So if the reader works by hearing a particular frequency or "note" from EM excitation of one of the 70 "inks", and assigns a binary digit based on the presence or absence of that note, how does it read multiple tags at once?
Does it triangulate the signal source and disambiguate the return signals that way (i.e., by physical location)? If so, what kind of distances can be easily discriminated?
Or is there some other technical trick I'm missing?
Do regular, plain-vanilla RFIDs have this issue too?
The technology as described in the article seems to be binary relative to "detected presence"; i.e., if we can detect this "note" from one of the 70 chemicals *at all*, that binary digit is on. So it would be remarkably easy, if one had the inks (or even a decent subset of the inks) to corrupt the signatures of the tags.
So that would seem to incline towards a control of the ink materials or production. I wonder how hard these chemicals would be to produce in a non-industrial setting?
I also wonder if the detectors could be improved to detect relative density -- of course that would just mean you need to do a little tinkering with the "eraser" so that it detects the signature and adjusts the masking mix . . .
Also, of course, having detectors capable of detecting relative density would increase the "namespace", though 2^70 already gives us ~200 million unique identifiers for each of 6 billion humans.
Re:The picture appears composited
on
News from Mars
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· Score: 2, Informative
Oops.
RTFA, and "The lower part of the picture shows the same region in perspective view as if seen from a low-flying aircraft."
Still annoying, though. And should be disclaimered better somewhere on the picture or at least on the detail page where you get the high-res version.
The picture appears composited
on
News from Mars
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The large picture of Valles Marineris appears to be composited. It looks like the background (with the small black border) is the real picture, and then they've extrapolated something closer to a surface view where you can see elevation, slapped it in front, over the border, and projected a shadow back over the join where they laid the forground over the background.
What gives? That's remarkably annoying -- why not just show us the picture as taken instead of this cutesy mockup?
Well, half right. It's named after the Beagle, which is the ship on which Charles Darwin was the naturalist, which visited (among other places) the Galapagos Islands, where Darwin formulated much of the theory of evolution by natural selection.
While agreeing with much of what you've said, in terms of cinematic necessity concerning maintaining the corrupting power of the Ring justifying some changes to Faramir, Tolkien would be (maybe is) rolling over in his grave.
Faramir in the books is not "immune" to the corrupting influence of the Rings -- he is a man deeply aware of it, and a man so possessed of his own integrity, his own identity, his own humanity, that he will not sacrifice these things to a lust for the power of the Ring.
And while making Faramir vulnerable to a lust for the power of the Ring serves to emphasize that part of Tolkien's reality, it fails because it actually makes the Ring more important than it is -- because the Ring governs the story. The reason Faramir in the books is so powerful is because it is a glimpse of a good thing -- and a human good thing -- which utterly rejects the power of the Ring, including its lure, and is not corrupted by it -- for even Sauron and his Ring are but a passing evil.
The other thing that gets lost with the Faramir change is a chance to appreciate what exactly Frodo is sacrificing. Remember that Frodo has at five points been willing to yield the Ring -- Gandalf, Bombadil, Aragorn, the Council, and Galadriel -- no other individual, save Bilbo, with Gandalf's help, was supposed to have been able to ever approach that kind of freedom. By the time he gets to Faramir, Frodo no longer possesses that sort of freedom -- the Ring has mastered him more than that. Frodo, by carrying the Ring, is sacrificing his own integrity, his own ability to master himself, his generosity -- his very selfhood. And in that sense, we can see that Frodo is even greater than Faramir; Faramir has the power to resist, but Frodo has the strength to suffer, even to the point of his own collapse from which he is saved only by further injury.
Now, I'm perfectly willing to believe that it's simply not possible to tell that kind of a story in these movies. But not having it is still a loss.
Right -- we've known that Jackson said it wouldn't work in the movie, and I was generally willing to defer to him on that point, similarly to the way I felt about Bombadil and even, to an extent, what he did to Faramir (though I'll be interested to see how the Faramir/Denethor/Mithrandir dynamic recovers from the violence done to the Faramir character).
