You know, it always amazes me, every article on nanotech I read. I've always thought I'd see practical nanotech while alive, but certainly not so soon! It feels like we are mere years away from a breakthrough.
What gets me is the amount of miniaturisation we're getting at. 60 years ago, we had Turing machines that filled an entire room; today, we have nano-sized Turing machines. That's several orders smaller.
If this trend continues, we'll get nano-sized Pentium-III's in 60 years or less.:)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
I second that motion. Let's have a poll and see if/.ers want Katz to continue writing features.
I'm trying to give Katz' articles an open mind. I'm trying to read them without gagging. I can't. He feels like an MTV jock trying to talk to geeks and be accepted. That's as likely as Madonna being made a nun.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
I've seen that too, at a large computer company. Lots of critical applications had to be fixed, but at the same time, the management was more interested in user comfort, so some critical applications were left as-is, while other software with minor cosmetic defaults (I mean, who cares if Word doesn't handle dates properly??) had to be upgraded to a high cost.
There's definitely work required for Y2K, but the whole thing has definitely been blown out of proportion. I've seen knives and plastic slicing boards sold as being "Y2K Ready". Puh-lease!
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Well, I'm willing to bet the PS2 will run PSX games more smoothly and with better graphics. It also means that PSX game classics will remain on the market longer because they can still be played on the new killer console.
Also, you're likely to be able to transfer saved games from one console to the other, in case you can port characters to a sequel.
In short, in everyone's mind, it's gonna feel like they're upgrading, not changing systems altogether. That feels important. I'm always happy to know a P-III is gonna run all the games I have since the days of Zork. Not being able to do this would be like saying you cannot play games that do not have 3D acceleration when you buy a 3D card.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Hey, fancy that. Companies can make money off the Web? They're beginning to be interested in developping high-profile sites for business online? Fascinating... Good thing Yankees thought of it first, and Katz pointed it out!
[/sarcasm]
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
WWW, galaxies, and Slashdot's black holes!
on
Web: 19 Clicks Wide
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· Score: 2
"The Web doesn't look anything like we expected it to be," said Notre Dame physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, who along with two colleagues studied the Web's topology. A power-law distribution means that the Web doesn't follow the usual mathematical models of random networks, but instead exhibits the type of physical order found in, say, magnetic fields, galaxies and plant growth.
"It's alive! It's alive!!!"
Seriously, though, that's very interesting, but it's actually obvious when you think about it. The reason why galaxies are not distributed randomly is that there are centres of attraction that begin as random fluctuations in an evenly-distributed environment; but as matter condenses, these types of patterns emerge.
Now, replace "gravity" with "number of hits". A site with a lot of hits, of course, represents a centre of interest, where people congregate. And naturally, they will either link to the site, or try to get linked from it.
And so, the same patterns emerge.
Hey, that means Slashdot is kinda like a black hole generator! Once it aims its beam at a site, it submerges it with hits until the site reaches critical mass and implodes, dropping out of the known Uiverse!
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
I must admit the idea of Don Corleone doing a cat food ad is quite nifty!
However, that's not creativity. It's just concept association. Ultimately, it's the human filtering the results that applies creativity: creativity is not just coming up with unusual ideas, it's understanding how these ideas play out into a coherent result.
For instance, the ad about Dracula and cat food, well, sucked. The idea of Don Corleone is a bit cheezy, but it works. Taken together, these ideas don't show creativity. It's when someone recognises which is the good one and which is the bad one.
So, we're back to square one: computers are not creative in themselves, they're assistants to creativity. In this case, the ad execs were so empty of creativity (is that surprising?) that they thought the computer did all the work.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Another good reason to wait for PS2: backward compatibility. If that ain't a competition killer, I don't know what is. With all the games I have invested in for the Playstation, it's reassuring to know I'll be able to play them on the PS2 when the time comes. So the games I buy until it comes out (FF8, anyone?) will still play on the new baby. Yummy, yummy.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Like others have pointed out, this sounds like Sega FUD. Fine. I don't care. Even if the PS2 is delayed until 2001, I won't buy a Dreamcast. It just so happens that we are in the gap between two generations of game consoles, as all the major manufacturers have a tendency to put out their platforms at the same time.
So, the Dreamcast's only hope of making money is that gap. They probably know they have an inferior product, so they shipped it quickly before the Dolphin or the PS2 got here. I'm not touching this console any time soon.
