It's not a question of security - it's a question of failing to submit with blind, unquestioning hierarchal obedience.
Most people drawn to employment in security departments have a particular affinity to seeing the world obeying rules and obeying they who impose or enforce the rules, regardless of the actual purpose or relevance of the rules - these kind of people can't think that far out-of-the-box to ask why.
I won't being buying anything with a broadcast flag unless there's a hack to bypass it. Frankly there isn't enough on TV worth watching to justify either the cost or the restriction. This has all the smell of an RIAA-style market screw-up. Raise prices above their actual value and go after your own customers for creating the inevitable blackmarket. Apparently some folks in the entertainment industry were drunk off their asses at a frat party on the day they talked about market pricing and blackmarkets in Economics 101.
Oh yes, some trivial: the HP 10, 11, 15 and 16 use precisely the same processor as the HP 41C. The only difference is in the final metal mask that defines the microcode ROM. The processor itself was designed in the late 70s.
If you've ever done any assembly/microcontroller work, an HP16C still is a sacred and joyous tool. As mentioned, emulators, even of the HP16C, suck badly.
As a HP veteran, I can tell you that not all HP (or Agilent) products are always profitable; some products are simply "required" by the market for legitimacy or leverage in related fields
That said, calculators themselves have always had excellent ROI for HP. The only issue is the absolute size of the return compared to, say, printers.
I guess I should feel even older than dirt - maybe it's dust at that point.:-)
My first "personal computer" was an IMSAI S-100 system. Not actually mine but a shared system among my friends. I remember going to the 2nd West Coast Computer Faire and being blown away by the hardware being offered: Wow! 2K (not M) Static RAM cards for $800. But I would never be able to afford one of those dream cards: a 16K Dynamic RAM card - it was several $K! The new Apple ][. Cool color Cromemco systems.
I had been using the Lawrence Hall of Science time-share system was about 2 years already. A few years before in the pre-Prop-13 era I took my first programming class at College of Marin. FORTRAN with punch cards; I was 11 years old - I also took an Electronics class, both College level, as part of their "College for Kids" program. It definitely led me to getting my EE degree.
Until I moved back to the SF Bay Area, I had an old home-brew S-100 system I kept working for nostalgia sake. No wirewrap but surprisingly flakey. I still have a spare 8" Floppy Drive from it in the garage. Sort of wish I still had. When the IMSAIs came back last year I seriously thought about getting one.
One of the most brilliant exposition on this idea is by the late economist Mancur Olson. I highly recommend the read. Amazon link
The short summary: the separation of politics and economics is highly artificial (especially in America). The historic record shows that there is a continuum between political governance and economics which relates to the economics of political resource theft. On the far end is "Rape and Pillage" where the political tax is 100% - all is taken, literally, but by necessity "governance" must be nomadic because the "ruled populace/economic production" is destroyed utterly by "extraction". Think Ghengis Khan.
Next is the warlord who decides to plant roots rather than roam. Hey, it's a young man's game and it's possible to extract more total tax this way. No longer can he tax at 100% however. Self-preservation requires at least survival of the means-of-production. But it need not be generous or comfortable for any but the warlord.
Then the warlord structure transitions to a higher tax opportunity by expanding in geography. However, no one man can span that in either space or time, so lieutenants or fellow warlords/nobles need to be delegated and herititary rule must be established. This cooperation requires further reductions in individual tax collectable by the sovereign and the creation of tiered tax (lieutenants need added incentives and protections to take the risks of playing as warlord). Think Julius Caesar, Scipio, Fabius, Pompey, et al. Think middle age feudalism.
The transitions to dictatorship/regal where graft (formerly lieutenants'/noble's percs) becomes essential to maintaining the status quo and will of the dictator. Think Magna Carta and British Empire as a pre-industrial case - Magna Carta gave democracy to nobles, but not subjects/citizens. The WWI & II with German industry or Meiji in the industrial age.
Eventually the "graft/redistribution" becomes wide enough and diffuse enough that it becomes "democracy" where "everyone" who matters is getting some (no there is no bright-line between the two - think Slavery and Sufferage in the USA). Our dear lobbyists+contributors are precisely an evolved version of senior noble/thieves. The supreme court decision of Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad, which gave corporations constitutional rights as citizens, despite not having the ability/desire to fulfill the duties of citizenship, is the Magna Carta of our age, with many of the same original selfish origins of which we have not yet grown out .
Olson also has an interesting discussion of communism which puts it in some ways into the real m of modern rape-and-pillage mixed with dictatorship.
We in America separate politics and economics partly to retain the constitution as a sacrosanct pillar of stability. NB I prefer to keep that stability - I'm not arguing against that. Sometimes though, the separation distorts our view of reality and causes us to make very bad decisions - both of commission and omission.
This whole VoIP tax issue is entirely about the California State budget deficit (despite that it's already been reduced from $30B to $8B since last year), and not about 1) rationality, 2) long-term economics, or 3) technological feasability. It's like when you can't make your bills and you decide to pawn your wedding ring and your work tools, as stupid and short-sighted as that might be. The consequences aren't being considered at all, in part because the problems will be on someone else's watch anyway so they're probably thinking: "fsck 'em, this gets me through my term, until I take that job the lobbyist promised me".
By and large, the criminals, I mean "legislators", up in Sacratomato are technical ignoramouses in addition to being generally unethical, self-aggrandizing vermin. Such a VoIP tax only serves to slow economic development, punish risk-taking startups out of business, and push VoIP service underground or out-of-country into complete undetectability. What will/can they do if I simply reconnect to the PSTN from Puerto Rico or Guam (quasi-out-of-country), Canada or Mexico? Nada!
And no, Aaahnold, isn't the answer. He's too thin-skinned to survive or be effective in Sacratomato. Gray's strategy is to "cocoon" which isn't much better. Ever notice how testy Arnie gets when someone teases him on something as minor as his accent - Wow! Very thin skinned. Clearly he's not used to people contradicting him or not fawning over him. All too similar to George W., I'm afraid. That lays the ground for unrealistic intentions and promises which end up being unfulfillable. Love him as a movie star - I have all his movie's on DVD; this is just too much of a stretch for him.
Unless you are not the owner but you are the possesser. For example, if the government or marketer puts a crypto-enabled RFID into something you have/buy and only they have the activation key. Then only they can activate it and only they even need to know it's there. They can then collect data on you with complete impunity and secrecy.
In reality, limiting activation control gives the potential for both the best-case and the worst-case scenarios - much as net anonymity gives you both the ability to resist totalitarian governments and the ability to spam with impunity. You've bifurcated the risk space.
Re:You don't need a totally unique ID for that
on
NYT on RFID
·
· Score: 1
If only this were true. The word size for most RFID devices currently being planned is big enough to be used PER INSTANCE. From an inventory counting point of view, you must have PER INSTANCE. This is exactly the primary goal of RFID - "walk-by/drive-by inventory counting".
