That's where I disagree....kind of. In the olden days an author had to quote the "best resource" that the audience needed to know about, yes. With out the specific source being quoted the author and the audience were adrift in a sea of ideas. Today that source is the internet. If the author tells me that a particular team, at a particular lab has published a paper on a topic, then I don't need him quoting a web page.
Of course not, if a particular team has published an article, then you should be quoting the source for that article.
I will use Google and any other web based resource to find the web page myself. And if that resource is missing I will tell the internet community that the resource is missing and the author, or the community, will set me straight. This is dynamic information interchange. Self monitoring, self documenting, self governing, and self correcting. It doesn't need to be static. Not here. Not for this purpose.
This is, assuming, that the resource still exists. Chances are quite good with this method that the resource will not exist in 5 years or 10 years.
But what you are missing here is that journals and libraries, far from being horse and buggy thinking, is perhaps the best P2P network ever created. I can walk into any research library and ask for Volume 24, Issue 4 of Educational Psychologist and can find it in under 10 minutes (usually I don't need to even go into the library). That reference is never going to change, will never need correcting or monitoring. It will be there 5 years from now when the team that published it has migrated to the four winds, taking their web sites with them, editing out the old stuff. It will be there in 10 years when the primary authors are dead.
There are other advantages to the static reference. If I see Krackhardt (1987) or Nonaka (1994), I know what the author is talking about. I can pull up the reference from my files (indexed by author and name.) Again, this reference will not change even if the journal goes off the web, or the authors change jobs.
And perhaps we write for different reasons. I write to communicate, not to send my readers on a wild goose chase through google.
There already is such an identifier. It's called a Universal Resource Identifier, or URI. See Berners-Lee essay Cool URIs Don't Change.
However, URIs are a completely different beast from ISBNs. To start with, a URI identifies a specific instance of a resource on a specific server. As such it is more akin to a library of congress designation coupled with the address of the library.
In contrast, an ISBN uniquely identifies a book no matter where it is located. I can ask any librarian or bookseller in the U.S. or Europe "I need ISBN#" and get an answer regardless of whether they use LOC or Dewey Decimal. A similar method works for Journal citations. At most libraries knowing the title/volume/number is sufficient to find a periodical resource no matter what filing system is used.
One of the things missed in this discussion is that libraries are massive peer-to-peer networks that use high redundancy and dense networking to deliver resources. If a library does not have a work available, they can get it through inter-library loan.
I don't think so. The author has a legitimate complaint. In writing a scientific article you select the best resources that you feel your audience needs to know about. What is the point in having those resources available if the audience can't get to them?
There has to be a balance between so chaotic that noone can find anything, and so static that nothing ever changes.
In fact, although a lot of people here are dissing the traditional library system, libraries have been doing p2p information distribution for years. It is a system with a unique identifier for every resource, high redundancy, and a fairly efficient method for leveraging that redundancy to insure access to resources. If the Northwestern University library burns down, most resources would still be available through interlibrary loan within a few days.
There have been efforts to provide for the same unique access and redundancy with URLs by adding more metadata. However, in the absence of widespread use, we are stuck with fulltext searches.
Who the hell told you to cite a webpage? Might as well cite a poster you saw downtown. If the webpage is a reputable source in the first place, it'll keep it around permanently.
Not always true. The U.S. Government was a good source for research information until the political purge of research articles that disagreed with the administration on key policy issues. The basic response? The NIH, Department of Education, FDA and EPA's responsibility is to promote policy, not provide information to the public. (Although this problem is not limited to the Internet, libraries that were public archives for government documents were ordered to pull "sensitive" material after 9-11.) In addition there is the problem of upgrading infrastructure. The URL may work today, but what happens when the site moves to a more scalable system?
Still better than scientific journals that are squirrelled away in the basements of university libraries - anyone can get to a webpage.
I don't know about the journals you read, but 90% of the ones I read are already on the web or archived through a distribution service. (Although another loss to reseach for politics may be ERIC which in education has been a source for many interesting "minor" papers and conference proceedings.)
The real value of journals has never been print publication, but in the peer-review process. The reason why citations in professional journals carry more weight is because the reader knows that the article had to have run the gauntlet of critical reviews from expert peers.