Of course, PS2 is going to be more expensive. Of course, it ain't gonna be delayed for its December release! It's Christmas. The FUD here is so clear, Sega is hoping that by saying things like this, they're gonna be the choice #1 for Christmas console presents.
But I'll say it clearly if Santa Claus happens to be reading Slashdot.:) Even if the PS2 is delayed, I don't want a Dreamcast for Christmas. When PS2 comes out, it's gonna be Christmas every day!
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Red herring indeed. The Y2K bug is not that much more complicated than the 9999 bug; I mean, the problem with 9/9/99 is that it signals the end of code prematurely! That's nothing compared to the threat that M$ Word will misinterpret your date sorting scheme. Boo hoo.
Of course, the Y2K bug is more widespread, but it's much more simple to interpret. Last year, people (alright, not people, Y2K consultants:) ) were saying how bad 9/9/99 would be, threatening us with a Y2K bug before Y2K even gets here.
I'm willing to bet Y2K will go as smoothly, and all the news we'll have to read will be, 'Power is still up in xxxx'.
Y2K consultants, it's time to run to Argentina with the money you made, before the public catches on!:)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
I see a lot of paranoia about RH protecting their trademarks and everything. However, I'm not as pessimistic about the future of Linux as RH gains in popularity.
What RH is doing is successfully bringing Linux into the corporate world, by showing it can be neatly supported, that it can be marketed successfully and that it is a viable business solution with a company front. Unfortunately, no amount of good-willed hacker PR can achieve that. The market is a place for suits and ties.
Even if RH turns into a Microsoft for the year 2000, they still won't dictate the core, only affect the public's perception of Linux by altering its distribution. What you end up with, once the fluff is over, is still the same old GPL apps.
Imagine if DOS has been Open Sourced from the get-go, and Microsoft then built their own distribution of it, including a custom-built GUI called Windows. You could download the DOS kernel for free, try other GUI's if you wanted, and Microsoft would be busy trying to enhance the user-friendliness of Windows, not trying to pass it off as a decent OS.
And as long as I could hack the OS and decide which GUI I want with it, I'd be fine if Microsoft was in that position. So I don't fear about Red Hat.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Alec Guinness is not ditching TPM, he's ditching the whole Star Wars franchise. He thought the first movie sucked.
It's easy to call him an heretic, but I don't think we should. I disagree with him that the dialogue sucked; granted, it wasn't Shakespearian, and certainly not the best lines he had been given. I'm not sure how this piece deserves news, other than it acts as counterpoint to the hype. But this type of comment comes along for every majorly successful movie series. Star Trek's Shatner is another example.
Hey, that's fine. When the 6 movies are done filming, we'll remember McGregor as Obi-Wan, not Sir Alec Guinness. Not to say the first three movies will be better, but McGregor would make a convincing Jabba the Hut if they cast him as that!
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
It's a weird thing that computers, in this age when we record every darn thing ever done and collect cereal boxes or Band-Aid boxes, would have an unclear ancestry. Of course, I blame it on military secrecy.
Thing is, I'm not sure what's the basis here for saying these guys invented the first computer. Basically, they fell into anonymity because they failed to produce something worthwhile during the course of WW2. Their computer calculated ballistic trajectories in 15 mins instead of a few hours? Turing, at the same time, was decoding German Enigma and screwing up the German war effort by himself.
It's not what you think of that matters, when it comes to innovation and invention; I probably thought about the concept of the next huge scientific revolution while taking a bath the other day. I once formulated the very basis of Superstring theory when I was in seventh grade. I thought up the idea of Quantum Chromodynamics while half-drunk at a friend's birthday party. I postulated the Internet's impact on commerce in a college philosophy class. The point here is, I couldn't use any of them, put them into an equation or found a company that would make Bill Gates beg me for change.
That is to say: it doesn't matter who thinks it first. What matters is what you do with it, and how fast you can chunk out results. We all get brilliant ideas, and that's why we don't remember who thought of something first, but rather, who invented something practical first.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Hmmm. Let's see. How about "Dawn of the Dead"? It's a far better examination of social conditions masked in a genre picture (zombies as the vanishing middle class, shopping mall as urban temple, etc.). That sure wasn't too hard.
Hey. I didn't say the whole American Tail was pure genius, I pointed out it was quite keen to see that in a children animated feature. It beats Disney beating us senseless with skewed history and racial stereotypes so loud I feel like wearing a RCMP uniform and frolick with wolves just cause I'm Canuck.