However, what really concerned me was hearing that Jackson just plain didn't like the Scouring. I would have been happier if he had loved it, but felt unable to do it justice. Finding out that he disliked it let me wondering if he and I were really fans of the same book.
Because performance in a supercomputing cluster is not just the sum of the nodes.
It's highly dependent on the interconnects, the topology of the network, the software that does the clustering (i.e., that actually makes the nodes available for parallelized word), etc.
So minor tweaks can have major effects, and getting it tweaked properly is quite an accomplishment.
In any case, here's a plausible explanation. First thing to do is note that almost all the entries are duplicates, ending in either/text or/iraq; that many of the/iraq entries are 404s and would seem to be ridiculous anyway, but that most or all of the/text entries work, and lead to the text-only version of the site.
Robots.txt exists with all the/text entries. Reason: So that only one version of the site gets indexed, and the text-only version doesn't compete with the full-graphics version for ranking. Perfectly legit.
Somebody writes a copy/replace script that gives us/iraq everywhere there used to be/text.
The article is fundamentally unbalanced. No one ever asks the question of what Cisco/LinkSys/Broadcom thought they were doing when they used Linux in the product. It's written as if the GPL was sprung on them after they had committed to Linux. They have lawyers. Said lawyers are presumably capable of reading the GPL.
What's the story here? The story is they got caught.
Turning this into GPL-badness is completely ignorant. The GPL is a large part of the incentive for Linux development -- one of the reasons Linux developed so fast and so well.
In proprietary software, the incentive to invest is development is monetary return upon sale. In GPL software, the incentive is the return of better-developed source. If there was no return for the investment (if Open Source were, BSD-style, just a donation), fewer individuals and organizations would make the investment. Basic economics.
Except that under the GPL every recipient (end-user) of the code is potentially a distributor. GPL destroys the distributor/user division.
The only difference between me and Redhat relative to distributing Linux is size. If I make a CD copy of Linux source and hand it to a friend, I'm engaging in the exact same act relative to the copyright license.
Why on earth was this modded interesting? The only interesting thing about is the misconceptions that make it possible.
What is the theoretical speed of 0 latency for computations?
(a) The theoretical "speed" of 0 latency is just that: theoretical (or maybe fictitious is a better word). Nothing in the real physical world happens with 0 latency.
(b) So let's talk about when we have a "perceived 0" latency . . . which would mean, umm, operations conducted in units asymptotically approaching Planck time? Or something. Anyway, ridiculously fast. Point is, it stil matters what you're going to calculate. And if you decide to calculate the factorial of googolplex, well, that'll probably still hurt.
(c) But let's posit a machine that does the factorial of googolplex in perceived-0-latency. What's it do with the factorial of googolplex raised to the googolplex power? The point is that you can always describe, in an instant, a computation that is any arbitrary order of magnitude more complex than the fast computation.
(d) so the real question you're asking, what's the speed at which computers become perceived-instantaneous for all interesting problems.
And, of course, the answer depends on what the interesting problems are. I think recent history shows that our appetite for computation actually grows faster than the supply. In other words, the minute someone hands us an "Earth Simulator", we can immediately think of all the cool things we could do if it could simulate at higher fidelity (i.e., do more computation faster). And that'll always happen, because we'll always want to model more complex phenomena with greater fidelity.
And, as has also been pointed out on this thread, there are inherent limitations around things like light-speed and the parallelism of a problem (i.e., how many pieces can a problem be subdivided into and how fast do they need to talk to each other drives how far apart they can be and still function). Grace Murray Hopper used to hold up a piece of wire, about a foot long, to show how far apart things could be at 1ns-latency at lightspeed. Some limits are fundamental.
[Becoming an inveterate geek]
Of course, in Star Trek the computers run immersed in subspace fields that make them superluminal, so . ..
Hopefully this kills off any remaining debate over cloning/killing babies and paves the way for real, theraputic research.
Why on earth would the discovery of the "master gene" have any impact whatsoever on the debate over the moral status of stem cells derived from the destruction of embryos?
The contention is that a human embryo, from the moment of conception, is a unique new human life, and deserves the full measure of respect and protection accorded to human life generally.
