Thank you for this quote--it succinctly expresses something I've been trying to formulate clearly for some time.
Searching for the origins of this quote, I came upon an interesting page (Evolution Facts) on talkorigins.org. From the site, " the Talk.Origins Archive is a collection of articles and essays most of which have appeared in talk.origins [usenet newsgroup] at one time or another.
I have a tendency to keep clear of discussing religious issues, in order to avoid becoming a unwitting vector for religious memes (I think the gods will disappear when we finally stop carrying them around in our collective brains), but enough is enough.
If this keeps up for too long, I'd expect a mass exodus of grey matter from the US--scientists and rational people will go looking for actual freedom of thought and expression elsewhere, and the states' position as one of the scientific and technological leaders will wither away. Though perhaps, in the big picture, that would be a good thing...
I'm guessing you're suffering from googleitis and meant moodle instead of moogle.
If that's the case, then yeah, moodle might be a good choice. It's pretty modular, but be warned that it really wants to stick with the social constructionist philosophy. This might actually be quite good for your needs, as I'm guessing acquiring a language is an activity that can certainly benefit from this type of learning--it's just that I ended up on a project that was trying to adapt it to the California DMV requirements and it got pretty hairy.
It works with a bunch of DBs, it's PHP so everybody and their uncle can mess around and customize it, its got nice UIs for students and teachers, and you can even force your advanced students to use it in Nihonji (using the Japanese language pack).
I think you're underestimating the vastness of the ocean.
Assume these 'bots heat up the ocean a bit because their putting out 2 Watts on average (which I'm guessing is way to much for them to last one month, but lets be conservative), then when they get the fleet up to 3000 you'd have 6000 Watts being dumped into the ocean.
On the surface of the earth, the sun gives off about 1350 Watts of energy per square meter. So to counteract the effect of the heat pollution from the Argo fleet, you'd just have to stick 9 parasols at the beach, someways into the water (9, instead of 4.5, since the sun actually only heats the water half the time).
As you can imagine, even 100 parasols probably wouldn't cool the ocean by very much;-)
If you are referring to changes in current etc, I can't imagine their effect being much greater than that of a single tanker.
In late breaking news, the final count of genomes in a typical human being has been found to be exactly 1.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome for details.
As if those same evil people couldn't just as easily have someone working within a closed-source software vendor... Only difference is how long it would take to uncover the hidden bug.
One proposed solution I would love to see getting more attention is SPF ("Sender Policy Framework"), which allows each domain admin to specify their email sending policy using existing infrastructure.
Executive summary of SPF: Just use DNS to specify where mail from your domain may originate from. If everyone used this, we could have domain blacklists that actually work.
Do an "nslookup -type=txt psychogenic.com" to see an example entry. And if you manage any domains, please consider doing the same.
Without debating the whether C++ is the best choice for beginners, I wish new books on the subject would stop rehashing the same old concepts and methods - not everyone is a C programmer trying to transition to C++. There are a lot of areas that merit greater attention and that will get beginners started on the right foot - and messing with raw pointers isn't one of them.
On top of trying to get the basic OO mindset accross (yes instantiation, polymorphism and encapsulation are big words but the concepts are essential and not that difficult to explain), I'd like to see some more modern and useful concepts explored in depth. For instance:
Everything you can find that has to do with automated memory management (smart pointers and such)
The STL. The STL. I know it's a rite of passage, but I'm tired of seeing every newbie struggling with his own linked list implementation
Reuse. The Boost library can teach you a lot about this and demonstrate that focusing on your problem is more fun than writing boring code that's been done a million times before
Design patterns. At least an introduction, dammit.
It seems to be worse than that. From the article, the point they keep trying to make is that "[the GPL] has forced it to take action against Linux users". McBribe states, "There's a bouncing ball that ends up in the hands of customers because of the GPL".
So the attack is basically "using GPLed soft makes you liable to the first nutcase who wants to stir up some trouble". Now I'm really starting to wonder what type of deal went down between Microsoft and SCO...
and auto drop those messages that use fake addresses that bounce? [...] Could it work?