I agree, Dawn of the Dead was nicely subversive and interesting. Zombies make for great social canon fodder.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Diamond Age, Van Eck, locus
on
Smart Dust
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· Score: 4
That article is both freaky and enthralling. Yes, I did make the Diamond Age connection the moment I read the subject, and gosh, this is exactly the motes(mites?) from Diamond Age.
But surveillance? Tempest detectors? Sounds like a wonderful way to practice Van Eck Phreaking easily.
One thing I think these motes lack; the article implies that they are all remotely controlled and emit back and forth to a single receptor. Sounds as stupid as the battledroids in SW: TPM, if you ask me. Get the relay station and you kill a slew of them at once.
What these buggers need is something akin to "locus" communication. That is, one particular mote should communicate only with the few within a very small range, and receive communications from them. Swarms of locusts, or flights of birds work this way, for instance. A bird, for instance, patterns its flight after the birds nearer to him, and they are all connected in a single pattern that seems perfectly synchronised.
Then, the swarm of motes can communicate as a single entity back to the central or whatever it may be, and this works regardless of how many mites are destroyed by accidental sneezing or a sudden itch.
I'd be willing to mention this to Berkeley if I didn't fear the FBI would infest my room with them next.:)
Hey, I can see a nice combination of borderline schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive behaviour emerging here: keep cleaning everything because the FBI may be spying on you.:)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
To say that the cells age "as fast as" the originator is correct but I don't think that's what you meant.
Well, that's what I meant, but rather than explain it all, I decided to cut corners for dramatic effect, if you will. Of course, Rich Man would have to wait 20 years (I mean, who wants to live through puberty again? Wait, I could drink Coke all I want, consider a McExtra health food and play D&D all day? I take that BACK!) and then get a brain transplant. Of course, he wouldn't get any more life expectancy, which is perhaps the Universe's way of telling us we can't be immortals just yet...:)
Love the nick btw, I've got about 100 pages left to the Cryptonomicon. Gotta see if I can finish that up tonight.
Thanks. Enjoy it!
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
This is somewhat unsettling, because it means clones do not carry on genetical diseases of the original in totality.
That means that cloning becomes a way to cure some genetical diseases. Rich Man has genetical defect. Rich Man gets cloned. Clone ages as fast as Rich Man (remember that? Dolly's cells show signs as aging as fast as her progenitor.) Rich Man transplants his brain without chance of reject.
Now that is a scary possibility.
That, or maybe I've played Parasite Eve too much and I'm gittery when the word "Mitochondria" gets mentioned.:)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
The Mice are fleeing the Cats from Russia where they are being killed and "hunted". They come to America, singing, "In America, there are no cats". It turns out that there are cats, but instead of hunting mice in the open, they dress as mice to lure them into their clutches.
If that ain't a great analogy and social commentary on the U.S., I don't know what is.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Frankly, the moderation system here on Slashdot is the best I have ever seen anywhere. It keeps flambait and trolls at bay, underlines particularly good comments when the number of comments becomes overwhelming; it works.
Personally, I don't think meta-moderation is necessary. Of course, in some specific cases something will be moderated negatively that shouldn't have been, but in general, I have seen these comments go up again within a few hours. Moderators here do a great job, and although the moderation is not perfect, it makes reading Slashdot all the more enjoyable.
What is the importance of karma? Why go bonkers about it and worry about being negatively moderated, etc? Karma is only an indicator of your moderation history. By having high karma, you are known to post intelligent comments on Slashdot, and it is safe to assume your comments will not be flames or trolls. That's all there is to karma, and I hope it doesn't become a mark of status on Slashdot. As a matter of fact, I would suggest no one but you can see your karma score.
Other than that, I will always read comments with scores of 0, because you never know when an AC will have something insightful to say. Also, comments at -1 are worth a glance, because it's possible that the poster posted a controversial opinion but still has something to bring to the debate. However, in general, such comments are rarely rated down, a sign that Slashdot moderators are, on the whole, insightful and helpful. -1 comments turn out generally to be posts to the effect of '1st p0st d00d!!' or '1inux sux m1rc0s0ft rulz!!!!'
So keep moderation as it is; to me, it's way ahead of anything else done on other forums, and there's no need to feel it is imperfect. Kudos to Rob and the gang.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
I don't think this article is very insightful. As a matter of fact, it's FUD-filled by "insightful" quotes from Microsoft employees such as, 'The hype is over' or 'Linux is good at delivering WWW pages'. I mean, come on.