Now, granted, web page citations should probably be treated on the level of personal correspondence rather than as authoritative source. But to say that web-based resources move or vanish because they loose their relevance is missing a major flaw in how the web works. One professional organization I'm a member of tottered on the edge of bankrupcy for about a year. If it had gone under, web access to some of the key works in the field would have vanished overnight, and the works themselves dumped into a copyright limbo.
This is something as unusual as a fantasy book that I enjoyed reading. Except for Tolkien I postively loath fantasy - all that Eddings and Shananananana crap - which seems mostly to be stupid D&D induced masturbatory escapism recorded and published for God knows what reason.....
This isn't about kings and dwarves and dragons, but rather set in a fantasy world with technological level fixed in early industrial, rather than medieval, times.
Isn't this rather like criticizing science fiction by dismissing Star Trek and Star Wars novelizations? Or criticizing contemporary horror as an endless string of vampire novels. (I agree with you on Shanara and Eddings BTW.) A large chunk of fantasy has nothing to do with kings, dwarves and dragons. Urban Mythic Fantasy writers like Gaiman, DeLint, Bull, Shetterly, Crowley, Pullman and Windling are probably better representatives of the genre as a whole. Mieville's first novel, King Rat is a good example.
I can't put it into words. I can only say again that I am heart-broken.
To paraphrase Tolkien's introduction to one of the last editions of LotRs published while he was still alive: It is just a book! Get over it!
Given his consistent modesty regarding his work, I suspect that he would be overjoyed that anyone would take pains to adapt his work to film. Given his strong respect for the constraints of medium and form, I suspect that he would appreciate the need to cut in adaptation. Given his expressed frustration at the fanbase that took him way too seriously in his lifetime, I suspect that he would be a bit amused and worried about the handwringing going on over editorial cuts. And given his dislike of fossilized treatments of classic stories, I suspect his primary concern with an adaptation would be "is worth watching" than "is it authentic."
Well, yeah. That seems to be one case where the market is offering a fair price given that the bulk of their income is tips. If they are not worth the service, why are they being tipped so much?
Yes, but apsfilter could not see the new driver settings for the printer and the documentation was no help in figuring out where to copy the configuation files.
I had major problems setting up apsfilter with an HP5550 (selected because of claimed compatibility). I could get good but not great output through aps filter. I find that both of them have really bad documentation (although half of the problem was with a bug in the hpijs port.) In both cases printing was a bit harder than it needed to be.
While you wouldn't call any of Tartakovsky's works beautiful when compared to Disney, they do have a style that stays wonderfully consistent and someone eye-pleasing.
Actually, I would. But then again, I've been underimpressed with Disney since Ashman died. I wouldn't compare Tartakovsky to Disney but to Chuck Jones and Tex Avery.
How many laymen are steeped in Baudrillard and Buddhism? How many seats at each showing are filled by cognitive scientists?
Is it really necessary to be so ham-fisted with these concepts however? Compare the Matrix as a film to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon for example, a movie that managed to tell a Buddhist story while still being entertaining. The best movies about philosophy are the ones that don't feel like philosophy lessons. While I can agree that there might in fact be something more there, (although as Star Wars proved, it is easy to go back after the fact and claim some grand achetypical significance for a hack job after the fact) there is certainly room to critique Matrix as a work of art.
As a work of philosophy, well, I find that even the most potent ideas in the film are rather weak.
is there any/.er who can honestly talk smack about Bound? Aside from the need for more clutch scenes...
Well, this is why the Matrix has become so darn dissapointing. Bound was a film that kept me on the edge of my seat in that I had no idea what to expect from minute to minute. The decline in their craft seems to parallel that of Bryan Singer who created one of the best contemporary film noirs to do the X-men series. Or even Spielberg who just can't stay away from the schmaltz any more.
My favorite theory about the ending was that McGoohan, having his production contract cut out from under him, decided to create a bizzare ending to spite the producers.
Personally, I'd want one of these. This thing would be the ultimate recycler. Something like this would eclipse techniques like TDP for taking matter and coverting it back into its root atoms.
