Tolkien's British publisher insisted on breaking up his 6 "book", 1 volume work into 3 smaller volumes of 2 books each (due to a paper shortage)...
Funny that, I always thought it was because nobody in his right mind would buy or read a novel of that magnitude. Granted the complete LotR pales in comparison to Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, but nobody who reads that (myself included) can be considered in his right mind.
As I understand it, for each unitl they send a number of redundant units out and then compare the evetual results taking the most popular result to be the correct result for that unit.
Even if this is the case, the point remains that one group handing in 300 redundant copies of the same data processed the same way will skew the results. What if the guy who processed the first 99% had some kind of screwup along the way, and his team hands in 300 copies of his screwed-up data? The other 3 people who got the same WU and got the right answer will be 'outvoted' by Team Cheater, ruining the whole effort (for that particular chunk of raw data, at any rate).
From the article: One common technique used by cheats is to distribute partially completed work units to other team members' SETI@home accounts. One account is used to process a work unit until it is 99 per cent complete. It is then distributed hundreds of other team members who process the remaining portion of the unit and return it. The WU is credited to their accounts vastly inflating the quantity of public processing that appear to be dedicated to the project.
Let's assume cheating is going on, and is being perpetrated in this manner. Why doesn't SETI@Home check each WU as it's submitted and say "Gee, here's hundreds of people from the same team submitting the same WU with the same result within minutes of each other. Seems awful suspicious!"
OK, the Ramones had some catchy tunes, as did the Sex Pistols. However, listen to the Ramones for more than 20 minutes at a time and they get atrociously boring. Their songs are fun, no argument there, it's just that the fact that every song was the exact same 1-4-5 chord sequence transposed to different keys.
Sure, the Sex Pistols were packaged entertainment, but they had two things going for them over the Ramones. First of all, they had a little more going on musically. More importantly, however, they blew the British class structure all to hell. I've been told that no American could possibly understand exactly how important the Sex Pistols were to Britain in terms of what they enabled. A lot of people thought bad things about the Crown and the status quo, but nobody said a damn thing for fear of being exiled (as Oscar Wilde was) for exposing society to something it didn't want to hear. The press was essentially gagged in that respect, too -- and then here come some stupid kids making fun of the Queen and getting away with it!
As fun to listen to as the Sex Pistols are, listening to them for the sake of the aural sensation they deliver is missing their biggest contribution. The politics (or maybe plain dumb luck) is why Johnny Rotten was voted the 87th Greatest Briton.
Unbelievable as it may seem, the success of a newspaper was not always predicated on its ability to sell ads (granted, it *is* predicated on its ability to attract readers, but those aren't equivalent statements). Back in the day, people made independent newspapers that stayed alive by the simple idea of making a profit on the sale of the physical newspaper to the consumer. That was The Way It Was Done until somebody got the genius idea of selling the newspaper for less than it cost to produce. They made up the money by having members of the business community pay for the privilege of placing content in the paper. Of course, should the newspaper decide to report anything opposed to the interests of its investors it would find itself no longer profitable.
A great, time-honored ploy that companies that buy advertisements can use (especially in impoverished areas) is buying ludicrously expensive advertisements for months and months before setting up any operations in the area. Then when it's time to move in and despoil the land or the workers or whatever and a staff writer wants to protest that, the editor says 'you can't write that article, they're our biggest customer!' Oh well.
Interestingly enough, people in general seem to enjoy news from independent sources -- in London, for example, a newspaper with no advertisements had about three times the readership of its sponsored competitors, despite its much higher price. Unfortunately, even with that readership it had too much overhead and simply couldn't compete and eventually folded.
Kevin Mitnick, the hacker example Katz cites, was written about repeatedly on the front page of the New York Times (not just the Technology section), and had several books written about him. A search on google I just did of 'kevin mitnick john markoff' had articles from CNN and Forbes on the first page of results. If NYT, CNN, Forbes, and their ilk are "the dark reaches of the Net" then there must be something I'm missing. What would you qualify as a story that makes ripples, then?