Notice also that the Mindcraft benchmarks? Anyway.
Thing is, if this is the angle of attack proferred against Linux in the media today, then I'm quite happy with it. They are attacking Linux exactly in the place it is best-suited to defend: they say its performance is bad, especially when compared against Windows 2000 (excuse me while I wipe a tear of laughter) and that it is too complicated to use.
However, it says nothing of the Open Source model. This is where it gets interesting.
We all read the Halloween memos. Microsoft identified clearly that the real battle was not MS vs Linux, but Closed Source vs Open Source models.
The most interesting point of this article is that the Open Source model is not mentioned at all. Considering the previous moves of Microsoft, this is very interesting. If you don't attack an adversary on a particular point, then it means that point is perfectly defended. It means Microsoft knows it cannot attack successfully the Open Source model.
And that, fellow Open Source fans, is really good news. They're failing to come up with proper attacks. So let them claim Windows 2000 will outgun Linux. Let them claim Linux is hard to use. The fact of the matter is, Microsoft is running scared.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Now, I hear a lot of people groaning. Yeah, Spielberg is a sentimentalist director, and he just loves throwing children into his story to make them appear as both cute and the recipient of infinite wisdom.
However, he is also perhaps the only director who can produce a story for children without having to baby-talk to them, and make the story enjoyable for adults as well. Remember An American Tail? That movie was beautiful, both for children who loved the mouse characters, and the adults like me who could appreciate events such as the Pogroms, and the sweet irony of cats dressing as mice in America.
Will Spielberg make AI as a children movie? Well, I'm not sure. I must admit I thought AI would be a totally different story, given it was Kubrick's pet project. I know I imagine the story more along the lines of The Shining than E.T. The plot sounds to me like it should be a disturbing relationship between a child robot and a mother who just won't love him. It sounds like it should be uncomfortable.
With Spielberg at the helm, there is bound to be hope and light in the middle of the tragedy, but it just won't be Kubrick. In the ideal world, Kubrick wouldn't have wasted time with Eyes Wide Shut and would have given us his ultimate sci-fi movie after 2001 before dying. In this world, however, I think if someone can make a good movie out of the story of AI, it has to be Spielberg.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
As promised, here is the passage from Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier that deals with NSA's tampering of the S-boxes. This is from the second edition, pp. 284-285:
In addition of being accused of reducing the key length, NSA was also accused of modifying the contents of the S-boxes. When pressed for design justification for the S-boxes, the NSA indicated that elements of the algorithm's design were "sensitive" and would not be made public. Many cryptographers were concerned that the NSA-designed S-boxes hid a trapdoor, making it possible for them to easily cryptanalyze the algorithm.
Since then, considerable effort has gone into analyzing the design and operation of the S-boxes. In the mid-1970s, Lexar Corporation and Bell Laboratories examined the operation of the S-boxes. Neither analysis revealed any weaknesses, although both found inexplicable features. The S-boxes had more features in common with a linear transformation than one would expect if they were chosen at random. The Bell Laboratories team stated that the S-boxes may have hidden trapdoors, and the Lexar report concluded with:
Structures have been found in DES that were undoubtly inserted to strenghten the system against certain types of attack.
Structures have also been found that appear to weaken the system.
On the other hand, this report also warned:
...the problem [of the search for structure in the S-boxes] is complicated by the ability of the human mind to find apparent structure in random data, which is really not structure at all.
[...]Various oddities about the S-boxes appeared in the literature. The last three output bits of the fourth S-box can be derived in the same way as the first by complementing some of the input bits. Two different, but carefully chosen, inputs to S-boxes can produce the same output. It is possible to obtain the same output of a sigle DES round by changing bits in only three neighboring S-boxes. Shamir noticed that the S-boxes entries appeared to be somewhat imbalanced, but wasn't about to turn that imbalance into an attack. [He mentioned a feature of the fifth S-box, but it took another eight years before linear cryptanalysis exploited that feature.] Other researchers showed that publicly known design principles could be used to generate S-boxes with the observed characteristics.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Slashdot Mirror
Help you practice your lightsabre skills.
Actually work as a tennis ball;
Always end its statements by 'But then again, I'm just a ball!'