No. Russian spammers have been abusing our domain for a month now, faking their from addresses so we get all the bounces. Your suggestion would only force them to use some poor schmuck's real address - causing the bounces to actually land in someones mailbox.
It looks like it retrives the private key. That's interesting.
I agree that it's interesting but the exploit doesn't retrieve or recreate the private key - it does something I've been fretting about recently: it simply modifies the public key - thereby creating it's own (new and weak) key pair.
From the article:Once you modify the public key this way, you end up with a public key that is easily factorable. It is now divisible by 3!
Anyone here bright enough to suggest a good way to protect from this? My first thought was to sign the public key with another, use an X.509 certificate or something but the problem is that you can always patch the signature/certificate/checksum/whatever verification mechanism... So what is the solution?
The pdf states that "...one of the studios commissioned an open source company to make Adome Photoshop run under Linux. Thanks to the open source development process, all Linux users can now run Photoshop on their desktop"
Anyone have any info on this? Photoshop is one of the last things keeping our web designer under the giant Windows thumb so I'd love to get more details. The Adobe site only mentions Linux in relation to the PDF reader, all other references I could find were about the crossover plugin.
And no, please don't extol the virtues of the Gimp - I've tried that...
Not sure the Prime Directive actually resolves the dilemma... looks like the folks in the ST universe have made their choice, though.
The question (dilemma) is whether you really want create/apply a "Prime Directive"... Do you deny technology to a people who already know of your existence and could really use the help (e.g. an african nation), or do you provide it knowing there may be unforeseen long term social repercussions...
Here's one that I have yet to figure out for myself:
Should we, as a technological society, share all our creations with other cultures?
As the inventors and producers of various technologies, we are somewhat ready for any given technology (though not always). However, sharing this "progress" with others leads to inevitable imbalance and has a steamroller effect on other cultures and societies.
For example, introduce a given technology in third world country X. This modern wonder saves 2/3 children and extends their lifetime by 30 years (a good thing). The problem is that in order to deal with the ensuing population explosion, progress must be made in terms of food production and other areas (housing, hygene in densly populated areas, waste management, etc. etc.). The obvious solution is to import yet more technology, to cope with these issues. Each of these additions causes their own social upheavals, which must in turn be dealt with...
In the end, you wind up with a duplicate of our own society (you've successfully integrated/eliminated another culture) or a disfunctional mess. The choice becomes "should we let them be (with high mortality, etc) or introduce a trojan horse (that will eventually destroy their culture) in the form of helpful tech?"
Actually, this is just theory of course, some have proposed the Holographic principle which basically says that everything within a volume can be described by whats happening on the bounding surface and that there is at most 1 degree of freedom/Plank area of that surface.
If this was correct, then a complete "image" of the surface area would describe everything that happens within.
DNA [...] contains around 3,000,000,000 base pairs
Ok, that looks like a big number but a very gross estimate of the number of atoms in my body would be : ((myweight in grams)/14) * 6.022 x 10E23 (I chose 14 because it's somewhere between the atomic mass of carbon and water, but it's only the order of magnitude I'm interested in)
The point here is that I've got on the order of 10E27 atoms being "organized" by (possibly only a portion of) those base pairs. So I say again, we have lots of redundancy - this would seem obvious when you consider that a decent clone could be made with the DNA from a single cell.
The second point involves the comment that 375 MB. That's a pretty big picture. Yeah, I agree, but until we use holography a little better you only take pictures of the outside of my body and not even the entire outside at that (only a single side at a time). So you can certainly shave of a few megs from stuff like heart ventricles, bone marrow and alveoli.
Your DNA is only sufficient to create another state machine with the same rules you had at birth.
Agreed. Of course, a clone is the like a twin - nothing more. It isn't the entire you (an exact replica of everything up to the superimposed quantum wave functions or whatever) but to a camera it's pretty close, and that's what we're discussing.
But the DNA is not visible in the pictures of you, is it?
I am certain you will agree that phenotype has something to do with genotype. Let's say, for instance, that your skin cells - although there are very many - are pretty much all the same (since they are coded in a small part of that DNA). This will cause different areas of your skin to be similar (same color, etc.) and easier to compress than some random static.