(Sidebar: note that the contention is not that the embryo is a human person; personhood is fundamentally impossible to establish scientifically, since it is at bottom a philosophical and theological category. But an embryo is, inarguably, human life.)
And yet those parties to the debate who support embyronic stem cell research persist in trotting out the most recent developments and extravagant promises of embryonic stem cell research as if they will determine the debate.
Let me try to make it clear. Let us posit that embryonic stem cells will cure not just one, but every human disease; that they will erase poverty; usher in world peace; and make us all immortal.
It is still irreducibly evil to profit from the deliberate destruction of a unique human life.
The danger here is . . .
on
SCO SCO SCO!
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· Score: 1
. . . that it eventually becomes more economical for IBM or somebody to buy SCO just to make them go away.
Behold: precedent!
Suddenly, we have a viable business model. ..
Buy old intellectual property (or develop your own, but that would be work)
Lie about its incorporation in open source
Massive conflagration of anxiety
Lots of cash for owners as someone makes you go away
I for one am quite glad that IBM doesn't seem to be pursuing the buyout route with SCO; who wants to legitimate this kind of idiocy?
I mean, we all hope it's not *that* dangerous with Linux, but imagine this happening to an Open Source project without that much inertia and momentum to protect it. We can expect Apache to survive similar treatment, but what about things like application servers or compilers?
What if somebody just takes potshots at open source in hope of quick buck?
Right, but if an entity is using the threat of suit to interfere with the normal functioning of the marketplace or to quash comptetion or to extort monies (in this case licensing fees) and the suit has no merit, someone should have standing to sue for actual economic damages and an injunction to prevent SCO from behaving this way.
What do you see as a company's options in the face of your warning?
I would suspend any new Linux-related activities until this is all sorted out. But first get that opinion of your legal counsel. If they say there is no problem and no issue, then you probably have nothing to worry about. But I doubt there is any attorney worth his salt that is going to say there is no potential of an issue here. There is a big issue.
Q: In other words, a company's options reduce to sending a flock of (expensive) lawyers to investigate the legal consequences of a highly complex claim, the factual merits of which you refuse to divulge?
A: Well, when you put it that way . . . still YES! A thousand times YES! Linux development shall come to a screeching halt!
Seriously, when's someone with standing going to countersue?
Open-source software is a common resource; what SCO is doing is analogous to saying "we know that there are poisoned wells. But we're not telling you which ones. Options: (1) drink and maybe die; or (2) pay us to tell you which wells are poisoned.
This is flagrantly abusive, and someone should unleash the flesh-eating lawyers on SCO.
In other words, Novell (assuming they do in fact retain copyright) can make this go away for Linux simply by, at whatever point SCO reveals what source was theoretically copied into Linux, slapping a copyright notice on the appropriate files and granting GPL on the code involved.
Unless, of course, what SCO means by having the "contract rights" to Unix involves having the exclusive right to license the source (but if so, why didn't they say so?). And, how exactly would posessing the exclusive right to license be different from copyright itself?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Ian McKellen was nominated for FotR for Best Supporting Actor. Didn't win, though.
Or, also possible that Microsoft revved the version numbers strangely. Who knows?
Does it triangulate the signal source and disambiguate the return signals that way (i.e., by physical location)? If so, what kind of distances can be easily discriminated?
Or is there some other technical trick I'm missing?
Do regular, plain-vanilla RFIDs have this issue too?
So that would seem to incline towards a control of the ink materials or production. I wonder how hard these chemicals would be to produce in a non-industrial setting?
I also wonder if the detectors could be improved to detect relative density -- of course that would just mean you need to do a little tinkering with the "eraser" so that it detects the signature and adjusts the masking mix . . .
Also, of course, having detectors capable of detecting relative density would increase the "namespace", though 2^70 already gives us ~200 million unique identifiers for each of 6 billion humans.
Or mod me, 'cause I took the time to make a link.
RTFA, and "The lower part of the picture shows the same region in perspective view as if seen from a low-flying aircraft."
Still annoying, though. And should be disclaimered better somewhere on the picture or at least on the detail page where you get the high-res version.