Come coated with Nerf foam for stress relief.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
What gets me is the amount of miniaturisation we're getting at. 60 years ago, we had Turing machines that filled an entire room; today, we have nano-sized Turing machines. That's several orders smaller.
If this trend continues, we'll get nano-sized Pentium-III's in 60 years or less. :)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
I'm trying to give Katz' articles an open mind. I'm trying to read them without gagging. I can't. He feels like an MTV jock trying to talk to geeks and be accepted. That's as likely as Madonna being made a nun.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
There's definitely work required for Y2K, but the whole thing has definitely been blown out of proportion. I've seen knives and plastic slicing boards sold as being "Y2K Ready". Puh-lease!
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Also, you're likely to be able to transfer saved games from one console to the other, in case you can port characters to a sequel.
In short, in everyone's mind, it's gonna feel like they're upgrading, not changing systems altogether. That feels important. I'm always happy to know a P-III is gonna run all the games I have since the days of Zork. Not being able to do this would be like saying you cannot play games that do not have 3D acceleration when you buy a 3D card.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Hey, fancy that. Companies can make money off the Web? They're beginning to be interested in developping high-profile sites for business online? Fascinating... Good thing Yankees thought of it first, and Katz pointed it out!
[/sarcasm]
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
"It's alive! It's alive!!!"
Seriously, though, that's very interesting, but it's actually obvious when you think about it. The reason why galaxies are not distributed randomly is that there are centres of attraction that begin as random fluctuations in an evenly-distributed environment; but as matter condenses, these types of patterns emerge.
Now, replace "gravity" with "number of hits". A site with a lot of hits, of course, represents a centre of interest, where people congregate. And naturally, they will either link to the site, or try to get linked from it.
And so, the same patterns emerge.
Hey, that means Slashdot is kinda like a black hole generator! Once it aims its beam at a site, it submerges it with hits until the site reaches critical mass and implodes, dropping out of the known Uiverse!
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
However, that's not creativity. It's just concept association. Ultimately, it's the human filtering the results that applies creativity: creativity is not just coming up with unusual ideas, it's understanding how these ideas play out into a coherent result.
For instance, the ad about Dracula and cat food, well, sucked. The idea of Don Corleone is a bit cheezy, but it works. Taken together, these ideas don't show creativity. It's when someone recognises which is the good one and which is the bad one.
So, we're back to square one: computers are not creative in themselves, they're assistants to creativity. In this case, the ad execs were so empty of creativity (is that surprising?) that they thought the computer did all the work.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
So, the Dreamcast's only hope of making money is that gap. They probably know they have an inferior product, so they shipped it quickly before the Dolphin or the PS2 got here. I'm not touching this console any time soon.
Of course, PS2 is going to be more expensive. Of course, it ain't gonna be delayed for its December release! It's Christmas. The FUD here is so clear, Sega is hoping that by saying things like this, they're gonna be the choice #1 for Christmas console presents.
But I'll say it clearly if Santa Claus happens to be reading Slashdot. :) Even if the PS2 is delayed, I don't want a Dreamcast for Christmas. When PS2 comes out, it's gonna be Christmas every day!
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Of course, the Y2K bug is more widespread, but it's much more simple to interpret. Last year, people (alright, not people, Y2K consultants :) ) were saying how bad 9/9/99 would be, threatening us with a Y2K bug before Y2K even gets here.
I'm willing to bet Y2K will go as smoothly, and all the news we'll have to read will be, 'Power is still up in xxxx'.
Y2K consultants, it's time to run to Argentina with the money you made, before the public catches on! :)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
What RH is doing is successfully bringing Linux into the corporate world, by showing it can be neatly supported, that it can be marketed successfully and that it is a viable business solution with a company front. Unfortunately, no amount of good-willed hacker PR can achieve that. The market is a place for suits and ties.
Even if RH turns into a Microsoft for the year 2000, they still won't dictate the core, only affect the public's perception of Linux by altering its distribution. What you end up with, once the fluff is over, is still the same old GPL apps.
Imagine if DOS has been Open Sourced from the get-go, and Microsoft then built their own distribution of it, including a custom-built GUI called Windows. You could download the DOS kernel for free, try other GUI's if you wanted, and Microsoft would be busy trying to enhance the user-friendliness of Windows, not trying to pass it off as a decent OS.