Sounds like a guidance failure rather than an engine failure, hence the "aerospike test" was a success. When the test vehicles are expensive and few, you have to try to define as many "experiments" on a single event as you can - the overall success of the whole system is just another experiment, possible least likely to succeed. SDI/BMD has caught a lot of flack about "success/failure" in tests of late but the problem is precisely this definition of success.
Imagine the days when getting time on a computer was expensive. Analysis of bugs and tests for function used to try to hit as many points as possible in a single card deck batch run - you'd put a lot of effort into building the deck and going over the output to maximum the value of each run. You didn't just compile and let the computer tell you which one bug to fix next, like promoted by XP today. You can't launch rockets like you compile code.:-)
The question is whether the RIAA is exercising "due diligence" in their filings. It seems clear they are not in this case and others. It would still be a civil tort - essentially negligent behavior that results in damage to reputation and/or incurred cost.
It's important to realize that there are two kinds of GM Food: transgenic and non-transgenic. This has to do with whether genes from a completely unrelated organism have been added to the food plant or animal, or not, respectively.
Unfortunately, the biotechnology industry obfuscates (intentionally?) this difference. They typically talk about non-trangenics safety but push transgenics into their policies.
Non-transgenic GM food isn't significantly different from conventional crossbreeding and hybridization. There are several millenia of experience and natural evolutionary correction to suggest this type isn't a big deal.
Transgenic GM food involves inserting DNA of completely unrelated (evolutionarily speaking) species into a food plant or animal. The problem is that we know surprisingly little about metabolic pathways and their dynamics. The total experience with this type of modification is less than one human generation and only dozens of animal generations.
The standard defense is that any "badly selected" gene inserted will simply result in the quick death of the organism preventing any bad from resulting. Unfortunately 40 years ago they said something similar about the certainty and effacacy of antibiotics and bacteria. We all know now that those assurances of certainty were misplaced. The bigger system response was more complicated.
The whole reason biologist were surprised by the low human genome count that resulted from the Human Genome Project is because they didn't understand the complexity and extra degrees of freedom that metabolic pathways provide to biological systems. So now they want us to give them anonymous (no labeling), carte blanche (no regulations) to insert alien genes and create alien enzymes and proteins in systems no biologist yet understands well enough to predict behavior of under normal operating conditions. Don't get me started about how unprepared 99% of all biologists are in mathematics to even begin comprehend high-order, nonlinear system topologies, let alone what happens when you throw a monkey wrench into one!
There is a lot of research in this area; I'm still involved in some projects relating to metabolic pathway simulation so I know what the state of the art is right now. Moving ahead while the research is so undeveloped yet still doing transgenic GM food is like developing the atom bomb without understanding the dangers of radiation on the human body - oh yeah, that's is how we did that - but given that we are mucking with the "internals" of the system now rather than an external "application", you'd hope we'd be more careful and less arrogant.
Based on the huge trade imbalance St. Lucia has perhaps this is simply bad judgment or ignorance about basic economics (ignorance of the equation: new business = new growth = new tax revenue). In the most generous case, the fees are high just because 90 cent of every dollar earned goes to overseas creditors.
The worse case is, well, worse. Is there any current WiFi in place or in the works by others? Are those parties connected with the elites in power? If yes to both, then this is likely both kleptocracy and plutocratic protectionism. Those fees probably go straight into someone pocket rather than government coffers - assuming any get collected at all.
> In the long run, will biology rewrite computing
> or will modern day technology concepts and
> theory be integrated into biology? If both
> are true, which will have the greater effect?
> I understand long run is ambiguous in this
> question, but Iâ(TM)m interested in all thoughts
> using any applicable definition.
These aren't really "either-or" but "both"
Computing will probably evolve to DNA-based biological computation to some extent. There will
remain an "inorganic" element (which I lump polymeric semiconductors which are strictly organic from a chemist's POV. Biological computing has the benefit of a billion years of debugged code effort.
Our understanding of biology will integrate many current concepts and ideas from mathematics, engineering and computer, in general. Biologists at the moment are fairly illiterate mathematically (newer bio majors excepted?).
The fact that so many biologist seriously believed or, at least, propagated, the "One-Gene-One-Disease" garbage is a clear illustration of this. Fortunately, this idea has finally been trounced by the recent gene counts of the Human Genome Project. Any 2nd year engineering student could look at the DNA-RNA-Enzyme-Protein pathways and tell you it couldn't possibly be "One-Gene-One-Disease" because that would imply linearity and no feedback loops. I predict that biology will begin to require an undergraduate curriculum vitually identical to engineering very soon (before 2010). This would include 4 years of advanced math, as wells as plenty of computers and physics.
> Tied to the first question: How will the nature
> of computing, and how we perceive it, change
> due to biology integration? More to the point,
> how much of the theory we learn today may
> change?
Biology is usually taught holistic as a holistic science. This is good because, generally it is, and because reductionism has its gaping blind spots too. However, this is often used as an excuse to shun reductionism by some in the field. The only real difference between the hard sciences and soft sciences is that the reproducibility of phenomenology has a small variance in the former giving the appearance of "hardness" and simply facilitating reductionism, but has a large variance in the latter, often addling our limited brains and requiring holistic methods instead. Mixing computational tools with biology facilitates our brains' ability to apply reductionism to a large variance phenomena. In either case, the science is equally knowable and explainable, only we mere humans may need computers to help - hardness or softness is an artifact of human cognition.
> What will be the biggest issue determining the
> success of the adoption of biology-integrated
> computing? Will it be technology factors or
> will it be societal factors (e.g., rebellion
> by the Right Wing), or something else? What
> things must hold true to make the idea succeed?
Fundamentally there has to "value" to a technology for adoption to succeed; without "value" opposition to a technology can (but may not) win. What is "value"? Anything a consumer of the technology decides it is for themselves.
Simply being "neat" from a techie POV is not enough for success. Even though file sharing music may be technically and rationally wrong, it delivers so much value to most people that the RIAA will always be on the losing end of the argument regardless of how technically "right" they may be. RIAA members so out of touch with consumer value-needs that don't even see why this situation has occurred and why most everything they do riles their would-be customers into opposition. Most of us know this intuitively rather than rationally.
The value comes from what it does for you, not what it is. For techies there happens to be an alignment between what is and what it does for the techie (socially, intellectually, emotio
CTS seems to be a result of a pretty complex set of circumstances. It's probably not a linear phenomena (do twice x and get twice y results - good or bad). Since the standard methods for scientific statistical analysis presume model linearity, it's not surprising that the results come back mixed in subsequent studies.
I've come close to problems a few times but have been mostly free of trouble despite doing upwards of 60-80 hours a week on computers since the late 1970s/early 1980s.
Some personal data points
- I touch-type up to ~40-50wpm w/o needing to look at the screen - higher if I'm looking. I took typing on manual typewriters in high school. My key positioning is pretty much the standard, though my "b" fingering prevents me from using ergo keyboards completely (the "b" is always on the "wrong side" for me).