The reason you are not likely to see one of these in your home has to do with the major limits on nanotechnology, time and energy. Energy is the ultimate currency of life. The reason why you don't see our existing nanobots working with even small chunks of metal, much less a Ferrari is because there is no "money" in it. Iron, titanium and aluminum all require a ton of energy to keep from oxidation. Working at the molecular level just makes the problem worse, with a slug of iron one can limit oxidation to the surface. Fabrication are the ultimate energy sinks.
In addition there is the issue of complexity. Existing nano-systems build big things as fractal self-organizing collections of small things using a few simple rules. The designs of nature and the designs of humans are extremely different. Don't expect nanobots to create books.
If you have the raw materials to start with, it is easier to just work on the macro scale. Why build a book atom by atom when you can start with fiber? Why build a road atom from atom when you can just dig gravel out of the ground?
Of course, nanotechnology can be useful in other ways. But much of the hype reminds me of perpetual motion devices.
However, what's wrong with the "grey goo" argument? What we must remember about nanomachines is that they (theoretically -- look at any of the CAD designs made in the last decade) have no redundancy whatsoever, so if one part goes wrong, the whole thing is broken.
Um, other than the fact that if such a grey goo is possible, don't you think that one would have evolved already? The reason why we have not seen a grey goo, or a superbug is that there are significant trade-offs that favor specialization. Also basic metabolic rates are limited by available energy.
When people have the ability to build anything they want from the atom up, the only thing constraining us will be those constraints that our society dictates. (Everything else is merely requires sufficently talented engineers.) Unfortunatly, the dangerous aspects of nanotech also are only constrained by our society.When people have the ability to build anything they want from the atom up, the only thing constraining us will be those constraints that our society dictates. (Everything else is merely requires sufficently talented engineers.) Unfortunatly, the dangerous aspects of nanotech also are only constrained by our society.
Nanobots in the form of bacteria, have been on the Earth for billions of years. The extensive history of activity at this scale deflates both the claims of grey goo pessimists and the claims of boundless possibility constrained only by society. Regardless of the talent of engineers, physics and chemestry pose some very hard constraints on what is possible.
The surest way to stifle innovation is to demand that the innovator prove that the invention will cause no harm. As we all know, proving a negative is a daunting task and 'harm' is a nebulous concept. All articles like this do is spread FUD. Fear of the unknown, Uncertainty about the future, and doubt in the benefits of progress.
But isn't FUD sometimes prudent when dealing with a substance that is proposed to be released into the environment in large quantities? After all, we had the "better living through radioactivity" that included fluoroscope X-ray machines in shoe stores until, whoops, excessive X-ray exposure was found to cause cancer. PCBs were an excellent technology for electronics, contained in hundreds of consumer products as well as industrial electrical equipment until they were found to have their own dark side.
Progress is one thing but nobody wants another Love Canal, aspestos suit, or nuclear waste lagoons. A few million dollars in testing up front can save billions of dollars in cleanup costs down the road.
This is actually one of the things that I like about BSD. Stability and security improvements to the old version are still being developed until the new version has time to "burn in".
Both CURRENT and STABLE are tags for the system under development. CURRENT is the latest bleeding edge version. STABLE includes those elements of CURRENT that have proven to be pretty much reliable. Once the STABLE branch is solidified, it gets promoted to RELEASE. Typically the process goes CURRENT->STABLE->RELEASE.
If you don't download the images then you *probably* have no way to differentiate spam from any other mail you may receive from online acocunts, pix of friends kids, etc and the spammers win again. If the information is in the image, then there is nothing to key off of, right?
There is still the huge part of most messages that spamers can't control, the route from their computer to mine. The filter "remembers" what the headers of messages from my family and friends typically look like, and the web hosts of people who send me photos. A family photo sent to me (aww, how sweet) is likely to be sent to other names that score strongly on my list of ham tokens.
This is one of those things that is frequently forgotten in talking about probabilistic spam filtering. Changing the body is of limited effectiveness in breaking the filter.
Freedom to read is an essential element for democracy. To ensure that everyone has this freedom, we have public libraries to help ensure that everyone, no matter how poor, can learn on their own. To really have freedom to read, you need freedom to read anonymously. If you're afraid of the ramifications of reading something, you are effectively censoring it. Another wave of McCarthyism might drum up another irrational wave of hatred of communism. Suddenly a list of who has checked out and read Karl Marx's books would be very useful for tracking down people deemed to be unamerican. Perhaps the list was gained from library records (a reason many libraries do not maintain records longer than necessary), or through hidden RFID monitors on the sidewalk by the library scanning your books and your RFID library card (or one of the many other RFID items purchased on your credit card). As a friend pointed out, "Once you've burned the books, you have to track down everyone who read the books and burn them too."