And of course today's newspapers mention the planes colliding and the Afghanistan wedding bombing, since those still qualify as news. It would be bizarre (to say the least!) for a newspaper to put a Kevin Mitnick story on the front page today...;)
While I admit that it's certainly possible that Riemann's Hypothesis may, God willing, be proven or disproven, isn't it also possible that it cannot be either proven or disproven under the applicable mathematical system? Gödel's Theorem means that that's a possibility, doesn't it? Not everything has to necessarily be true or untrue...
Sure these technologies seem fine individually, but add 'em up and they spell disaster with a capital 'D'. Even worse, what if such a robot uses its unstoppable power to take over an automobile or vacuum cleaner factory and convert it to some sort of killbot factory? I think the Luddites were on to something! We'd better go out with baseball bats (or cricket bats for those of you near the Living Robot facility) and rough up some robotics researchers! Who's with me?
(Ugh, those lousy robots have even infiltrated my.sig! Is there no stopping them?)
The very bizarre French movie "Cité des Enfants Perdus" ("City of the Lost Children") has a large group of characters who are blind and who have their vision restored by... (drumroll)... head-mounted cameras that plug into connectors attached to the visual cortex. Well, I assume it's the visual cortex, it plugs into the head in any case and the movie doesn't go into anal-retentive detail or anything. The single lens means they only have monocular vision, and the (presumably) low quality of the whole piece of kit means that the parts of the movie shown from their points of view are tinted green and have scanlines and a lot of background noise. This lets them see well enough to fulfill their task, though: kidnapping children so that a twisted, genetically-engineered genius can steal their dreams. (I told you it was a strange movie!) In one of the most psychologically horrifying things shown in the movie, one blind guy goes insane and starts choking a blind comrade to death... after switching the wire connections so that the guy getting choked gets to watch himself as he dies. Pleasant, eh? The movie is quite good, though. Absolutely insane, but very good, plus it had this whole bionic eye idea back in 1995. >:
In high school AP C++ class, when we were learning about sorting my teacher mentioned the different 'standard' sort algorithms, describing how they worked theoretically, and how some were n! and some were n log n, but we never actually compared the output of programs using the different methods. Out of boredom one day I went and made a program that generated a bunch of random arrays of various and then timed how long it took each of six or so algorithms to sort them all. I took the output and graphed it in Excel (being too lazy to make my own graphs;) and sure enough the better sorts did much better. Coding several different algorithms to perform the exact same task may seem needlessly redundant (because it most certainly is) but it's a great way to get a grasp of loops & recursion &c.
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Funny that, I always thought it was because nobody in his right mind would buy or read a novel of that magnitude. Granted the complete LotR pales in comparison to Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, but nobody who reads that (myself included) can be considered in his right mind.
How long until battles like this are rendered live in video card tech demos at E3? *drool*
...And then how long until a former ATi employee leaks the alpha version to the web?
Even if this is the case, the point remains that one group handing in 300 redundant copies of the same data processed the same way will skew the results. What if the guy who processed the first 99% had some kind of screwup along the way, and his team hands in 300 copies of his screwed-up data? The other 3 people who got the same WU and got the right answer will be 'outvoted' by Team Cheater, ruining the whole effort (for that particular chunk of raw data, at any rate).
One common technique used by cheats is to distribute partially completed work units to other team members' SETI@home accounts. One account is used to process a work unit until it is 99 per cent complete. It is then distributed hundreds of other team members who process the remaining portion of the unit and return it. The WU is credited to their accounts vastly inflating the quantity of public processing that appear to be dedicated to the project.
Let's assume cheating is going on, and is being perpetrated in this manner. Why doesn't SETI@Home check each WU as it's submitted and say "Gee, here's hundreds of people from the same team submitting the same WU with the same result within minutes of each other. Seems awful suspicious!"
Seems awful suspicious.
...Google toolbar! I'm helpless without it.
OK, the Ramones had some catchy tunes, as did the Sex Pistols. However, listen to the Ramones for more than 20 minutes at a time and they get atrociously boring. Their songs are fun, no argument there, it's just that the fact that every song was the exact same 1-4-5 chord sequence transposed to different keys.