- I don't keep my elbows on the desk (alluded to by other threads).
- I try to listen to and adopt at least some of the corporate ergo training I've had. My current home office doesn't really comply with all that. My current work environment has the wrong monitor height, no adjustable keyboard height and minimal adjustability on knee/leg height, and barely enough room for proper mousing. But I haven't had any problems in the last years. Maybe it's the elbow thing!
- I have sometimes gotten numbness and pain (maybe 3 or 4 times) in 30 years but its been infrequent.
- My doctor who is also a rheumatologist (joint doctor) has always told me in those cases to *never* immobilize a body part with tendonitis (the usual precursor of CTS); reduce swelling and pain with Advil (up to 800-1000mg (4-5 pills) at a time, if necessary) if pain would lead to unconscious immobilization.
- I get massages are a biweekly basis which include deep-tissue on back, shoulders, arms and hands. My masseuse is also a physical therapist so she knows anatomy. These relieve alot of muscle tension you aren't even aware you may have (and, no, there is no "happy ending" involved;-p).
- At one time I had "computer eyes" and used two sets of glasses. I haven't had problems in >10 years and just use my normal glasses (I'm near-sighted). I do take breaks and walk around every few hours which is supposed to help. In an office environment I use it for coffee (I'm an addict and proud of it!) and socializing. I can still go on 10+ hour streaks "by mistake" when I'm in "the zone".
- I'm now using 20" and 21" monitors on my two main computers. This is partly for visibility (though I don't need reading glasses - not presbytopic yet), but mostly because after using Unix workstations and Macs for years I'm more comfortable with densely busy desktops for lots of multitasking. I've come to expect having dozens of windows open at once since the late 80s.
Yes, it's they're pretty much me-too product line filler for them - I'm sure the PL manager will deny it, but it's been since the late 80's that there was a compelling value prop for HP's HPIB controllers. Imagine what the margins are on PC GPIB cards, especially with the overhead and support - definitely a loss-leader.
As for cables, et al., you can almost always find them cheaper. However it may not be cheaper when you consider the overhead of a typical corporate purchasing department. I know that the cost-per-PO at HP in the mid-90s started at roughly $200 for simple purchases. If the vendor was new even higher due to setup time, credit checks, reference checks, etc. This wasn't even excessive by Fortune 25 standards back then. This why companies typically start using P-card (corporate credit cards) - even with the possible lossage, it's still cheaper. Only control freaks who don't know accounting usually resist instituting them in big companies.
Suddenly just throwing in a $100 cable that could be had for $30 isn't so wasteful. There were times when a customer would want a LaserJet for their equipment added in with an instrument purchase. We'd tell them that it was cheaper to just go down to Fry's, since HP didn't warehouse them themselves but would simply order one from a local wholesaler or retailer (even Fry's!), slap a standard 40% uplift to the price for "handling" and ship it 2-4 weeks later. A lot of the time was still easier and internally cheaper for them to take the hit than deal with purchasing through another vendor. Also you could avoid IT oversight and "buy-the-3-year-old-printer-because-it's-
our-standard" rules that way.
JGSki
The fact that the rep steered you to NI and other vendors is an indication that Agilent still have the ethics of the HP Way! If they can't provide, they didn't lead you on; they told you how to solve your problem, regardless of the immediate economic impact. In my book, that earns them brownie points for the future even if it isn't GPIB cards. I can't say the same for HP ethics now but that's another posting. That "weird feeling" is the astonishment of seeing ethical behavior!
As a 9yr veteran of Agilent/HP T&M (now ex) I can tell you some of the reasons why they won't support Linux or, at least, offer "NoMAS" information (No Manufacturer Available Support: "accepting this information constitutes a legal contract agreeing to never request support or otherwise use any company resources regarding this information") like the old HP Corvallis used to for "insider information" about ultra popular calculators (HP41, et al).
The number one reason is: support cost or concerns about support cost regardless of such a NoMAS. There is this admirable concept at Agilent (hell, I was heavily involved in creating the first formalized version of it, so it must be good;-) ) once called "Intrinsic Support" which basically asks "What do we owe a customer contact who simply possesses one of our products regardless of its current support life status or whether this is the original purchaser of the product (assuming not stolen, right)?". Well, it isn't nothing. It's at least "best effort", that is, other product support issues are the priority but if nothing else is on the burner... The "Real" HP always did this anyway. It's sometimes hard to assess those support priorities though so there is a risk of "cost leakage" that can be scary.
Unfortunately one of the side-effects of insisting on observing a more ethical customer relationship has been reduced incentive to innovate or allow customers to innovate in hard times for these kinds of cases.
The other element in this is that the key R&D lead/influencer for these products has been enamoured with the Evil Empire for sometime and has gone completely Cult Koolaid on.NET at the expense of rationality, IMO. You might have "picked up" on this phenomena on their web site!:-p
BTW I've had the same request rejected also, and I had the power of an entire Agilent product division pulling for my cause. Hence, we're going with NI for our product development and an NI GPIB card will be bundled with this Agilent-sold product which will be available on platforms other than Windows! This sounds paradoxical but Agilent, like HP, has product line profit & loss so product line managers are free to "do what it takes" to make their numbers even if that means using a component that competes with another division. It's actually a wise strategy overall.
To the GPIB-hater: if you want to foot the bill for replacing the vast installed base of both HW and SW that is based on GPIB, please, write the check now (easily in the ten of billions of $) and everyone who currently slogs GPIB code will gladly switch to some other standard. Until then, this is what we've got. USB would be nice but no one is going to pay to replace equipment that is perfectly functional, fully depreciated and still generating value despite being purchased decades ago. On top of that, in most cases, it's the physics of the measurement that determine throughput and not the i/f to the computer, so GPIB ends up being perfectly acceptable on all counts but programmer comfort! That darn HP/Agilent and other vendor stuff were made with too much reliability! Some of the newer stuff has various newer i/f but for products that have a use life of 20-30 years, even USB is new and untested in the grand scheme of things - it could become a has-been i/f in a blink like Mac ADB is now.
:-) Yes, but if you are the one the kernel panic happens to... My Epson 1640U scanner started causing panics seemingly out of the blue about two weeks ago. I had update to 10.2.5 a while back but had brought the scanner out of the garage for a quick project two days before. The timing of both events obscured the cause pretty well. Since my Mac is my primary Let me forgot I know anything about computers and just get the work done machine, this gave me a fright.
Did I install something evil? Did I run out of disk? Worst it would kernel panic again within 5-10 minutes of rebooting from a kernel panic. Fortunately I tracked it down to the USB from the logs and presumptively to the scanner. Shutting it off did the trick. I'm actually excited about this patch!:-)
Therein lies the truth of the study, in fact. It's not that the recall of ads is any good in either case, but rather that ad recall by TiVo users is no better than non-TiVo users, which is probably bad to none anyway. The joy of experimental design!
