choice. I believe you need to provide a credit card # to become a seller. Ebay wants a fairly strong notion of seller identity, so they can identify and remove people who lie/cheat.