A lot of this paranoia is based on the belief that law enforcement does not have much easier methods to discover what we are reading than to standardize RFID tags across thousands of library systems and place sensors at convenient locations. Linking a book to you through RIFD would require having the complete library catalog plus access to your purchases as well. Why go through this when a basic subpoena will do the trick most of the time?
The basic problem with this handwringing is that it treats privacy as a technical problem rather than a social problem. If the black hats want to know that you are reading, they can find out now. Mitnick and Schneier have both pointed out that the weakest link in any form of security and privacy is social and psychological rather than technical. Social engineering has always been the most powerful tool of law enforcement and spies, and is likely to continue to be for the forseeable future.
Meanwhile, RFID tags have the pontential to solve problems that cost a heck of a lot in terms of time, money and energy. I can't count how much time I've wasted (and the library has wasted on me) in looking for materials that have been misshevlved, stolen, or lost between departments.
What you said in your conclusion is the answer to the problem. The government must be held to the highest standards. Privacy is not going to be won by a kneejerk reaction against new technology by the tinfoil hat sect of the EFF. It will be won in the courts by demanding that law enforcement be held to the highest standards of probable cause before access to library databases become useful to them.
I don't need a UID in my shirt or on a can of tomatoes and no one else does either. A number that identifies the shirt as a shirt of a specific size and color is sufficient for inventory purposes. Bar codes have done this very well and are still more practical than these invasive little fuckers so many other fuckers wish to present as "inevitable" and "practical".
However, most library books are unique items in the inventory, therefore generic information such as size and color does not apply. Bar codes also depend on the item being at location described in the computer. Given how much time I've spent cooling my heels waiting for librarians to search for the odd book that has gotten lost somewhere between check in and shelving, this seems worthwhile.
Actually, Montblanc has a bad rep among pen lovers as showy, overpriced and pretentious with not enough quality to back it up. Pelikan seems to be to be beloved among pen lovers as opposed to management drones looking for a status symbol to match their suit.
And I was wanting to build one, but a 2.2ghz celeron with a low-end mini-atx motherboard is cheaper then a mini-ITX 800mhz C3 motherboard and 10x more capable.
I suppose it depends on where you are looking. By cheaper the price comparison's I've found are only about $10 difference. However there are other design considerations as well. For the purpose this is intended (home firewall, web server and file server) 800MHz is overkill. I'm writing my dissertation on a 950MHz VIA EPIA with OpenOffice and 950MHz is plenty for that.
just buy a efficiant fan, underclock/undervolt the cpu and get a nice heatsink and you'll be able to make it as quiet as any C3, except for the fanless ones.
Doesn't underclocking remove the basic reason for going with the Celeron to begin with? An underclocked Celeron is still a dog in the power consumption area, and by the time you spend the extra money on the heat sink and fan, you might as well just buy the EPIA.
This is not to say that this second type of university simply allows the students to run rampant on the network. But the tools are different. Instead of yanking network access at a hint of trouble and invasively scanning people's PCs, they use traffic shaping and selective blocking, not because they think P2P is evil but simply to conserve bandwidth. They treat their students as reasonable human beings because they realize that they are ultimately the university's customers.
How is port-scanning for open servers invasive? I guess I see a bit of hypocracy here in that I don't think that anyone would object to security scans for open mail relays that can be used by spammers, or for known worms and viruses before they spread.
I guess I don't see how it is not a violation for Joe User to download files from my service on port 8080, but is a violation for my ISP to download files from my service on port 8080.
I agree that traffic shaping is a better idea in general. But caveat emptor here. If you don't agree with the terms of service, don't sign the service agreement.
The report itself stated quite clearly in several places that Dr Geer was the Chief Technical Officer of @Stake.
At least in academic writing, identifying your organizational affiliation is a requirement to assess conflict of interest. One can not assume that because a researcher is affiliated with an organization on the cover of a technical report, that they are speaking as an official representative of the organization.
