Of course, this hack isn't even new. There's the value of delaying a radio broadcast was documented in the movie The Sting. And before that there was the Count of Monte Christo who did a man in the middle injection of fake tweets into France's Semaphore packet system to ruin a banker.
I would assert that High frequency trading is simply parasitic. Many people have suggested a transaction tax could fix this. It would damp the frivolous trades yes, but it would not fix these mega scale singleton trades that can happen like this.
my proposal: What one should do I think is fix this by injecting random delays into the trading system itself. That is you would queue up all trades for the last 100 milliseconds into a block. Then randomize their order. then execute the trades in that new order. This would erase any value of a trade that depended on beating another trade by a few millisconds. You'd still have some edge cases to worry about (i.e. racing to be in the block before the next block). But you could fix that too (dither the interval size between 80 and 120 milliseconds at random, so no one would know where the block boundaries were.
For this to be viable enough people would have to agree that HF trades have no actual value added. Additionally, one would have the potential problem of exchanges popping up that did not honor this. But those would not likely have enough liquidity to matter.
In New Mexico, Google maps sent drivers 50 miles out of their way because it doesn't know that a road that was closed 2 years ago in a flood was re-opened shortly after that. Considering this is a main route to a National Monument, it's not just some podunk mistake. They finally fixed this last week.
Can you give a glimpse at the process this requires? I assume it has to be algorithmic in some way but it's still baffling to me how it's done. What sort of errors happen?
One could easily have said the same thing about Microsoft Word. It was a copycat and it sucked compared to Word Perfect when it first came out. But slowly they kept making it better and it won the market. One could have said the same thing about the early DOS, then the early Windows 2.0. Even windows 95. All those eventually won the markets that others owned. Moreover the same conditions exist now. It's not a saturated market; it's a growing market size.
Microsoft has followed this same pattern with all their incremental advances as well. All their new product revision completely stink at first. then they settle in and make them workable. Indeed things like Xune and PlaysForSure are outliers in that Microsoft didn't just bear down for the long haul.
Microsoft knows that embrace and extend works over time because it always has. Given they have a positive cash flow it makes even more sense since there's no ticking clock.
That's not a refund. A chargeback is a refund. With this they just keep your money and give you the illusion of getting the full value back, when in actuality it costs them cents on the dollar to do this.
Dude, they can use the refund to buy the rest of the season. That's all they wanted in the first place. So the refund is actually a better deal than they originally thought they were buying. They DID want to buy the whole season.
Whoever pays $22.99 for half a season, or any other TV show, when it is available on Netflix is beyond me. Don't get me started on bluray box sets.
With most movies I have no problem waiting for them to come out on DVD. But somethings are just so good you want to see them now. One of the things about a series is that it's immersive and lasts a long time. You enjoy talking to your friends about it while the thoughts are fresh and the possibilities in the next show have your mind alive. You want to talk about it now not in hindsight. that's the thrill. Look at all the discussion sites for breaking bad.
Since it's currently the best and most engaging drama on TV, this of all examples is a case where you should understand why anyone would want to pay $22.
Also Dumbledor dies at the end of harry potter. The cake is a lie. Walter poisons Todd's Tea with ricin.
That's not a refund. A chargeback is a refund. With this they just keep your money and give you the illusion of getting the full value back, when in actuality it costs them cents on the dollar to do this.
Well, on the other hand, the viewer already watched half the season. It's not like the season was a stale donut to be sent back. What the viewer got was good. Just half of what he expected.
I find the whole proposition dubious, and therefore apple is being quite generous. Not only that they aren't putting up much of a fight which is what makes it even more sincere. The customer is always right is an ideal that, when you can pull it off, makes for a good premium bussiness model. Discounters can't pull that off. So it distinguishes apple.
Personally, if it were my decision I'd fight with this customer. A season is a 1/4 trip around the sun. He got all the episodes available in that season. What he thought he was buying was Series 5 not season 5. Like how the british TV is named. If AMC had simply named them properly, Season 5 and seasons 6 or series 5 and series 6, rather than calling both season 5 there would be no ambiguity at all.
Apple is caving here not because they have to but because thats how they roll. Apples knows it's customers are loyal and they know that Apple limits their risks (which is a good reason to buy apple if your time has any value). So they look for ways to set themselves apart in that niche
If they are lucky this will turn up the heat on Amazon. Amazon probably has a lot more financial exposure to this. Will people make the demand to amazon now?