If anything the study shows how damningly useless and ineffective advertising is with non-Tivo viewers. Thus the claim that not viewing ads due to PVR fast-forward is the equivalent of theft is especially fallacious, not just for the obvious reasons.
All this could be predicted by information theory: which of the following data streams contains information and which contains (nearly) none at all?
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1
0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 1
If you said only the last one has information you'd be right. Yes, the second stream has exactly zero information (except at the beginning and end if you assume finite length). Advertising on tv has reached a point where dispite all the data that is transmitted (20% of each hour of programming as ads) there is actually no information being transmitted any longer. That's a problem given that ads are supposed to change behavior.
Behavior is only changed or influenced by communication if that communication contains information in a formal, Claude Shannon sense. Creating a need to buy something and inducing you to take steps to do so is a behavioral change from either what you already do or inertly doing nothing.
The human brain is particularly tuned to filtering out non-information (or "just" data). As ad information content goes down, people simply stop seeing the message (like driving to work on auto-pilot - you remember nothing about the specifics of the drive because the stimulus becomes predictable and contains no new information).
This is precisely what the study is showing also. Ad recall is the same because the message contains little or no information in either case so recall itself approachs random chance as information content approachs zero, and comparing PVR to non-PVR recall amounts to comparing the correlation between two independent random signals, i.e. no measureable difference because random chance predicts the same results - null hypothesis. Using PVR fast-forward only serves to turn down the jackhammer noise of zero information messages that are already being ignored. There is no information transmitted; just the physical unpleasantness of the media "wrapper" remains. This leaves individuals using PVR fast-forward with a one-sided term in the value-decision equation: noise reduction and time savings. Advertisers' messages aren't even in the equation anymore. They have made their own messages irrelevant!
Just got my 2nd TiVo - now I'm an insufferable TiVo fanatic rather than just a TiVo fanatic!:-)
> I'm not particularly fond of the tone in which
> this article was written. I think that it's
> terrific that such a recent (8 years) technology
> has taken part in such a big news event as
> SARS; however, there is a significant lack of
> information provided about the technology
> itself.
From the picture and the array density quoted it looks like they are spotting their own slides.
The article is wrong about their being no virus microarrays: Affymetrix has had an AIDS array for ~10 years which has several dozen different HIV genotyping sequences on it. There probably isn't a general purpose, general pathogen array commercially.
> I am happy to be one of many users of this DNA
> chip/microarray technology and this article has
> terribly simplified its uses and the findings
> thus far. DeRisi is looking at 1000 sequences,
> but you can easily place 20 000 sequences on a
> chip. That's a lot of information! Not to
> mention, a lot of computing power is being put
> into storing, let alone analysing all the data
> generated.
Except that any microarray densities over 1,100 site/spots/sequences have to pay a heft license fee to Affymetrix (the name "Gene Chip" in all its variants are all trademarked by Affymetrix too; I'm sure the newpaper will be getting a nastygram from Affy legal about it). As obscenely broad as it is, the patent has been upheld by the courts.
Alas, high density genechip data won't being coming soon since Affy is the gatekeeper with fairly high prices. They've lowered some prices but mostly their arrays run $500-2000 a pop, one-time use. At that price you have to spend months planning their use - most experiment use an absolute minimum of about a dozen chips (statistic significance and controls).
Between the IP protection and the high margin, non-commodity Affy business plan, microarrays won't become commodities for at least another 10-15 years. Without becoming commodities, you'll never generate the variety and quantity of data to really take biology knowledge where it is possible or needed, or create the next biotech revolution/boom. You need to make using microarrays as cheap, easy and trivial as a disposable pipette. There are no technical reasons why it couldn't, but only business and legal reasons.
I don't have a major problem with it up to the point of actually physical harm (given the vanishingly small size of the spammer "community" I still mystified that no one has taken that tact yet - perhaps the internet community is infinitely more civilized than spammers).
Outing a spammer is simply part of re-establishing social norms. What they do is abhorrent to the majority of the internet community and they take advantage (free ride in economic terms) the social anonymity provided by the internet to do it.
When you live in a small community, part of the "folksy niceness and safety" of small towns is due to the fact that the social network is so small that you can't act up too far outside of the social norms of the social network without immediate negative impact. For those who were part of the usenet community in the 1980s much of the academic/intellectual elan and espirit de corps was directly (exclusively?) due to this phenomena. The community was small enough that it was just one community and the social norms were quite clear (no advertising, value for ration discourse with healthy but respectful debate, mostly, etc.)
Similarly in the big city you have the opportunity to become anonymous since there are dozens to thousands of overlapped social networks to belong and/or escape to. People in cities act (and drive) like jerks because the probability their behavior getting back to their social network is very small and even if it did with resulting negative consequences, the current social network is, worst-case, abandonable with others available even locally. Consider usenet today or any part of the Internet for that matter.
Spamming represents an extreme in personal (virtual) space violation - akin in social intrusion to a fatal attraction stalker in some ways. Outting spammers by posting personal information is simply applying age-old social norming: if you mother, spouse, neighbor, church or other key personal social (support) network knew what you were doing, would you still do it? The fact that it makes spammers uncomfortable is direct proof that the desired social conditioning forces are kicking in. 90% of all social harmony involves forces like this.
I'll very happy to be proven wrong. Really.:-) Having been on this planet for a while I've had an eerie ability to "see" possible paths of human and group behavior. This was part of what led to the military hiring me for "scenario planning" and "threat analysis". I certainly hope there are enough the barriers you both describe to keep us out of that path.
Again I'd be pleased to be wrong! There are some discomforting signs though.
HARMs are pretty smart. Shrikes aren't slouchs. Both are compable of differentiating fairly subtle differences in rf spectral signatures.
In a past life I was one of the guys who tested these puppies (Shrikes, HARMS, Cruise Missles, Mavericks, Smart Bomb guidance systems, etc.) at China Lake NWC. For Shrikes and HARMS we would setup dozens of "threat" simulators, each with slightly different modulation (CW, PRF, PW, jitter, spread codes, etc.) to simulate particular makes and models of radar, and each at different location to simulate real life deployment. You don't want to be near any source that is on a target signal profile list. One of my other duties included measuring the distance between the boresite and the missle's impact crater after a test. Often enough my simulators were damaged or destroyed by inert warheads alone:-). Let's just say the 100-hour 1st Gulf War wasn't much of a surprise - China Lake has geography a lot like Kuwait and Iraq.
It's certainly possible to discriminate targets well enough to avoid targetting TV satellite uplinks. It's even possible that journalist's military-supplied uplinks are provided with known spread code signals that are put on an avoid list. A warning and insistence on "equipment registration" may be CYA - unless they know the equipment's signature, there's still a small chance of a "mishap". However, unless they choose to target TV stations it would still probably be pretty safe (How many TV broadcasters does Iraq really have? Ah, maybe one? Compared to simply being shot by accident?) The spectral signatures of analog or digital TV are pretty different from radar (even spread spectrum radar).