Slashdot Mirror
That's where I disagree....kind of. In the olden days an author had to quote the "best resource" that the audience needed to know about, yes. With out the specific source being quoted the author and the audience were adrift in a sea of ideas. Today that source is the internet. If the author tells me that a particular team, at a particular lab has published a paper on a topic, then I don't need him quoting a web page.
Of course not, if a particular team has published an article, then you should be quoting the source for that article.
I will use Google and any other web based resource to find the web page myself. And if that resource is missing I will tell the internet community that the resource is missing and the author, or the community, will set me straight. This is dynamic information interchange. Self monitoring, self documenting, self governing, and self correcting. It doesn't need to be static. Not here. Not for this purpose.
This is, assuming, that the resource still exists. Chances are quite good with this method that the resource will not exist in 5 years or 10 years.
But what you are missing here is that journals and libraries, far from being horse and buggy thinking, is perhaps the best P2P network ever created. I can walk into any research library and ask for Volume 24, Issue 4 of Educational Psychologist and can find it in under 10 minutes (usually I don't need to even go into the library). That reference is never going to change, will never need correcting or monitoring. It will be there 5 years from now when the team that published it has migrated to the four winds, taking their web sites with them, editing out the old stuff. It will be there in 10 years when the primary authors are dead.
There are other advantages to the static reference. If I see Krackhardt (1987) or Nonaka (1994), I know what the author is talking about. I can pull up the reference from my files (indexed by author and name.) Again, this reference will not change even if the journal goes off the web, or the authors change jobs.
And perhaps we write for different reasons. I write to communicate, not to send my readers on a wild goose chase through google.
There already is such an identifier. It's called a Universal Resource Identifier, or URI. See Berners-Lee essay Cool URIs Don't Change.
However, URIs are a completely different beast from ISBNs. To start with, a URI identifies a specific instance of a resource on a specific server. As such it is more akin to a library of congress designation coupled with the address of the library.
In contrast, an ISBN uniquely identifies a book no matter where it is located. I can ask any librarian or bookseller in the U.S. or Europe "I need ISBN#" and get an answer regardless of whether they use LOC or Dewey Decimal. A similar method works for Journal citations. At most libraries knowing the title/volume/number is sufficient to find a periodical resource no matter what filing system is used.
One of the things missed in this discussion is that libraries are massive peer-to-peer networks that use high redundancy and dense networking to deliver resources. If a library does not have a work available, they can get it through inter-library loan.
I don't think so. The author has a legitimate complaint. In writing a scientific article you select the best resources that you feel your audience needs to know about. What is the point in having those resources available if the audience can't get to them?
There has to be a balance between so chaotic that noone can find anything, and so static that nothing ever changes.
In fact, although a lot of people here are dissing the traditional library system, libraries have been doing p2p information distribution for years. It is a system with a unique identifier for every resource, high redundancy, and a fairly efficient method for leveraging that redundancy to insure access to resources. If the Northwestern University library burns down, most resources would still be available through interlibrary loan within a few days.
There have been efforts to provide for the same unique access and redundancy with URLs by adding more metadata. However, in the absence of widespread use, we are stuck with fulltext searches.
Who the hell told you to cite a webpage? Might as well cite a poster you saw downtown. If the webpage is a reputable source in the first place, it'll keep it around permanently.
Not always true. The U.S. Government was a good source for research information until the political purge of research articles that disagreed with the administration on key policy issues. The basic response? The NIH, Department of Education, FDA and EPA's responsibility is to promote policy, not provide information to the public. (Although this problem is not limited to the Internet, libraries that were public archives for government documents were ordered to pull "sensitive" material after 9-11.) In addition there is the problem of upgrading infrastructure. The URL may work today, but what happens when the site moves to a more scalable system?
Still better than scientific journals that are squirrelled away in the basements of university libraries - anyone can get to a webpage.
I don't know about the journals you read, but 90% of the ones I read are already on the web or archived through a distribution service. (Although another loss to reseach for politics may be ERIC which in education has been a source for many interesting "minor" papers and conference proceedings.)
The real value of journals has never been print publication, but in the peer-review process. The reason why citations in professional journals carry more weight is because the reader knows that the article had to have run the gauntlet of critical reviews from expert peers.