What gives? That's remarkably annoying -- why not just show us the picture as taken instead of this cutesy mockup?
Which just isn't true .
Why did this get modded interesting?
Well, half right. It's named after the Beagle, which is the ship on which Charles Darwin was the naturalist, which visited (among other places) the Galapagos Islands, where Darwin formulated much of the theory of evolution by natural selection.
Mod parent down -- link doesn't go anywhere near a review.
All the Unexplained Stuff is explained therein.
And there are about 20 endings, instead of 13. And an appendix after the endings with some more endings.
And please never let anyone adapt Wheel of Time.
Faramir in the books is not "immune" to the corrupting influence of the Rings -- he is a man deeply aware of it, and a man so possessed of his own integrity, his own identity, his own humanity, that he will not sacrifice these things to a lust for the power of the Ring.
And while making Faramir vulnerable to a lust for the power of the Ring serves to emphasize that part of Tolkien's reality, it fails because it actually makes the Ring more important than it is -- because the Ring governs the story. The reason Faramir in the books is so powerful is because it is a glimpse of a good thing -- and a human good thing -- which utterly rejects the power of the Ring, including its lure, and is not corrupted by it -- for even Sauron and his Ring are but a passing evil.
The other thing that gets lost with the Faramir change is a chance to appreciate what exactly Frodo is sacrificing. Remember that Frodo has at five points been willing to yield the Ring -- Gandalf, Bombadil, Aragorn, the Council, and Galadriel -- no other individual, save Bilbo, with Gandalf's help, was supposed to have been able to ever approach that kind of freedom. By the time he gets to Faramir, Frodo no longer possesses that sort of freedom -- the Ring has mastered him more than that. Frodo, by carrying the Ring, is sacrificing his own integrity, his own ability to master himself, his generosity -- his very selfhood. And in that sense, we can see that Frodo is even greater than Faramir; Faramir has the power to resist, but Frodo has the strength to suffer, even to the point of his own collapse from which he is saved only by further injury.
Now, I'm perfectly willing to believe that it's simply not possible to tell that kind of a story in these movies. But not having it is still a loss.
However, what really concerned me was hearing that Jackson just plain didn't like the Scouring. I would have been happier if he had loved it, but felt unable to do it justice. Finding out that he disliked it let me wondering if he and I were really fans of the same book.
It's highly dependent on the interconnects, the topology of the network, the software that does the clustering (i.e., that actually makes the nodes available for parallelized word), etc.
So minor tweaks can have major effects, and getting it tweaked properly is quite an accomplishment.
In any case, here's a plausible explanation. First thing to do is note that almost all the entries are duplicates, ending in either /text or /iraq; that many of the /iraq entries are 404s and would seem to be ridiculous anyway, but that most or all of the /text entries work, and lead to the text-only version of the site.
Reason: So that only one version of the site gets indexed, and the text-only version doesn't compete with the full-graphics version for ranking. Perfectly legit.
Stupid? Yes.
Nefarious? Probably not.
What's the story here? The story is they got caught.
Turning this into GPL-badness is completely ignorant. The GPL is a large part of the incentive for Linux development -- one of the reasons Linux developed so fast and so well.
In proprietary software, the incentive to invest is development is monetary return upon sale. In GPL software, the incentive is the return of better-developed source. If there was no return for the investment (if Open Source were, BSD-style, just a donation), fewer individuals and organizations would make the investment. Basic economics.
Except that under the GPL every recipient (end-user) of the code is potentially a distributor. GPL destroys the distributor/user division. The only difference between me and Redhat relative to distributing Linux is size. If I make a CD copy of Linux source and hand it to a friend, I'm engaging in the exact same act relative to the copyright license.
Positing that the universe is in fact deterministic, where would the computer that simulates the universe sit? Where is there enough room?
As long as you need more than one atom to simulate an atom, this is going to be a problem.
What is the theoretical speed of 0 latency for computations?
(a) The theoretical "speed" of 0 latency is just that: theoretical (or maybe fictitious is a better word). Nothing in the real physical world happens with 0 latency.