<OffTopicWarning KarmaLock="disabled">
Despite my experience with this stuff, I'm still against this war and the facile justifications pathetically provided for it.
If you don't see a patriot described above, you need to get your head examined!
This war is about extension of the Monroe Doctrine to the entire world and Manifest Destiny as a world hyperpower. It's spelled out on the PNAC web site. Note the founders include Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and other major hawks in the Bush Adminstration. Also note that the entire obsession with regime change and axis of evil predates 9-11 back to when Clinton was approached by PNAC with essentially the same Iraq/Axis of Evil plan. Clinton rejected it. Bush has embraced it. Linkage between Al Qaida and Iraq? Machiavelian fiction, nothing more. Weapons of Mass Destruction (worked on those too;-| )? Doesn't add up in the context of post-War Iraqi infrastructure and economics, and especially not with forged documentery evidence provided by the US and UK intelligence agencies.
Creating a hegemon might not even seem so bad if you happen to be an American, but this type of foreign policy is certain to be mirrored in domestic policy: the beginning is Patriot I, Patriot II, TIA, CAPP and other recent laws and proposals.
For those who have read Linked,
consider what a Bose-Einstein condensation of a geopolitical social network is in comparison to what it is for an economic social network. Consider that one of the desires of PNAC is to assure that the relationship between the US and each other country shall be stronger than the relationships between any pair of countries. What social network topology is that? Can you say: "All Roads Lead to Washington".
There are many active and reserve duty officers with similar concerns. I recently gave a speech about this subject where an officer I know, who is now serving in the Middle East, was in attendence. I was concerned about his reaction - these are scary ideas most people would prefer to ignore - but he approached me after the speech and was my stron
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Most people drawn to employment in security departments have a particular affinity to seeing the world obeying rules and obeying they who impose or enforce the rules, regardless of the actual purpose or relevance of the rules - these kind of people can't think that far out-of-the-box to ask why.
I won't being buying anything with a broadcast flag unless there's a hack to bypass it. Frankly there isn't enough on TV worth watching to justify either the cost or the restriction. This has all the smell of an RIAA-style market screw-up. Raise prices above their actual value and go after your own customers for creating the inevitable blackmarket. Apparently some folks in the entertainment industry were drunk off their asses at a frat party on the day they talked about market pricing and blackmarkets in Economics 101.
Oh yes, some trivial: the HP 10, 11, 15 and 16 use precisely the same processor as the HP 41C. The only difference is in the final metal mask that defines the microcode ROM. The processor itself was designed in the late 70s.
As a HP veteran, I can tell you that not all HP (or Agilent) products are always profitable; some products are simply "required" by the market for legitimacy or leverage in related fields
That said, calculators themselves have always had excellent ROI for HP. The only issue is the absolute size of the return compared to, say, printers.
My first "personal computer" was an IMSAI S-100 system. Not actually mine but a shared system among my friends. I remember going to the 2nd West Coast Computer Faire and being blown away by the hardware being offered: Wow! 2K (not M) Static RAM cards for $800. But I would never be able to afford one of those dream cards: a 16K Dynamic RAM card - it was several $K! The new Apple ][. Cool color Cromemco systems.
I had been using the Lawrence Hall of Science time-share system was about 2 years already. A few years before in the pre-Prop-13 era I took my first programming class at College of Marin. FORTRAN with punch cards; I was 11 years old - I also took an Electronics class, both College level, as part of their "College for Kids" program. It definitely led me to getting my EE degree.
Until I moved back to the SF Bay Area, I had an old home-brew S-100 system I kept working for nostalgia sake. No wirewrap but surprisingly flakey. I still have a spare 8" Floppy Drive from it in the garage. Sort of wish I still had. When the IMSAIs came back last year I seriously thought about getting one.
One of the most brilliant exposition on this idea is by the late economist Mancur Olson. I highly recommend the read. Amazon link
The short summary: the separation of politics and economics is highly artificial (especially in America). The historic record shows that there is a continuum between political governance and economics which relates to the economics of political resource theft. On the far end is "Rape and Pillage" where the political tax is 100% - all is taken, literally, but by necessity "governance" must be nomadic because the "ruled populace/economic production" is destroyed utterly by "extraction". Think Ghengis Khan.
Next is the warlord who decides to plant roots rather than roam. Hey, it's a young man's game and it's possible to extract more total tax this way. No longer can he tax at 100% however. Self-preservation requires at least survival of the means-of-production. But it need not be generous or comfortable for any but the warlord.
Then the warlord structure transitions to a higher tax opportunity by expanding in geography. However, no one man can span that in either space or time, so lieutenants or fellow warlords/nobles need to be delegated and herititary rule must be established. This cooperation requires further reductions in individual tax collectable by the sovereign and the creation of tiered tax (lieutenants need added incentives and protections to take the risks of playing as warlord). Think Julius Caesar, Scipio, Fabius, Pompey, et al. Think middle age feudalism.
The transitions to dictatorship/regal where graft (formerly lieutenants'/noble's percs) becomes essential to maintaining the status quo and will of the dictator. Think Magna Carta and British Empire as a pre-industrial case - Magna Carta gave democracy to nobles, but not subjects/citizens. The WWI & II with German industry or Meiji in the industrial age.
Eventually the "graft/redistribution" becomes wide enough and diffuse enough that it becomes "democracy" where "everyone" who matters is getting some (no there is no bright-line between the two - think Slavery and Sufferage in the USA). Our dear lobbyists+contributors are precisely an evolved version of senior noble/thieves. The supreme court decision of Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad, which gave corporations constitutional rights as citizens, despite not having the ability/desire to fulfill the duties of citizenship, is the Magna Carta of our age, with many of the same original selfish origins of which we have not yet grown out .
Olson also has an interesting discussion of communism which puts it in some ways into the real m of modern rape-and-pillage mixed with dictatorship.
We in America separate politics and economics partly to retain the constitution as a sacrosanct pillar of stability. NB I prefer to keep that stability - I'm not arguing against that. Sometimes though, the separation distorts our view of reality and causes us to make very bad decisions - both of commission and omission.
By and large, the criminals, I mean "legislators", up in Sacratomato are technical ignoramouses in addition to being generally unethical, self-aggrandizing vermin. Such a VoIP tax only serves to slow economic development, punish risk-taking startups out of business, and push VoIP service underground or out-of-country into complete undetectability. What will/can they do if I simply reconnect to the PSTN from Puerto Rico or Guam (quasi-out-of-country), Canada or Mexico? Nada!
And no, Aaahnold, isn't the answer. He's too thin-skinned to survive or be effective in Sacratomato. Gray's strategy is to "cocoon" which isn't much better. Ever notice how testy Arnie gets when someone teases him on something as minor as his accent - Wow! Very thin skinned. Clearly he's not used to people contradicting him or not fawning over him. All too similar to George W., I'm afraid. That lays the ground for unrealistic intentions and promises which end up being unfulfillable. Love him as a movie star - I have all his movie's on DVD; this is just too much of a stretch for him.