Now, granted, web page citations should probably be treated on the level of personal correspondence rather than as authoritative source. But to say that web-based resources move or vanish because they loose their relevance is missing a major flaw in how the web works. One professional organization I'm a member of tottered on the edge of bankrupcy for about a year. If it had gone under, web access to some of the key works in the field would have vanished overnight, and the works themselves dumped into a copyright limbo.
This is something as unusual as a fantasy book that I enjoyed reading. Except for Tolkien I postively loath fantasy - all that Eddings and Shananananana crap - which seems mostly to be stupid D&D induced masturbatory escapism recorded and published for God knows what reason.....
This isn't about kings and dwarves and dragons, but rather set in a fantasy world with technological level fixed in early industrial, rather than medieval, times.
Isn't this rather like criticizing science fiction by dismissing Star Trek and Star Wars novelizations? Or criticizing contemporary horror as an endless string of vampire novels. (I agree with you on Shanara and Eddings BTW.) A large chunk of fantasy has nothing to do with kings, dwarves and dragons. Urban Mythic Fantasy writers like Gaiman, DeLint, Bull, Shetterly, Crowley, Pullman and Windling are probably better representatives of the genre as a whole. Mieville's first novel, King Rat is a good example.
I can't put it into words. I can only say again that I am heart-broken.
To paraphrase Tolkien's introduction to one of the last editions of LotRs published while he was still alive: It is just a book! Get over it!
Given his consistent modesty regarding his work, I suspect that he would be overjoyed that anyone would take pains to adapt his work to film. Given his strong respect for the constraints of medium and form, I suspect that he would appreciate the need to cut in adaptation. Given his expressed frustration at the fanbase that took him way too seriously in his lifetime, I suspect that he would be a bit amused and worried about the handwringing going on over editorial cuts. And given his dislike of fossilized treatments of classic stories, I suspect his primary concern with an adaptation would be "is worth watching" than "is it authentic."
Well, yeah. That seems to be one case where the market is offering a fair price given that the bulk of their income is tips. If they are not worth the service, why are they being tipped so much?
Yes, but apsfilter could not see the new driver settings for the printer and the documentation was no help in figuring out where to copy the configuation files.
I had major problems setting up apsfilter with an HP5550 (selected because of claimed compatibility). I could get good but not great output through aps filter. I find that both of them have really bad documentation (although half of the problem was with a bug in the hpijs port.) In both cases printing was a bit harder than it needed to be.
While you wouldn't call any of Tartakovsky's works beautiful when compared to Disney, they do have a style that stays wonderfully consistent and someone eye-pleasing.
Actually, I would. But then again, I've been underimpressed with Disney since Ashman died. I wouldn't compare Tartakovsky to Disney but to Chuck Jones and Tex Avery.
How many laymen are steeped in Baudrillard and Buddhism? How many seats at each showing are filled by cognitive scientists?
/.er who can honestly talk smack about Bound? Aside from the need for more clutch scenes...
Is it really necessary to be so ham-fisted with these concepts however? Compare the Matrix as a film to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon for example, a movie that managed to tell a Buddhist story while still being entertaining. The best movies about philosophy are the ones that don't feel like philosophy lessons. While I can agree that there might in fact be something more there, (although as Star Wars proved, it is easy to go back after the fact and claim some grand achetypical significance for a hack job after the fact) there is certainly room to critique Matrix as a work of art.
As a work of philosophy, well, I find that even the most potent ideas in the film are rather weak.
is there any
Well, this is why the Matrix has become so darn dissapointing. Bound was a film that kept me on the edge of my seat in that I had no idea what to expect from minute to minute. The decline in their craft seems to parallel that of Bryan Singer who created one of the best contemporary film noirs to do the X-men series. Or even Spielberg who just can't stay away from the schmaltz any more.
My favorite theory about the ending was that McGoohan, having his production contract cut out from under him, decided to create a bizzare ending to spite the producers.
Personally, I'd want one of these. This thing would be the ultimate recycler. Something like this would eclipse techniques like TDP for taking matter and coverting it back into its root atoms.