I will have to read the research article because the press article doesn't explain it. a dipole charge would not move in a linear gradient field. it would require a second order curvature to the gradient to make it move. thus it's irrelevant that the linear field is 120 v/meter. what would matter is the derivative on that.
I had much the same reaction to perl. I love perl for many reasons. One is that even though the native language without any imports is more powerful than almost any other languange (without imports) the O'reily nut shell guide is the thinest one on my shelf. It really says something about incomprehensibility when even the C++ nutshell guide is thicker than perl. It means that even though perl might seem very ad hoc, in fact it's so self consistent that you can write it all up in a tiny guide.
What really sold me on perl was writing object oriented perl. I had been doing object oriented programming for some time in multiple languages including java and Objective C, but what really made me understand it was perl. In perl you actually see the underside magic of what an object actually is. It's remarkable that the language of perl could go from not having any objects to having objects just by adding one additional command ("bless"). Nothing else in the language had to be re-written. Internally one is storing all the instance variables in a single hash. What's interesting is that you don't have to choose that mode of data organization. you can instead bless a scalar. then you can have the class rather than the instance manage the instance variables. Effectively a hash is a row oriented data base and a scalar is a column oriented data base. When I realized this I was sort of staggered how many high concept ideas were rolled up into the perl method of objects.
I went back and implemented a hash in fortran 77. After that I could write Object oriented fortran 77. yep that's right fortran can also be an object oriented language just doing the same trick perl does. All you then are missing is dynamic memory allocation for it to be complete.
While may people curse perls prefix sigils I actually find them conceptually compact. In most languages the notion of a type, and the construction of a primitives data, get conflated. Really these are different things. Perl makes this explicit. A primitive in perl can have a data organization (list, hash, scalar, reference, dereference, glob) signified by a pand it can separately have a package inheritance (@ISA) that is analogous to a type. In languages like C++ or most everything those two concepts are not distinguised heavily. As a result I find it easier to read a perl program because of all the explicit data structure prefixes.
What kills perl in the end for complex programs is not these sigils looking like cursing on the page, but rather that everyones programming style is different, so it gets pretty crazy to read because it's so compact. It's perhaps a compliment how compact it is. It's interesting that the less compact and less versatile a languages native syntax is the easier it is to read.
But it's true. Try reading APL, the most dense language ever devised. then try reading Lua or (early) python. Both of those are a breeze to read other people's code.
When I read ruby what I see mainly is an extended perl syntax that can avoid using these despised prefix sigils. It gives the objects syntacic sugar, like python does, to hide the object mechanics from you. So it's a very clean looking upgrade to perl.
one of the smallest things in a microscope is the lens. most of the microscope is precision, vibration damped, gearing to manipulate the focal distance precisely. If you are going for high resolution its not yet clear to me how you avoid the expensive non-portable part of the microscope.
Answering my own question: Been staring at their schematic diagram. What I think they are doing is relying on the thinness of thr sample to avoid having a long range over which to focus. then they are not worrying too much about the reproducible adjustment of the X and Y directions. this might let them get away with a precision casted fixed distance that could be trimmed to perfection over a small range then fixed.
one of the smallest things in a microscope is the lens. most of the microscope is precision, vibration damped, gearing to manipulate the focal distance precisely. If you are going for high resolution its not yet clear to me how you avoid the expensive non-portable part of the microscope.
If you were going to bomb a building, and thus kill everything in a kill radius, is it significantly different if you send in a kill bot with no off switch. Maybe the AI on the robot makes mistakes as shoots some non-combatants. The bomb doesn't even have AI.
Mission planners have the trade off of, do I send in very selective humans to avoid casualties, but put those humans at risk, or do I drop a bomb and not put my soldiers at risk but have the potential for indisriminate killing. With unclear info it's hard.
What this does is allow more parsimonious missions with the use of more, not less selective force.
The danger here is not the proper use of these, but that they remove the restrain that hard decision was enforcing. Right now often the right choice is do nothing. But here with the prospect of lower casualties and more mission options, this may lower restraint.
Another nightmare sceanrio is that as these things become more and more trusted, police forces start using them in non-warefare environments. then were fucked.
the mid night movie scenario is one of these runs amuck like robocop is probably not going to happen unless these get so common that they enter commerical rent-a-cop domain where every bussiness has one to replace the security guard.