And as long as I could hack the OS and decide which GUI I want with it, I'd be fine if Microsoft was in that position. So I don't fear about Red Hat.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
It's easy to call him an heretic, but I don't think we should. I disagree with him that the dialogue sucked; granted, it wasn't Shakespearian, and certainly not the best lines he had been given. I'm not sure how this piece deserves news, other than it acts as counterpoint to the hype. But this type of comment comes along for every majorly successful movie series. Star Trek's Shatner is another example.
Hey, that's fine. When the 6 movies are done filming, we'll remember McGregor as Obi-Wan, not Sir Alec Guinness. Not to say the first three movies will be better, but McGregor would make a convincing Jabba the Hut if they cast him as that!
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Thing is, I'm not sure what's the basis here for saying these guys invented the first computer. Basically, they fell into anonymity because they failed to produce something worthwhile during the course of WW2. Their computer calculated ballistic trajectories in 15 mins instead of a few hours? Turing, at the same time, was decoding German Enigma and screwing up the German war effort by himself.
It's not what you think of that matters, when it comes to innovation and invention; I probably thought about the concept of the next huge scientific revolution while taking a bath the other day. I once formulated the very basis of Superstring theory when I was in seventh grade. I thought up the idea of Quantum Chromodynamics while half-drunk at a friend's birthday party. I postulated the Internet's impact on commerce in a college philosophy class. The point here is, I couldn't use any of them, put them into an equation or found a company that would make Bill Gates beg me for change.
That is to say: it doesn't matter who thinks it first. What matters is what you do with it, and how fast you can chunk out results. We all get brilliant ideas, and that's why we don't remember who thought of something first, but rather, who invented something practical first.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Hey. I didn't say the whole American Tail was pure genius, I pointed out it was quite keen to see that in a children animated feature. It beats Disney beating us senseless with skewed history and racial stereotypes so loud I feel like wearing a RCMP uniform and frolick with wolves just cause I'm Canuck.
I agree, Dawn of the Dead was nicely subversive and interesting. Zombies make for great social canon fodder.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
But surveillance? Tempest detectors? Sounds like a wonderful way to practice Van Eck Phreaking easily.
One thing I think these motes lack; the article implies that they are all remotely controlled and emit back and forth to a single receptor. Sounds as stupid as the battledroids in SW: TPM, if you ask me. Get the relay station and you kill a slew of them at once.
What these buggers need is something akin to "locus" communication. That is, one particular mote should communicate only with the few within a very small range, and receive communications from them. Swarms of locusts, or flights of birds work this way, for instance. A bird, for instance, patterns its flight after the birds nearer to him, and they are all connected in a single pattern that seems perfectly synchronised.
Then, the swarm of motes can communicate as a single entity back to the central or whatever it may be, and this works regardless of how many mites are destroyed by accidental sneezing or a sudden itch.
I'd be willing to mention this to Berkeley if I didn't fear the FBI would infest my room with them next. :)
Hey, I can see a nice combination of borderline schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive behaviour emerging here: keep cleaning everything because the FBI may be spying on you. :)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Well, that's what I meant, but rather than explain it all, I decided to cut corners for dramatic effect, if you will. Of course, Rich Man would have to wait 20 years (I mean, who wants to live through puberty again? Wait, I could drink Coke all I want, consider a McExtra health food and play D&D all day? I take that BACK!) and then get a brain transplant. Of course, he wouldn't get any more life expectancy, which is perhaps the Universe's way of telling us we can't be immortals just yet... :)
Thanks. Enjoy it!
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
That means that cloning becomes a way to cure some genetical diseases. Rich Man has genetical defect. Rich Man gets cloned. Clone ages as fast as Rich Man (remember that? Dolly's cells show signs as aging as fast as her progenitor.) Rich Man transplants his brain without chance of reject.
Now that is a scary possibility.
That, or maybe I've played Parasite Eve too much and I'm gittery when the word "Mitochondria" gets mentioned. :)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Mice: "Common" folks
Cats: Greed, power, corruption
The Mice are fleeing the Cats from Russia where they are being killed and "hunted". They come to America, singing, "In America, there are no cats". It turns out that there are cats, but instead of hunting mice in the open, they dress as mice to lure them into their clutches.
If that ain't a great analogy and social commentary on the U.S., I don't know what is.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Personally, I don't think meta-moderation is necessary. Of course, in some specific cases something will be moderated negatively that shouldn't have been, but in general, I have seen these comments go up again within a few hours. Moderators here do a great job, and although the moderation is not perfect, it makes reading Slashdot all the more enjoyable.