The reason you are not likely to see one of these in your home has to do with the major limits on nanotechnology, time and energy. Energy is the ultimate currency of life. The reason why you don't see our existing nanobots working with even small chunks of metal, much less a Ferrari is because there is no "money" in it. Iron, titanium and aluminum all require a ton of energy to keep from oxidation. Working at the molecular level just makes the problem worse, with a slug of iron one can limit oxidation to the surface. Fabrication are the ultimate energy sinks.
In addition there is the issue of complexity. Existing nano-systems build big things as fractal self-organizing collections of small things using a few simple rules. The designs of nature and the designs of humans are extremely different. Don't expect nanobots to create books.
If you have the raw materials to start with, it is easier to just work on the macro scale. Why build a book atom by atom when you can start with fiber? Why build a road atom from atom when you can just dig gravel out of the ground?
Of course, nanotechnology can be useful in other ways. But much of the hype reminds me of perpetual motion devices.
However, what's wrong with the "grey goo" argument? What we must remember about nanomachines is that they (theoretically -- look at any of the CAD designs made in the last decade) have no redundancy whatsoever, so if one part goes wrong, the whole thing is broken.
Um, other than the fact that if such a grey goo is possible, don't you think that one would have evolved already? The reason why we have not seen a grey goo, or a superbug is that there are significant trade-offs that favor specialization. Also basic metabolic rates are limited by available energy.
When people have the ability to build anything they want from the atom up, the only thing constraining us will be those constraints that our society dictates. (Everything else is merely requires sufficently talented engineers.) Unfortunatly, the dangerous aspects of nanotech also are only constrained by our society.When people have the ability to build anything they want from the atom up, the only thing constraining us will be those constraints that our society dictates. (Everything else is merely requires sufficently talented engineers.) Unfortunatly, the dangerous aspects of nanotech also are only constrained by our society.
Nanobots in the form of bacteria, have been on the Earth for billions of years. The extensive history of activity at this scale deflates both the claims of grey goo pessimists and the claims of boundless possibility constrained only by society. Regardless of the talent of engineers, physics and chemestry pose some very hard constraints on what is possible.
The surest way to stifle innovation is to demand that the innovator prove that the invention will cause no harm. As we all know, proving a negative is a daunting task and 'harm' is a nebulous concept. All articles like this do is spread FUD. Fear of the unknown, Uncertainty about the future, and doubt in the benefits of progress.
But isn't FUD sometimes prudent when dealing with a substance that is proposed to be released into the environment in large quantities? After all, we had the "better living through radioactivity" that included fluoroscope X-ray machines in shoe stores until, whoops, excessive X-ray exposure was found to cause cancer. PCBs were an excellent technology for electronics, contained in hundreds of consumer products as well as industrial electrical equipment until they were found to have their own dark side.
Progress is one thing but nobody wants another Love Canal, aspestos suit, or nuclear waste lagoons. A few million dollars in testing up front can save billions of dollars in cleanup costs down the road.
This is actually one of the things that I like about BSD. Stability and security improvements to the old version are still being developed until the new version has time to "burn in".
Actually, I believe it is the other way around.
Both CURRENT and STABLE are tags for the system under development. CURRENT is the latest bleeding edge version. STABLE includes those elements of CURRENT that have proven to be pretty much reliable. Once the STABLE branch is solidified, it gets promoted to RELEASE. Typically the process goes CURRENT->STABLE->RELEASE.
If you don't download the images then you *probably* have no way to differentiate spam from any other mail you may receive from online acocunts, pix of friends kids, etc and the spammers win again. If the information is in the image, then there is nothing to key off of, right?
There is still the huge part of most messages that spamers can't control, the route from their computer to mine. The filter "remembers" what the headers of messages from my family and friends typically look like, and the web hosts of people who send me photos. A family photo sent to me (aww, how sweet) is likely to be sent to other names that score strongly on my list of ham tokens.
This is one of those things that is frequently forgotten in talking about probabilistic spam filtering. Changing the body is of limited effectiveness in breaking the filter.
Freedom to read is an essential element for democracy. To ensure that everyone has this freedom, we have public libraries to help ensure that everyone, no matter how poor, can learn on their own. To really have freedom to read, you need freedom to read anonymously. If you're afraid of the ramifications of reading something, you are effectively censoring it. Another wave of McCarthyism might drum up another irrational wave of hatred of communism. Suddenly a list of who has checked out and read Karl Marx's books would be very useful for tracking down people deemed to be unamerican. Perhaps the list was gained from library records (a reason many libraries do not maintain records longer than necessary), or through hidden RFID monitors on the sidewalk by the library scanning your books and your RFID library card (or one of the many other RFID items purchased on your credit card). As a friend pointed out, "Once you've burned the books, you have to track down everyone who read the books and burn them too."