I'd like to see versions of this with array-of-Kerr-cells in place of the liquid crystal device (for more rapid modulation, at the cost of high voltage drivers), or digital light processors for the mirrors (though the latter are more on/off than continuously adjustable so they might be more limited on what beams they can form).
instead of an LCD, which are slow, the inventors used an accoustoptic modulator as the pattern former. Those are fast. In fact they are so fast they could also use the pattern former to sweep the wavelength in real time or q switch the laser.
It's not as conspiracy-theory cool as magical backdoors implanted in every piece of hardware, but this is how the NSA actually breaks into systems... they do it the same way everyone else does, just on a much larger scale and with even less fear of legal repercussions that the cyber criminals.
rubbish. I'd be more concerned if they didn't closely monitor all zero Day hacks. This is a SECURITY firm, not a backroom russian exploits dealer, they sell this advanced knowledge because people want to protect themselves and know what is coming. The weather service is not about weather warfare it's about advanced knowledge of what's coming. Insert car analogy here if that's insufficiently obvious.
I don't have special knowledge about how the Apple print scanner works but what I've read makes me believe it uses infrared sub dermal imaging. That is it seems below the surface. If so it's seeing more than just your finger surface print. That should make it harder to forge from lifted surface prints. It also will mean that it will work for people who have worn their finger prints off (apparently some types of labor do this--they grow back)
Moreover I would say this so called "expert" has it backwards. If you fingerprints really are a one-shot biometric that can't be unspoiled then we want to use them for casual things not critical things.
This finger print scanner is not eliminating passwords, it's just a second factor. I'ts a great idea used well.
Apple used a saphire cover for the lens cover. Why? One possibility was they needed a material that is transparent in the IR to do the sub dermal imaging. But there's other choices. Another possibility is that it's just cool. But what I'm thinking is that perhaps this cannot tolerate too much scratching so they had to use something super hard. I suppose there's also the requirement for mechanical stresses. I don't know. But if it's scratching I wonder if this will be robust.
In any case getting back to the post I'm replying to. there's no reason to store the finger print, just a hash of it, as is done for passwords. You would not want to hash the image of it either. You would want to distill it down to a set of rotationally and translationally invariant feature vectors. Of course that's still an ID of you from your fingerprint, but given the features they could not recreate your fingerprint itself.
Personally I'm very excited about this because I'm very concerned about my phone being the worlds worst 2 -factor identification. Since passwords resets from nearly all websites are sent to the address that you get all your other correspondence from them you have to use the same e-mail address for both. Your phone knows this address since you have to be able to get your e-mail. And if you also use your phone for a 2nd factor, then that doesn't really help. Anyone with your phone can just request a password reset and then they have your password and the 2nd factor. By by pay pal and google pay and your bank accounts.
So if the phone is to be that important having a biometric filter running transparently, regardless of whether it is 100%, is really welcome.
Google play and amazon both sell the final season as though it were not season 5++
So clearly everyone has partitioned it.
Now as to word mincing about what a "season" means, one can counter mince as well: technically a Season is 1/4 of the way around the sun. And the two tranches of episodes are clearly an entire sun rotation apart. So he bought a season pass and got a seasons worth of episodes.
I did not see anything that isn't a cheap app already available on the leap motion app store website. Seriously, people who do molecular modeling have set ups like that for decades.
If you don't believe me, go test drive Fold It, the protein folding game. It works with Leap motion and does the same thing. You and use it to engineer molecules by moving the parts around, slicing through them to see 3D crossections, etc...
Not to pooh-pooh this study, but dolphins and bats aren't as far apart as say, bats and moths. If a fish or reptile converged with a mammal that would be more "unbelievable". I think we're in "Oh, cool," territory more than "WHAT????"
Well that's the point. they all start with some common underlying mamallian hearing genes and then they tweak them to develop echolocation.
My guess is that in addition to certain mutations being easy to evolve (for example a particular mutation might set a rate constant on a binding protein to a be in some useful range for a typical return signal time, to create a clock), that viruses could carry genetic material between species that would bind the dna in common regions and transfer the point mutations between species.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, this hack isn't even new. There's the value of delaying a radio broadcast was documented in the movie The Sting. And before that there was the Count of Monte Christo who did a man in the middle injection of fake tweets into France's Semaphore packet system to ruin a banker.