In reality, limiting activation control gives the potential for both the best-case and the worst-case scenarios - much as net anonymity gives you both the ability to resist totalitarian governments and the ability to spam with impunity. You've bifurcated the risk space.
RFID is not like barcodes!
Imagine the days when getting time on a computer was expensive. Analysis of bugs and tests for function used to try to hit as many points as possible in a single card deck batch run - you'd put a lot of effort into building the deck and going over the output to maximum the value of each run. You didn't just compile and let the computer tell you which one bug to fix next, like promoted by XP today. You can't launch rockets like you compile code. :-)
The question is whether the RIAA is exercising "due diligence" in their filings. It seems clear they are not in this case and others. It would still be a civil tort - essentially negligent behavior that results in damage to reputation and/or incurred cost.
Non-transgenic GM food isn't significantly different from conventional crossbreeding and hybridization. There are several millenia of experience and natural evolutionary correction to suggest this type isn't a big deal.
Transgenic GM food involves inserting DNA of completely unrelated (evolutionarily speaking) species into a food plant or animal. The problem is that we know surprisingly little about metabolic pathways and their dynamics. The total experience with this type of modification is less than one human generation and only dozens of animal generations.
The standard defense is that any "badly selected" gene inserted will simply result in the quick death of the organism preventing any bad from resulting. Unfortunately 40 years ago they said something similar about the certainty and effacacy of antibiotics and bacteria. We all know now that those assurances of certainty were misplaced. The bigger system response was more complicated.
The whole reason biologist were surprised by the low human genome count that resulted from the Human Genome Project is because they didn't understand the complexity and extra degrees of freedom that metabolic pathways provide to biological systems. So now they want us to give them anonymous (no labeling), carte blanche (no regulations) to insert alien genes and create alien enzymes and proteins in systems no biologist yet understands well enough to predict behavior of under normal operating conditions. Don't get me started about how unprepared 99% of all biologists are in mathematics to even begin comprehend high-order, nonlinear system topologies, let alone what happens when you throw a monkey wrench into one!
There is a lot of research in this area; I'm still involved in some projects relating to metabolic pathway simulation so I know what the state of the art is right now. Moving ahead while the research is so undeveloped yet still doing transgenic GM food is like developing the atom bomb without understanding the dangers of radiation on the human body - oh yeah, that's is how we did that - but given that we are mucking with the "internals" of the system now rather than an external "application", you'd hope we'd be more careful and less arrogant.
A recent biotech employee
The worse case is, well, worse. Is there any current WiFi in place or in the works by others? Are those parties connected with the elites in power? If yes to both, then this is likely both kleptocracy and plutocratic protectionism. Those fees probably go straight into someone pocket rather than government coffers - assuming any get collected at all.
increasing the value will result in price matching value, or
decreasing the price will result in price matching value.
> or will modern day technology concepts and
> theory be integrated into biology? If both
> are true, which will have the greater effect?
> I understand long run is ambiguous in this
> question, but Iâ(TM)m interested in all thoughts
> using any applicable definition.
These aren't really "either-or" but "both"
Computing will probably evolve to DNA-based biological computation to some extent. There will remain an "inorganic" element (which I lump polymeric semiconductors which are strictly organic from a chemist's POV. Biological computing has the benefit of a billion years of debugged code effort.
Our understanding of biology will integrate many current concepts and ideas from mathematics, engineering and computer, in general. Biologists at the moment are fairly illiterate mathematically (newer bio majors excepted?). The fact that so many biologist seriously believed or, at least, propagated, the "One-Gene-One-Disease" garbage is a clear illustration of this. Fortunately, this idea has finally been trounced by the recent gene counts of the Human Genome Project. Any 2nd year engineering student could look at the DNA-RNA-Enzyme-Protein pathways and tell you it couldn't possibly be "One-Gene-One-Disease" because that would imply linearity and no feedback loops. I predict that biology will begin to require an undergraduate curriculum vitually identical to engineering very soon (before 2010). This would include 4 years of advanced math, as wells as plenty of computers and physics.
> Tied to the first question: How will the nature
> of computing, and how we perceive it, change
> due to biology integration? More to the point,
> how much of the theory we learn today may
> change?
Biology is usually taught holistic as a holistic science. This is good because, generally it is, and because reductionism has its gaping blind spots too. However, this is often used as an excuse to shun reductionism by some in the field. The only real difference between the hard sciences and soft sciences is that the reproducibility of phenomenology has a small variance in the former giving the appearance of "hardness" and simply facilitating reductionism, but has a large variance in the latter, often addling our limited brains and requiring holistic methods instead. Mixing computational tools with biology facilitates our brains' ability to apply reductionism to a large variance phenomena. In either case, the science is equally knowable and explainable, only we mere humans may need computers to help - hardness or softness is an artifact of human cognition.
> What will be the biggest issue determining the
> success of the adoption of biology-integrated
> computing? Will it be technology factors or
> will it be societal factors (e.g., rebellion
> by the Right Wing), or something else? What
> things must hold true to make the idea succeed?
Fundamentally there has to "value" to a technology for adoption to succeed; without "value" opposition to a technology can (but may not) win. What is "value"? Anything a consumer of the technology decides it is for themselves. Simply being "neat" from a techie POV is not enough for success. Even though file sharing music may be technically and rationally wrong, it delivers so much value to most people that the RIAA will always be on the losing end of the argument regardless of how technically "right" they may be. RIAA members so out of touch with consumer value-needs that don't even see why this situation has occurred and why most everything they do riles their would-be customers into opposition. Most of us know this intuitively rather than rationally.
The value comes from what it does for you, not what it is. For techies there happens to be an alignment between what is and what it does for the techie (socially, intellectually, emotio
I've come close to problems a few times but have been mostly free of trouble despite doing upwards of 60-80 hours a week on computers since the late 1970s/early 1980s.
Some personal data points
- I touch-type up to ~40-50wpm w/o needing to look at the screen - higher if I'm looking. I took typing on manual typewriters in high school. My key positioning is pretty much the standard, though my "b" fingering prevents me from using ergo keyboards completely (the "b" is always on the "wrong side" for me).
- I don't keep my elbows on the desk (alluded to by other threads).
- I try to listen to and adopt at least some of the corporate ergo training I've had. My current home office doesn't really comply with all that. My current work environment has the wrong monitor height, no adjustable keyboard height and minimal adjustability on knee/leg height, and barely enough room for proper mousing. But I haven't had any problems in the last years. Maybe it's the elbow thing!
- I have sometimes gotten numbness and pain (maybe 3 or 4 times) in 30 years but its been infrequent.