The fact your body is a redundant interpretation of your DNA does impact the compressibility of your image.
On the other hand, I very much doubt that gzip will be able to note such large scale symmetries/patterns as "he has two arms and two legs"
By the way, the spermatozoids are not issued from a mytosis but from a meyosis, and therefore do not contain the full DNA, but only half of it.
Yeah, I'm actually aware of that. And although the mechanisms related to dominant-recessive genes and sexual characteristics are influenced by these two pairs, the fact is that you get 22 autosomes from your parents (11 from each) and these are basically duplicates (the 2 extra sex chromos are a little different). Doubling those 11 from the sperm won't result in you but will result in a functional human being nonetheless.
All you need is 1 germ cell to produce a perfectly normal (although statistically anomalous) female (XX sex chromos).
Every one of us is incredibly redundant, and I don't just mean in our posts on slashdot!
Simply consider that you can have a reasonably good duplicate of yourself, with only the DNA contained in a single cell!
You may need most of your parts to be functional but, information-wise, it all comes down to 1 germ cell (say, a spermatozoid) and the aparatus needed to move it into proximity of another compatible germ cell;)
I care what you say, not where you are.
on
Geocoding All Content
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I guess I can imagine a few circumstances in which this type of information could be useful... but this smells to me like a way to find the closest wal-mart and other marketing schemes more than anything I might find actually useful.
Really, if you're looking to meet people in your neighborhood, go take a walk outside, if you're looking to hear your own point of view (or that of people just like you), turn the TV off for a few minutes.
I get the impression that the mainstream media is scared of the internet.
You bet they are. It isn't easy going from a total monopoly on information flow to this.
Before: a one-way broadcast model in which people are isolated and spoon fed selected tidbits of unformation and hisstory.
Now: their droning, commercial-filled vacuousness drowning in a two (three,... ten thousand) way conversation.
Just one of the reasons the 'net, specifically freedom of expression on the 'net, is one thing we should all be working to preserve
Slashdot Mirror
Whoa! Extremely informative cut & paste! ;-)
Thank you for this quote--it succinctly expresses something I've been trying to formulate clearly for some time.
Searching for the origins of this quote, I came upon an interesting page (Evolution Facts) on talkorigins.org. From the site, " the Talk.Origins Archive is a collection of articles and essays most of which have appeared in talk.origins [usenet newsgroup] at one time or another.
I have a tendency to keep clear of discussing religious issues, in order to avoid becoming a unwitting vector for religious memes (I think the gods will disappear when we finally stop carrying them around in our collective brains), but enough is enough.
If this keeps up for too long, I'd expect a mass exodus of grey matter from the US--scientists and rational people will go looking for actual freedom of thought and expression elsewhere, and the states' position as one of the scientific and technological leaders will wither away. Though perhaps, in the big picture, that would be a good thing...
I'm guessing you're suffering from googleitis and meant moodle instead of moogle.
If that's the case, then yeah, moodle might be a good choice. It's pretty modular, but be warned that it really wants to stick with the social constructionist philosophy. This might actually be quite good for your needs, as I'm guessing acquiring a language is an activity that can certainly benefit from this type of learning--it's just that I ended up on a project that was trying to adapt it to the California DMV requirements and it got pretty hairy.
It works with a bunch of DBs, it's PHP so everybody and their uncle can mess around and customize it, its got nice UIs for students and teachers, and you can even force your advanced students to use it in Nihonji (using the Japanese language pack).
Give it a spin, it's GPLed and everything :)
I think you're underestimating the vastness of the ocean.
;-)
Assume these 'bots heat up the ocean a bit because their putting out 2 Watts on average (which I'm guessing is way to much for them to last one month, but lets be conservative), then when they get the fleet up to 3000 you'd have 6000 Watts being dumped into the ocean.
On the surface of the earth, the sun gives off about 1350 Watts of energy per square meter. So to counteract the effect of the heat pollution from the Argo fleet, you'd just have to stick 9 parasols at the beach, someways into the water (9, instead of 4.5, since the sun actually only heats the water half the time).
As you can imagine, even 100 parasols probably wouldn't cool the ocean by very much
If you are referring to changes in current etc, I can't imagine their effect being much greater than that of a single tanker.