I would assert that High frequency trading is simply parasitic. Many people have suggested a transaction tax could fix this. It would damp the frivolous trades yes, but it would not fix these mega scale singleton trades that can happen like this.
my proposal: What one should do I think is fix this by injecting random delays into the trading system itself. That is you would queue up all trades for the last 100 milliseconds into a block. Then randomize their order. then execute the trades in that new order. This would erase any value of a trade that depended on beating another trade by a few millisconds. You'd still have some edge cases to worry about (i.e. racing to be in the block before the next block). But you could fix that too (dither the interval size between 80 and 120 milliseconds at random, so no one would know where the block boundaries were.
For this to be viable enough people would have to agree that HF trades have no actual value added. Additionally, one would have the potential problem of exchanges popping up that did not honor this. But those would not likely have enough liquidity to matter.
In New Mexico, Google maps sent drivers 50 miles out of their way because it doesn't know that a road that was closed 2 years ago in a flood was re-opened shortly after that. Considering this is a main route to a National Monument, it's not just some podunk mistake. They finally fixed this last week.
Can you give a glimpse at the process this requires? I assume it has to be algorithmic in some way but it's still baffling to me how it's done. What sort of errors happen?
One could easily have said the same thing about Microsoft Word. It was a copycat and it sucked compared to Word Perfect when it first came out. But slowly they kept making it better and it won the market. One could have said the same thing about the early DOS, then the early Windows 2.0. Even windows 95. All those eventually won the markets that others owned. Moreover the same conditions exist now. It's not a saturated market; it's a growing market size.
Microsoft has followed this same pattern with all their incremental advances as well. All their new product revision completely stink at first. then they settle in and make them workable. Indeed things like Xune and PlaysForSure are outliers in that Microsoft didn't just bear down for the long haul.
Microsoft knows that embrace and extend works over time because it always has. Given they have a positive cash flow it makes even more sense since there's no ticking clock.
That's not a refund. A chargeback is a refund. With this they just keep your money and give you the illusion of getting the full value back, when in actuality it costs them cents on the dollar to do this.
Dude, they can use the refund to buy the rest of the season. That's all they wanted in the first place. So the refund is actually a better deal than they originally thought they were buying. They DID want to buy the whole season.
Whoever pays $22.99 for half a season, or any other TV show, when it is available on Netflix is beyond me. Don't get me started on bluray box sets.
With most movies I have no problem waiting for them to come out on DVD. But somethings are just so good you want to see them now. One of the things about a series is that it's immersive and lasts a long time. You enjoy talking to your friends about it while the thoughts are fresh and the possibilities in the next show have your mind alive. You want to talk about it now not in hindsight. that's the thrill. Look at all the discussion sites for breaking bad.
Since it's currently the best and most engaging drama on TV, this of all examples is a case where you should understand why anyone would want to pay $22.
Also Dumbledor dies at the end of harry potter. The cake is a lie. Walter poisons Todd's Tea with ricin.
That's not a refund. A chargeback is a refund. With this they just keep your money and give you the illusion of getting the full value back, when in actuality it costs them cents on the dollar to do this.
Well, on the other hand, the viewer already watched half the season. It's not like the season was a stale donut to be sent back. What the viewer got was good. Just half of what he expected.
I find the whole proposition dubious, and therefore apple is being quite generous. Not only that they aren't putting up much of a fight which is what makes it even more sincere. The customer is always right is an ideal that, when you can pull it off, makes for a good premium bussiness model. Discounters can't pull that off. So it distinguishes apple.
Personally, if it were my decision I'd fight with this customer. A season is a 1/4 trip around the sun. He got all the episodes available in that season. What he thought he was buying was Series 5 not season 5. Like how the british TV is named. If AMC had simply named them properly, Season 5 and seasons 6 or series 5 and series 6, rather than calling both season 5 there would be no ambiguity at all.
Apple is caving here not because they have to but because thats how they roll. Apples knows it's customers are loyal and they know that Apple limits their risks (which is a good reason to buy apple if your time has any value). So they look for ways to set themselves apart in that niche
If they are lucky this will turn up the heat on Amazon. Amazon probably has a lot more financial exposure to this. Will people make the demand to amazon now?
I will have to read the research article because the press article doesn't explain it. a dipole charge would not move in a linear gradient field. it would require a second order curvature to the gradient to make it move. thus it's irrelevant that the linear field is 120 v /meter. what would matter is the derivative on that.