- My doctor who is also a rheumatologist (joint doctor) has always told me in those cases to *never* immobilize a body part with tendonitis (the usual precursor of CTS); reduce swelling and pain with Advil (up to 800-1000mg (4-5 pills) at a time, if necessary) if pain would lead to unconscious immobilization.
- I get massages are a biweekly basis which include deep-tissue on back, shoulders, arms and hands. My masseuse is also a physical therapist so she knows anatomy. These relieve alot of muscle tension you aren't even aware you may have (and, no, there is no "happy ending" involved ;-p).
- At one time I had "computer eyes" and used two sets of glasses. I haven't had problems in >10 years and just use my normal glasses (I'm near-sighted). I do take breaks and walk around every few hours which is supposed to help. In an office environment I use it for coffee (I'm an addict and proud of it!) and socializing. I can still go on 10+ hour streaks "by mistake" when I'm in "the zone".
- I'm now using 20" and 21" monitors on my two main computers. This is partly for visibility (though I don't need reading glasses - not presbytopic yet), but mostly because after using Unix workstations and Macs for years I'm more comfortable with densely busy desktops for lots of multitasking. I've come to expect having dozens of windows open at once since the late 80s.
JGski
Yes, it's they're pretty much me-too product line filler for them - I'm sure the PL manager will deny it, but it's been since the late 80's that there was a compelling value prop for HP's HPIB controllers. Imagine what the margins are on PC GPIB cards, especially with the overhead and support - definitely a loss-leader. As for cables, et al., you can almost always find them cheaper. However it may not be cheaper when you consider the overhead of a typical corporate purchasing department. I know that the cost-per-PO at HP in the mid-90s started at roughly $200 for simple purchases. If the vendor was new even higher due to setup time, credit checks, reference checks, etc. This wasn't even excessive by Fortune 25 standards back then. This why companies typically start using P-card (corporate credit cards) - even with the possible lossage, it's still cheaper. Only control freaks who don't know accounting usually resist instituting them in big companies. Suddenly just throwing in a $100 cable that could be had for $30 isn't so wasteful. There were times when a customer would want a LaserJet for their equipment added in with an instrument purchase. We'd tell them that it was cheaper to just go down to Fry's, since HP didn't warehouse them themselves but would simply order one from a local wholesaler or retailer (even Fry's!), slap a standard 40% uplift to the price for "handling" and ship it 2-4 weeks later. A lot of the time was still easier and internally cheaper for them to take the hit than deal with purchasing through another vendor. Also you could avoid IT oversight and "buy-the-3-year-old-printer-because-it's- our-standard" rules that way. JGSki
As a 9yr veteran of Agilent/HP T&M (now ex) I can tell you some of the reasons why they won't support Linux or, at least, offer "NoMAS" information (No Manufacturer Available Support: "accepting this information constitutes a legal contract agreeing to never request support or otherwise use any company resources regarding this information") like the old HP Corvallis used to for "insider information" about ultra popular calculators (HP41, et al).
The number one reason is: support cost or concerns about support cost regardless of such a NoMAS. There is this admirable concept at Agilent (hell, I was heavily involved in creating the first formalized version of it, so it must be good ;-) ) once called "Intrinsic Support" which basically asks "What do we owe a customer contact who simply possesses one of our products regardless of its current support life status or whether this is the original purchaser of the product (assuming not stolen, right)?". Well, it isn't nothing. It's at least "best effort", that is, other product support issues are the priority but if nothing else is on the burner... The "Real" HP always did this anyway. It's sometimes hard to assess those support priorities though so there is a risk of "cost leakage" that can be scary.
Unfortunately one of the side-effects of insisting on observing a more ethical customer relationship has been reduced incentive to innovate or allow customers to innovate in hard times for these kinds of cases.
The other element in this is that the key R&D lead/influencer for these products has been enamoured with the Evil Empire for sometime and has gone completely Cult Koolaid on .NET at the expense of rationality, IMO. You might have "picked up" on this phenomena on their web site! :-p
BTW I've had the same request rejected also, and I had the power of an entire Agilent product division pulling for my cause. Hence, we're going with NI for our product development and an NI GPIB card will be bundled with this Agilent-sold product which will be available on platforms other than Windows! This sounds paradoxical but Agilent, like HP, has product line profit & loss so product line managers are free to "do what it takes" to make their numbers even if that means using a component that competes with another division. It's actually a wise strategy overall.
To the GPIB-hater: if you want to foot the bill for replacing the vast installed base of both HW and SW that is based on GPIB, please, write the check now (easily in the ten of billions of $) and everyone who currently slogs GPIB code will gladly switch to some other standard. Until then, this is what we've got. USB would be nice but no one is going to pay to replace equipment that is perfectly functional, fully depreciated and still generating value despite being purchased decades ago. On top of that, in most cases, it's the physics of the measurement that determine throughput and not the i/f to the computer, so GPIB ends up being perfectly acceptable on all counts but programmer comfort! That darn HP/Agilent and other vendor stuff were made with too much reliability! Some of the newer stuff has various newer i/f but for products that have a use life of 20-30 years, even USB is new and untested in the grand scheme of things - it could become a has-been i/f in a blink like Mac ADB is now.
JGSki
:-) Yes, but if you are the one the kernel panic happens to... My Epson 1640U scanner started causing panics seemingly out of the blue about two weeks ago. I had update to 10.2.5 a while back but had brought the scanner out of the garage for a quick project two days before. The timing of both events obscured the cause pretty well. Since my Mac is my primary Let me forgot I know anything about computers and just get the work done machine, this gave me a fright. Did I install something evil? Did I run out of disk? Worst it would kernel panic again within 5-10 minutes of rebooting from a kernel panic. Fortunately I tracked it down to the USB from the logs and presumptively to the scanner. Shutting it off did the trick. I'm actually excited about this patch! :-)
If anything the study shows how damningly useless and ineffective advertising is with non-Tivo viewers. Thus the claim that not viewing ads due to PVR fast-forward is the equivalent of theft is especially fallacious, not just for the obvious reasons.
All this could be predicted by information theory: which of the following data streams contains information and which contains (nearly) none at all?
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1
0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 1
If you said only the last one has information you'd be right. Yes, the second stream has exactly zero information (except at the beginning and end if you assume finite length). Advertising on tv has reached a point where dispite all the data that is transmitted (20% of each hour of programming as ads) there is actually no information being transmitted any longer. That's a problem given that ads are supposed to change behavior.
Behavior is only changed or influenced by communication if that communication contains information in a formal, Claude Shannon sense. Creating a need to buy something and inducing you to take steps to do so is a behavioral change from either what you already do or inertly doing nothing.
The human brain is particularly tuned to filtering out non-information (or "just" data). As ad information content goes down, people simply stop seeing the message (like driving to work on auto-pilot - you remember nothing about the specifics of the drive because the stimulus becomes predictable and contains no new information).