Sure, the Sex Pistols were packaged entertainment, but they had two things going for them over the Ramones. First of all, they had a little more going on musically. More importantly, however, they blew the British class structure all to hell. I've been told that no American could possibly understand exactly how important the Sex Pistols were to Britain in terms of what they enabled. A lot of people thought bad things about the Crown and the status quo, but nobody said a damn thing for fear of being exiled (as Oscar Wilde was) for exposing society to something it didn't want to hear. The press was essentially gagged in that respect, too -- and then here come some stupid kids making fun of the Queen and getting away with it!
As fun to listen to as the Sex Pistols are, listening to them for the sake of the aural sensation they deliver is missing their biggest contribution. The politics (or maybe plain dumb luck) is why Johnny Rotten was voted the 87th Greatest Briton.
A great, time-honored ploy that companies that buy advertisements can use (especially in impoverished areas) is buying ludicrously expensive advertisements for months and months before setting up any operations in the area. Then when it's time to move in and despoil the land or the workers or whatever and a staff writer wants to protest that, the editor says 'you can't write that article, they're our biggest customer!' Oh well.
Interestingly enough, people in general seem to enjoy news from independent sources -- in London, for example, a newspaper with no advertisements had about three times the readership of its sponsored competitors, despite its much higher price. Unfortunately, even with that readership it had too much overhead and simply couldn't compete and eventually folded.
And of course today's newspapers mention the planes colliding and the Afghanistan wedding bombing, since those still qualify as news. It would be bizarre (to say the least!) for a newspaper to put a Kevin Mitnick story on the front page today... ;)
While I admit that it's certainly possible that Riemann's Hypothesis may, God willing, be proven or disproven, isn't it also possible that it cannot be either proven or disproven under the applicable mathematical system? Gödel's Theorem means that that's a possibility, doesn't it? Not everything has to necessarily be true or untrue...
Combine these three technologies and you get a robot that:
- Can subsist on biological matter
- Has an ingrained taste for flesh
- Knows where to find a ready supply of people
Sure these technologies seem fine individually, but add 'em up and they spell disaster with a capital 'D'. Even worse, what if such a robot uses its unstoppable power to take over an automobile or vacuum cleaner factory and convert it to some sort of killbot factory? I think the Luddites were on to something! We'd better go out with baseball bats (or cricket bats for those of you near the Living Robot facility) and rough up some robotics researchers! Who's with me? .sig! Is there no stopping them?)
(Ugh, those lousy robots have even infiltrated my
The very bizarre French movie "Cité des Enfants Perdus" ("City of the Lost Children") has a large group of characters who are blind and who have their vision restored by... (drumroll)... head-mounted cameras that plug into connectors attached to the visual cortex. Well, I assume it's the visual cortex, it plugs into the head in any case and the movie doesn't go into anal-retentive detail or anything. The single lens means they only have monocular vision, and the (presumably) low quality of the whole piece of kit means that the parts of the movie shown from their points of view are tinted green and have scanlines and a lot of background noise. This lets them see well enough to fulfill their task, though: kidnapping children so that a twisted, genetically-engineered genius can steal their dreams. (I told you it was a strange movie!) In one of the most psychologically horrifying things shown in the movie, one blind guy goes insane and starts choking a blind comrade to death... after switching the wire connections so that the guy getting choked gets to watch himself as he dies. Pleasant, eh? The movie is quite good, though. Absolutely insane, but very good, plus it had this whole bionic eye idea back in 1995. >:
In high school AP C++ class, when we were learning about sorting my teacher mentioned the different 'standard' sort algorithms, describing how they worked theoretically, and how some were n! and some were n log n, but we never actually compared the output of programs using the different methods. Out of boredom one day I went and made a program that generated a bunch of random arrays of various and then timed how long it took each of six or so algorithms to sort them all. I took the output and graphed it in Excel (being too lazy to make my own graphs ;) and sure enough the better sorts did much better. Coding several different algorithms to perform the exact same task may seem needlessly redundant (because it most certainly is) but it's a great way to get a grasp of loops & recursion &c.