(b) So let's talk about when we have a "perceived 0" latency . . . which would mean, umm, operations conducted in units asymptotically approaching Planck time? Or something. Anyway, ridiculously fast. Point is, it stil matters what you're going to calculate. And if you decide to calculate the factorial of googolplex, well, that'll probably still hurt.
(c) But let's posit a machine that does the factorial of googolplex in perceived-0-latency. What's it do with the factorial of googolplex raised to the googolplex power? The point is that you can always describe, in an instant, a computation that is any arbitrary order of magnitude more complex than the fast computation.
(d) so the real question you're asking, what's the speed at which computers become perceived-instantaneous for all interesting problems.
And, of course, the answer depends on what the interesting problems are. I think recent history shows that our appetite for computation actually grows faster than the supply. In other words, the minute someone hands us an "Earth Simulator", we can immediately think of all the cool things we could do if it could simulate at higher fidelity (i.e., do more computation faster). And that'll always happen, because we'll always want to model more complex phenomena with greater fidelity. And, as has also been pointed out on this thread, there are inherent limitations around things like light-speed and the parallelism of a problem (i.e., how many pieces can a problem be subdivided into and how fast do they need to talk to each other drives how far apart they can be and still function). Grace Murray Hopper used to hold up a piece of wire, about a foot long, to show how far apart things could be at 1ns-latency at lightspeed. Some limits are fundamental.
[Becoming an inveterate geek]
Of course, in Star Trek the computers run immersed in subspace fields that make them superluminal, so . . .
[Friends pull me back to something like normal]Why on earth would the discovery of the "master gene" have any impact whatsoever on the debate over the moral status of stem cells derived from the destruction of embryos?
The contention is that a human embryo, from the moment of conception, is a unique new human life, and deserves the full measure of respect and protection accorded to human life generally.
(Sidebar: note that the contention is not that the embryo is a human person; personhood is fundamentally impossible to establish scientifically, since it is at bottom a philosophical and theological category. But an embryo is, inarguably, human life.)
And yet those parties to the debate who support embyronic stem cell research persist in trotting out the most recent developments and extravagant promises of embryonic stem cell research as if they will determine the debate.
Let me try to make it clear. Let us posit that embryonic stem cells will cure not just one, but every human disease; that they will erase poverty; usher in world peace; and make us all immortal.
It is still irreducibly evil to profit from the deliberate destruction of a unique human life.
Behold: precedent!
Suddenly, we have a viable business model. . .
I for one am quite glad that IBM doesn't seem to be pursuing the buyout route with SCO; who wants to legitimate this kind of idiocy?
I mean, we all hope it's not *that* dangerous with Linux, but imagine this happening to an Open Source project without that much inertia and momentum to protect it. We can expect Apache to survive similar treatment, but what about things like application servers or compilers?
What if somebody just takes potshots at open source in hope of quick buck?
Right, but if an entity is using the threat of suit to interfere with the normal functioning of the marketplace or to quash comptetion or to extort monies (in this case licensing fees) and the suit has no merit, someone should have standing to sue for actual economic damages and an injunction to prevent SCO from behaving this way.
Q: In other words, a company's options reduce to sending a flock of (expensive) lawyers to investigate the legal consequences of a highly complex claim, the factual merits of which you refuse to divulge?
A: Well, when you put it that way . . . still YES! A thousand times YES! Linux development shall come to a screeching halt!
Seriously, when's someone with standing going to countersue?
Open-source software is a common resource; what SCO is doing is analogous to saying "we know that there are poisoned wells. But we're not telling you which ones. Options: (1) drink and maybe die; or (2) pay us to tell you which wells are poisoned.
This is flagrantly abusive, and someone should unleash the flesh-eating lawyers on SCO.
In other words, Novell (assuming they do in fact retain copyright) can make this go away for Linux simply by, at whatever point SCO reveals what source was theoretically copied into Linux, slapping a copyright notice on the appropriate files and granting GPL on the code involved.
Unless, of course, what SCO means by having the "contract rights" to Unix involves having the exclusive right to license the source (but if so, why didn't they say so?). And, how exactly would posessing the exclusive right to license be different from copyright itself?