I had much the same reaction to perl. I love perl for many reasons. One is that even though the native language without any imports is more powerful than almost any other languange (without imports) the O'reily nut shell guide is the thinest one on my shelf. It really says something about incomprehensibility when even the C++ nutshell guide is thicker than perl. It means that even though perl might seem very ad hoc, in fact it's so self consistent that you can write it all up in a tiny guide.
What really sold me on perl was writing object oriented perl. I had been doing object oriented programming for some time in multiple languages including java and Objective C, but what really made me understand it was perl. In perl you actually see the underside magic of what an object actually is. It's remarkable that the language of perl could go from not having any objects to having objects just by adding one additional command ("bless"). Nothing else in the language had to be re-written. Internally one is storing all the instance variables in a single hash. What's interesting is that you don't have to choose that mode of data organization. you can instead bless a scalar. then you can have the class rather than the instance manage the instance variables. Effectively a hash is a row oriented data base and a scalar is a column oriented data base. When I realized this I was sort of staggered how many high concept ideas were rolled up into the perl method of objects.
I went back and implemented a hash in fortran 77. After that I could write Object oriented fortran 77. yep that's right fortran can also be an object oriented language just doing the same trick perl does. All you then are missing is dynamic memory allocation for it to be complete.
While may people curse perls prefix sigils I actually find them conceptually compact. In most languages the notion of a type, and the construction of a primitives data, get conflated. Really these are different things. Perl makes this explicit. A primitive in perl can have a data organization (list, hash, scalar, reference, dereference, glob) signified by a pand it can separately have a package inheritance (@ISA) that is analogous to a type. In languages like C++ or most everything those two concepts are not distinguised heavily. As a result I find it easier to read a perl program because of all the explicit data structure prefixes.
What kills perl in the end for complex programs is not these sigils looking like cursing on the page, but rather that everyones programming style is different, so it gets pretty crazy to read because it's so compact. It's perhaps a compliment how compact it is. It's interesting that the less compact and less versatile a languages native syntax is the easier it is to read.
But it's true. Try reading APL, the most dense language ever devised. then try reading Lua or (early) python. Both of those are a breeze to read other people's code.
When I read ruby what I see mainly is an extended perl syntax that can avoid using these despised prefix sigils. It gives the objects syntacic sugar, like python does, to hide the object mechanics from you. So it's a very clean looking upgrade to perl.
one of the smallest things in a microscope is the lens. most of the microscope is precision, vibration damped, gearing to manipulate the focal distance precisely. If you are going for high resolution its not yet clear to me how you avoid the expensive non-portable part of the microscope.
Answering my own question: Been staring at their schematic diagram. What I think they are doing is relying on the thinness of thr sample to avoid having a long range over which to focus. then they are not worrying too much about the reproducible adjustment of the X and Y directions. this might let them get away with a precision casted fixed distance that could be trimmed to perfection over a small range then fixed.
one of the smallest things in a microscope is the lens. most of the microscope is precision, vibration damped, gearing to manipulate the focal distance precisely. If you are going for high resolution its not yet clear to me how you avoid the expensive non-portable part of the microscope.
If you were going to bomb a building, and thus kill everything in a kill radius, is it significantly different if you send in a kill bot with no off switch. Maybe the AI on the robot makes mistakes as shoots some non-combatants. The bomb doesn't even have AI.
Mission planners have the trade off of, do I send in very selective humans to avoid casualties, but put those humans at risk, or do I drop a bomb and not put my soldiers at risk but have the potential for indisriminate killing. With unclear info it's hard.
What this does is allow more parsimonious missions with the use of more, not less selective force.
The danger here is not the proper use of these, but that they remove the restrain that hard decision was enforcing. Right now often the right choice is do nothing. But here with the prospect of lower casualties and more mission options, this may lower restraint.
Another nightmare sceanrio is that as these things become more and more trusted, police forces start using them in non-warefare environments. then were fucked.
the mid night movie scenario is one of these runs amuck like robocop is probably not going to happen unless these get so common that they enter commerical rent-a-cop domain where every bussiness has one to replace the security guard.
I'd like to see versions of this with array-of-Kerr-cells in place of the liquid crystal device (for more rapid modulation, at the cost of high voltage drivers), or digital light processors for the mirrors (though the latter are more on/off than continuously adjustable so they might be more limited on what beams they can form).
your wish is my command:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18319825
here's the patent from 2000
https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/pdfs/US6031852.pdf
instead of an LCD, which are slow, the inventors used an accoustoptic modulator as the pattern former. Those are fast. In fact they are so fast they could also use the pattern former to sweep the wavelength in real time or q switch the laser.