HTH
In late breaking news, the final count of genomes in a typical human being has been found to be exactly 1. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome for details.
As if those same evil people couldn't just as easily have someone working within a closed-source software vendor... Only difference is how long it would take to uncover the hidden bug.
One proposed solution I would love to see getting more attention is SPF ("Sender Policy Framework"), which allows each domain admin to specify their email sending policy using existing infrastructure.
See the SPF site or read this month's Linux Journal to find out more.
Executive summary of SPF: Just use DNS to specify where mail from your domain may originate from. If everyone used this, we could have domain blacklists that actually work.
Do an "nslookup -type=txt psychogenic.com" to see an example entry. And if you manage any domains, please consider doing the same.
Without debating the whether C++ is the best choice for beginners, I wish new books on the subject would stop rehashing the same old concepts and methods - not everyone is a C programmer trying to transition to C++. There are a lot of areas that merit greater attention and that will get beginners started on the right foot - and messing with raw pointers isn't one of them.
On top of trying to get the basic OO mindset accross (yes instantiation, polymorphism and encapsulation are big words but the concepts are essential and not that difficult to explain), I'd like to see some more modern and useful concepts explored in depth. For instance:
Just my $0.02 for potential authors out there.
If they are claiming the GPL is invalid
It seems to be worse than that. From the article, the point they keep trying to make is that "[the GPL] has forced it to take action against Linux users". McBribe states, "There's a bouncing ball that ends up in the hands of customers because of the GPL".
So the attack is basically "using GPLed soft makes you liable to the first nutcase who wants to stir up some trouble". Now I'm really starting to wonder what type of deal went down between Microsoft and SCO...
I don't think it's mentioned in the README but the Makefile seems to expect ee-gcc and associated libs. Have a look at the PS2Dev project on sf.net.
and auto drop those messages that use fake addresses that bounce? [...] Could it work?
No. Russian spammers have been abusing our domain for a month now, faking their from addresses so we get all the bounces. Your suggestion would only force them to use some poor schmuck's real address - causing the bounces to actually land in someones mailbox.
It looks like it retrives the private key. That's interesting.
I agree that it's interesting but the exploit doesn't retrieve or recreate the private key - it does something I've been fretting about recently: it simply modifies the public key - thereby creating it's own (new and weak) key pair.
From the article:Once you modify the public key this way, you end up with a public key that is easily factorable. It is now divisible by 3!
Anyone here bright enough to suggest a good way to protect from this? My first thought was to sign the public key with another, use an X.509 certificate or something but the problem is that you can always patch the signature/certificate/checksum/whatever verification mechanism... So what is the solution?
The pdf states that "...one of the studios commissioned an open source company to make Adome Photoshop run under Linux. Thanks to the open source development process, all Linux users can now run Photoshop on their desktop"
Anyone have any info on this? Photoshop is one of the last things keeping our web designer under the giant Windows thumb so I'd love to get more details. The Adobe site only mentions Linux in relation to the PDF reader, all other references I could find were about the crossover plugin.
And no, please don't extol the virtues of the Gimp - I've tried that...
Not sure the Prime Directive actually resolves the dilemma... looks like the folks in the ST universe have made their choice, though.
The question (dilemma) is whether you really want create/apply a "Prime Directive"... Do you deny technology to a people who already know of your existence and could really use the help (e.g. an african nation), or do you provide it knowing there may be unforeseen long term social repercussions...
Here's one that I have yet to figure out for myself:
Should we, as a technological society, share all our creations with other cultures?
As the inventors and producers of various technologies, we are somewhat ready for any given technology (though not always). However, sharing this "progress" with others leads to inevitable imbalance and has a steamroller effect on other cultures and societies.
For example, introduce a given technology in third world country X. This modern wonder saves 2/3 children and extends their lifetime by 30 years (a good thing). The problem is that in order to deal with the ensuing population explosion, progress must be made in terms of food production and other areas (housing, hygene in densly populated areas, waste management, etc. etc.). The obvious solution is to import yet more technology, to cope with these issues. Each of these additions causes their own social upheavals, which must in turn be dealt with...