A lot of this paranoia is based on the belief that law enforcement does not have much easier methods to discover what we are reading than to standardize RFID tags across thousands of library systems and place sensors at convenient locations. Linking a book to you through RIFD would require having the complete library catalog plus access to your purchases as well. Why go through this when a basic subpoena will do the trick most of the time?
The basic problem with this handwringing is that it treats privacy as a technical problem rather than a social problem. If the black hats want to know that you are reading, they can find out now. Mitnick and Schneier have both pointed out that the weakest link in any form of security and privacy is social and psychological rather than technical. Social engineering has always been the most powerful tool of law enforcement and spies, and is likely to continue to be for the forseeable future.
Meanwhile, RFID tags have the pontential to solve problems that cost a heck of a lot in terms of time, money and energy. I can't count how much time I've wasted (and the library has wasted on me) in looking for materials that have been misshevlved, stolen, or lost between departments.
What you said in your conclusion is the answer to the problem. The government must be held to the highest standards. Privacy is not going to be won by a kneejerk reaction against new technology by the tinfoil hat sect of the EFF. It will be won in the courts by demanding that law enforcement be held to the highest standards of probable cause before access to library databases become useful to them.
I don't need a UID in my shirt or on a can of tomatoes and no one else does either. A number that identifies the shirt as a shirt of a specific size and color is sufficient for inventory purposes. Bar codes have done this very well and are still more practical than these invasive little fuckers so many other fuckers wish to present as "inevitable" and "practical".
However, most library books are unique items in the inventory, therefore generic information such as size and color does not apply. Bar codes also depend on the item being at location described in the computer. Given how much time I've spent cooling my heels waiting for librarians to search for the odd book that has gotten lost somewhere between check in and shelving, this seems worthwhile.
Actually, Montblanc has a bad rep among pen lovers as showy, overpriced and pretentious with not enough quality to back it up. Pelikan seems to be to be beloved among pen lovers as opposed to management drones looking for a status symbol to match their suit.
And I was wanting to build one, but a 2.2ghz celeron with a low-end mini-atx motherboard is cheaper then a mini-ITX 800mhz C3 motherboard and 10x more capable.
I suppose it depends on where you are looking. By cheaper the price comparison's I've found are only about $10 difference. However there are other design considerations as well. For the purpose this is intended (home firewall, web server and file server) 800MHz is overkill. I'm writing my dissertation on a 950MHz VIA EPIA with OpenOffice and 950MHz is plenty for that.
just buy a efficiant fan, underclock/undervolt the cpu and get a nice heatsink and you'll be able to make it as quiet as any C3, except for the fanless ones.
Doesn't underclocking remove the basic reason for going with the Celeron to begin with? An underclocked Celeron is still a dog in the power consumption area, and by the time you spend the extra money on the heat sink and fan, you might as well just buy the EPIA.
This is not to say that this second type of university simply allows the students to run rampant on the network. But the tools are different. Instead of yanking network access at a hint of trouble and invasively scanning people's PCs, they use traffic shaping and selective blocking, not because they think P2P is evil but simply to conserve bandwidth. They treat their students as reasonable human beings because they realize that they are ultimately the university's customers.
How is port-scanning for open servers invasive? I guess I see a bit of hypocracy here in that I don't think that anyone would object to security scans for open mail relays that can be used by spammers, or for known worms and viruses before they spread.
I guess I don't see how it is not a violation for Joe User to download files from my service on port 8080, but is a violation for my ISP to download files from my service on port 8080.
I agree that traffic shaping is a better idea in general. But caveat emptor here. If you don't agree with the terms of service, don't sign the service agreement.
The report itself stated quite clearly in several places that Dr Geer was the Chief Technical Officer of @Stake.
At least in academic writing, identifying your organizational affiliation is a requirement to assess conflict of interest. One can not assume that because a researcher is affiliated with an organization on the cover of a technical report, that they are speaking as an official representative of the organization.