It's not as conspiracy-theory cool as magical backdoors implanted in every piece of hardware, but this is how the NSA actually breaks into systems... they do it the same way everyone else does, just on a much larger scale and with even less fear of legal repercussions that the cyber criminals.
rubbish. I'd be more concerned if they didn't closely monitor all zero Day hacks. This is a SECURITY firm, not a backroom russian exploits dealer, they sell this advanced knowledge because people want to protect themselves and know what is coming. The weather service is not about weather warfare it's about advanced knowledge of what's coming. Insert car analogy here if that's insufficiently obvious.
the man with AOL is king.
I don't have special knowledge about how the Apple print scanner works but what I've read makes me believe it uses infrared sub dermal imaging. That is it seems below the surface. If so it's seeing more than just your finger surface print. That should make it harder to forge from lifted surface prints. It also will mean that it will work for people who have worn their finger prints off (apparently some types of labor do this--they grow back)
Moreover I would say this so called "expert" has it backwards. If you fingerprints really are a one-shot biometric that can't be unspoiled then we want to use them for casual things not critical things.
This finger print scanner is not eliminating passwords, it's just a second factor. I'ts a great idea used well.
Apple used a saphire cover for the lens cover. Why? One possibility was they needed a material that is transparent in the IR to do the sub dermal imaging. But there's other choices. Another possibility is that it's just cool. But what I'm thinking is that perhaps this cannot tolerate too much scratching so they had to use something super hard. I suppose there's also the requirement for mechanical stresses. I don't know. But if it's scratching I wonder if this will be robust.
In any case getting back to the post I'm replying to. there's no reason to store the finger print, just a hash of it, as is done for passwords. You would not want to hash the image of it either. You would want to distill it down to a set of rotationally and translationally invariant feature vectors. Of course that's still an ID of you from your fingerprint, but given the features they could not recreate your fingerprint itself.
Personally I'm very excited about this because I'm very concerned about my phone being the worlds worst 2 -factor identification. Since passwords resets from nearly all websites are sent to the address that you get all your other correspondence from them you have to use the same e-mail address for both. Your phone knows this address since you have to be able to get your e-mail. And if you also use your phone for a 2nd factor, then that doesn't really help. Anyone with your phone can just request a password reset and then they have your password and the 2nd factor. By by pay pal and google pay and your bank accounts.
So if the phone is to be that important having a biometric filter running transparently, regardless of whether it is 100%, is really welcome.
Google play and amazon both sell the final season as though it were not season 5++
So clearly everyone has partitioned it.
Now as to word mincing about what a "season" means, one can counter mince as well: technically a Season is 1/4 of the way around the sun. And the two tranches of episodes are clearly an entire sun rotation apart. So he bought a season pass and got a seasons worth of episodes.
yummy, I always like breathing in someone else's medicated ethylene glycol.
I did not see anything that isn't a cheap app already available on the leap motion app store website. Seriously, people who do molecular modeling have set ups like that for decades.
If you don't believe me, go test drive Fold It, the protein folding game. It works with Leap motion and does the same thing. You and use it to engineer molecules by moving the parts around, slicing through them to see 3D crossections, etc...
Just use bigger DH, with better cipher. AES-256? Maybe. Twofish? OK.
Bruce Schneier himself advises avoiding elliptic-curve, as being intellectually tainted by the spooks.
that's what they want you to think.
Then he said, google's customers don't care about privacy and would gladly sell google the rope used to hang them.
http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote/vladimir_lenin_quote_068c
What sort of watch only runs for 10 hours and when you glance at it doesn't show the time till you activate it?
Not to pooh-pooh this study, but dolphins and bats aren't as far apart as say, bats and moths. If a fish or reptile converged with a mammal that would be more "unbelievable". I think we're in "Oh, cool," territory more than "WHAT????"
Well that's the point. they all start with some common underlying mamallian hearing genes and then they tweak them to develop echolocation.
My guess is that in addition to certain mutations being easy to evolve (for example a particular mutation might set a rate constant on a binding protein to a be in some useful range for a typical return signal time, to create a clock), that viruses could carry genetic material between species that would bind the dna in common regions and transfer the point mutations between species.