What is the importance of karma? Why go bonkers about it and worry about being negatively moderated, etc? Karma is only an indicator of your moderation history. By having high karma, you are known to post intelligent comments on Slashdot, and it is safe to assume your comments will not be flames or trolls. That's all there is to karma, and I hope it doesn't become a mark of status on Slashdot. As a matter of fact, I would suggest no one but you can see your karma score.
Other than that, I will always read comments with scores of 0, because you never know when an AC will have something insightful to say. Also, comments at -1 are worth a glance, because it's possible that the poster posted a controversial opinion but still has something to bring to the debate. However, in general, such comments are rarely rated down, a sign that Slashdot moderators are, on the whole, insightful and helpful. -1 comments turn out generally to be posts to the effect of '1st p0st d00d!!' or '1inux sux m1rc0s0ft rulz!!!!'
So keep moderation as it is; to me, it's way ahead of anything else done on other forums, and there's no need to feel it is imperfect. Kudos to Rob and the gang.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Notice also that the Mindcraft benchmarks? Anyway.
Thing is, if this is the angle of attack proferred against Linux in the media today, then I'm quite happy with it. They are attacking Linux exactly in the place it is best-suited to defend: they say its performance is bad, especially when compared against Windows 2000 (excuse me while I wipe a tear of laughter) and that it is too complicated to use.
However, it says nothing of the Open Source model. This is where it gets interesting.
We all read the Halloween memos. Microsoft identified clearly that the real battle was not MS vs Linux, but Closed Source vs Open Source models.
The most interesting point of this article is that the Open Source model is not mentioned at all. Considering the previous moves of Microsoft, this is very interesting. If you don't attack an adversary on a particular point, then it means that point is perfectly defended. It means Microsoft knows it cannot attack successfully the Open Source model.
And that, fellow Open Source fans, is really good news. They're failing to come up with proper attacks. So let them claim Windows 2000 will outgun Linux. Let them claim Linux is hard to use. The fact of the matter is, Microsoft is running scared.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
However, he is also perhaps the only director who can produce a story for children without having to baby-talk to them, and make the story enjoyable for adults as well. Remember An American Tail? That movie was beautiful, both for children who loved the mouse characters, and the adults like me who could appreciate events such as the Pogroms, and the sweet irony of cats dressing as mice in America.
Will Spielberg make AI as a children movie? Well, I'm not sure. I must admit I thought AI would be a totally different story, given it was Kubrick's pet project. I know I imagine the story more along the lines of The Shining than E.T. The plot sounds to me like it should be a disturbing relationship between a child robot and a mother who just won't love him. It sounds like it should be uncomfortable.
With Spielberg at the helm, there is bound to be hope and light in the middle of the tragedy, but it just won't be Kubrick. In the ideal world, Kubrick wouldn't have wasted time with Eyes Wide Shut and would have given us his ultimate sci-fi movie after 2001 before dying. In this world, however, I think if someone can make a good movie out of the story of AI, it has to be Spielberg.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
In addition of being accused of reducing the key length, NSA was also accused of modifying the contents of the S-boxes. When pressed for design justification for the S-boxes, the NSA indicated that elements of the algorithm's design were "sensitive" and would not be made public. Many cryptographers were concerned that the NSA-designed S-boxes hid a trapdoor, making it possible for them to easily cryptanalyze the algorithm.
Since then, considerable effort has gone into analyzing the design and operation of the S-boxes. In the mid-1970s, Lexar Corporation and Bell Laboratories examined the operation of the S-boxes. Neither analysis revealed any weaknesses, although both found inexplicable features. The S-boxes had more features in common with a linear transformation than one would expect if they were chosen at random. The Bell Laboratories team stated that the S-boxes may have hidden trapdoors, and the Lexar report concluded with:
On the other hand, this report also warned:
[...]Various oddities about the S-boxes appeared in the literature. The last three output bits of the fourth S-box can be derived in the same way as the first by complementing some of the input bits. Two different, but carefully chosen, inputs to S-boxes can produce the same output. It is possible to obtain the same output of a sigle DES round by changing bits in only three neighboring S-boxes. Shamir noticed that the S-boxes entries appeared to be somewhat imbalanced, but wasn't about to turn that imbalance into an attack. [He mentioned a feature of the fifth S-box, but it took another eight years before linear cryptanalysis exploited that feature.] Other researchers showed that publicly known design principles could be used to generate S-boxes with the observed characteristics.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."