This is precisely what the study is showing also. Ad recall is the same because the message contains little or no information in either case so recall itself approachs random chance as information content approachs zero, and comparing PVR to non-PVR recall amounts to comparing the correlation between two independent random signals, i.e. no measureable difference because random chance predicts the same results - null hypothesis. Using PVR fast-forward only serves to turn down the jackhammer noise of zero information messages that are already being ignored. There is no information transmitted; just the physical unpleasantness of the media "wrapper" remains. This leaves individuals using PVR fast-forward with a one-sided term in the value-decision equation: noise reduction and time savings. Advertisers' messages aren't even in the equation anymore. They have made their own messages irrelevant!
Just got my 2nd TiVo - now I'm an insufferable TiVo fanatic rather than just a TiVo fanatic! :-)
> this article was written. I think that it's
> terrific that such a recent (8 years) technology
> has taken part in such a big news event as
> SARS; however, there is a significant lack of
> information provided about the technology
> itself.
From the picture and the array density quoted it looks like they are spotting their own slides.
The article is wrong about their being no virus microarrays: Affymetrix has had an AIDS array for ~10 years which has several dozen different HIV genotyping sequences on it. There probably isn't a general purpose, general pathogen array commercially.
> I am happy to be one of many users of this DNA
> chip/microarray technology and this article has
> terribly simplified its uses and the findings
> thus far. DeRisi is looking at 1000 sequences,
> but you can easily place 20 000 sequences on a
> chip. That's a lot of information! Not to
> mention, a lot of computing power is being put
> into storing, let alone analysing all the data
> generated.
Except that any microarray densities over 1,100 site/spots/sequences have to pay a heft license fee to Affymetrix (the name "Gene Chip" in all its variants are all trademarked by Affymetrix too; I'm sure the newpaper will be getting a nastygram from Affy legal about it). As obscenely broad as it is, the patent has been upheld by the courts.
Alas, high density genechip data won't being coming soon since Affy is the gatekeeper with fairly high prices. They've lowered some prices but mostly their arrays run $500-2000 a pop, one-time use. At that price you have to spend months planning their use - most experiment use an absolute minimum of about a dozen chips (statistic significance and controls).
Between the IP protection and the high margin, non-commodity Affy business plan, microarrays won't become commodities for at least another 10-15 years. Without becoming commodities, you'll never generate the variety and quantity of data to really take biology knowledge where it is possible or needed, or create the next biotech revolution/boom. You need to make using microarrays as cheap, easy and trivial as a disposable pipette. There are no technical reasons why it couldn't, but only business and legal reasons.
JGSki
Outing a spammer is simply part of re-establishing social norms. What they do is abhorrent to the majority of the internet community and they take advantage (free ride in economic terms) the social anonymity provided by the internet to do it.
When you live in a small community, part of the "folksy niceness and safety" of small towns is due to the fact that the social network is so small that you can't act up too far outside of the social norms of the social network without immediate negative impact. For those who were part of the usenet community in the 1980s much of the academic/intellectual elan and espirit de corps was directly (exclusively?) due to this phenomena. The community was small enough that it was just one community and the social norms were quite clear (no advertising, value for ration discourse with healthy but respectful debate, mostly, etc.)
Similarly in the big city you have the opportunity to become anonymous since there are dozens to thousands of overlapped social networks to belong and/or escape to. People in cities act (and drive) like jerks because the probability their behavior getting back to their social network is very small and even if it did with resulting negative consequences, the current social network is, worst-case, abandonable with others available even locally. Consider usenet today or any part of the Internet for that matter.
Spamming represents an extreme in personal (virtual) space violation - akin in social intrusion to a fatal attraction stalker in some ways. Outting spammers by posting personal information is simply applying age-old social norming: if you mother, spouse, neighbor, church or other key personal social (support) network knew what you were doing, would you still do it? The fact that it makes spammers uncomfortable is direct proof that the desired social conditioning forces are kicking in. 90% of all social harmony involves forces like this.
JGSki
Again I'd be pleased to be wrong! There are some discomforting signs though.
In a past life I was one of the guys who tested these puppies (Shrikes, HARMS, Cruise Missles, Mavericks, Smart Bomb guidance systems, etc.) at China Lake NWC. For Shrikes and HARMS we would setup dozens of "threat" simulators, each with slightly different modulation (CW, PRF, PW, jitter, spread codes, etc.) to simulate particular makes and models of radar, and each at different location to simulate real life deployment. You don't want to be near any source that is on a target signal profile list. One of my other duties included measuring the distance between the boresite and the missle's impact crater after a test. Often enough my simulators were damaged or destroyed by inert warheads alone :-). Let's just say the 100-hour 1st Gulf War wasn't much of a surprise - China Lake has geography a lot like Kuwait and Iraq.
It's certainly possible to discriminate targets well enough to avoid targetting TV satellite uplinks. It's even possible that journalist's military-supplied uplinks are provided with known spread code signals that are put on an avoid list. A warning and insistence on "equipment registration" may be CYA - unless they know the equipment's signature, there's still a small chance of a "mishap". However, unless they choose to target TV stations it would still probably be pretty safe (How many TV broadcasters does Iraq really have? Ah, maybe one? Compared to simply being shot by accident?) The spectral signatures of analog or digital TV are pretty different from radar (even spread spectrum radar).
<OffTopicWarning KarmaLock="disabled">
Despite my experience with this stuff, I'm still against this war and the facile justifications pathetically provided for it. If you don't see a patriot described above, you need to get your head examined!
This war is about extension of the Monroe Doctrine to the entire world and Manifest Destiny as a world hyperpower. It's spelled out on the PNAC web site. Note the founders include Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and other major hawks in the Bush Adminstration. Also note that the entire obsession with regime change and axis of evil predates 9-11 back to when Clinton was approached by PNAC with essentially the same Iraq/Axis of Evil plan. Clinton rejected it. Bush has embraced it. Linkage between Al Qaida and Iraq? Machiavelian fiction, nothing more. Weapons of Mass Destruction (worked on those too ;-| )? Doesn't add up in the context of post-War Iraqi infrastructure and economics, and especially not with forged documentery evidence provided by the US and UK intelligence agencies.
Creating a hegemon might not even seem so bad if you happen to be an American, but this type of foreign policy is certain to be mirrored in domestic policy: the beginning is Patriot I, Patriot II, TIA, CAPP and other recent laws and proposals.
For those who have read Linked, consider what a Bose-Einstein condensation of a geopolitical social network is in comparison to what it is for an economic social network. Consider that one of the desires of PNAC is to assure that the relationship between the US and each other country shall be stronger than the relationships between any pair of countries. What social network topology is that? Can you say: "All Roads Lead to Washington".
There are many active and reserve duty officers with similar concerns. I recently gave a speech about this subject where an officer I know, who is now serving in the Middle East, was in attendence. I was concerned about his reaction - these are scary ideas most people would prefer to ignore - but he approached me after the speech and was my stron
Awesome. Yes, thanks!