In the end, you wind up with a duplicate of our own society (you've successfully integrated/eliminated another culture) or a disfunctional mess. The choice becomes "should we let them be (with high mortality, etc) or introduce a trojan horse (that will eventually destroy their culture) in the form of helpful tech?"
Actually, this is just theory of course, some have proposed the Holographic principle which basically says that everything within a volume can be described by whats happening on the bounding surface and that there is at most 1 degree of freedom/Plank area of that surface.
If this was correct, then a complete "image" of the surface area would describe everything that happens within.
Two points here need clarification.
DNA [...] contains around 3,000,000,000 base pairs
Ok, that looks like a big number but a very gross estimate of the number of atoms in my body would be : ((myweight in grams)/14) * 6.022 x 10E23 (I chose 14 because it's somewhere between the atomic mass of carbon and water, but it's only the order of magnitude I'm interested in)
The point here is that I've got on the order of 10E27 atoms being "organized" by (possibly only a portion of) those base pairs. So I say again, we have lots of redundancy - this would seem obvious when you consider that a decent clone could be made with the DNA from a single cell.
The second point involves the comment that 375 MB. That's a pretty big picture. Yeah, I agree, but until we use holography a little better you only take pictures of the outside of my body and not even the entire outside at that (only a single side at a time). So you can certainly shave of a few megs from stuff like heart ventricles, bone marrow and alveoli.
These screens get thinner, yet they pump up the volume
Your DNA is only sufficient to create another state machine with the same rules you had at birth.
Agreed. Of course, a clone is the like a twin - nothing more. It isn't the entire you (an exact replica of everything up to the superimposed quantum wave functions or whatever) but to a camera it's pretty close, and that's what we're discussing.
But the DNA is not visible in the pictures of you, is it?
I am certain you will agree that phenotype has something to do with genotype. Let's say, for instance, that your skin cells - although there are very many - are pretty much all the same (since they are coded in a small part of that DNA). This will cause different areas of your skin to be similar (same color, etc.) and easier to compress than some random static.
The fact your body is a redundant interpretation of your DNA does impact the compressibility of your image.
On the other hand, I very much doubt that gzip will be able to note such large scale symmetries/patterns as "he has two arms and two legs"
By the way, the spermatozoids are not issued from a mytosis but from a meyosis, and therefore do not contain the full DNA, but only half of it.
Yeah, I'm actually aware of that. And although the mechanisms related to dominant-recessive genes and sexual characteristics are influenced by these two pairs, the fact is that you get 22 autosomes from your parents (11 from each) and these are basically duplicates (the 2 extra sex chromos are a little different). Doubling those 11 from the sperm won't result in you but will result in a functional human being nonetheless.
All you need is 1 germ cell to produce a perfectly normal (although statistically anomalous) female (XX sex chromos).
Every one of us is incredibly redundant, and I don't just mean in our posts on slashdot!
Simply consider that you can have a reasonably good duplicate of yourself, with only the DNA contained in a single cell!
You may need most of your parts to be functional but, information-wise, it all comes down to 1 germ cell (say, a spermatozoid) and the aparatus needed to move it into proximity of another compatible germ cell ;)
I guess I can imagine a few circumstances in which this type of information could be useful... but this smells to me like a way to find the closest wal-mart and other marketing schemes more than anything I might find actually useful.
Really, if you're looking to meet people in your neighborhood, go take a walk outside, if you're looking to hear your own point of view (or that of people just like you), turn the TV off for a few minutes.
You bet they are. It isn't easy going from a total monopoly on information flow to this.
Now: their droning, commercial-filled vacuousness drowning in a two (three,
Just one of the reasons the 'net, specifically freedom of expression on the 'net, is one thing we should all be working to preserve
and this war isnt about oil .. is it?
Of course not.
It's not really about the oil, it's about "OPEC momentum towards the euro as an oil transaction currency standard".
Wow. This is neat - listening to a live feed of a show somewhere in TX. There's a good show at the Mercury at this very moment (23:30 EST).
The only thing missing is a beer and a bit of meta-info included in the stream (e.g. the band and tune names).