I think this law is just plain dumb. I mean, I guess I can understand people not wanting their children to be exposed to 'Rated R' type games, however, parents should take an active role in their child's life and interests. Trying to legislate morality into the public realm is not the way to solve this, as you tend to blanket-censor too much, and you leave it up to some government committee to decide what your child should or should not view. Take the time to review things for yourself, so that YOU are the one deciding what is right for your children.
When a government forbids minors from drinking or smoking or playing video games, it just makes it that much more cool to do it at a young age. Countries with less strict regulations on alcohol/smoking (most of europe) tend to have a lot less problems with the whole taboo/cool issue associations. When will our government learn that this is not the way?
This seems like a really cool contest to raise awareness on security matters. This feels kind of like an ACM problem, except less programming and probably a lot more real-world experience. Anyway, I've never tried to figure out what binary files do...I always refer to source files. Are there many tools available for looking at or figuring out what binaries do? Any reference pages? (the one linked on the article page isn't very helpful). Can someone provide more information about forensics with binaries? Thank you.
That means the apparent luminosity scales as: 1 / (r1^2 r2^2)
No, it does not mean that. The light is travelling the sum of the two distances so its magnitude (if the object were reflecting all light it encountered) would be:
1 / ( (r1+r2)^2 )
What makes things so faint, is that most objects DON't reflect all light they encounter. There is a property, known as albedo, which determines how reflective an object is. For instance, the moon has an albedo of ~.1 which means that it reflects only 10% of the light that strikes it (imagine how bright the moon would be if it had an albedo of.8 or.9, yikes!). So objects in the outer solar, with relatively low albedos, and large r1s and r2s, combined with their miniscule sizes are very difficult to see.
My bad, I meant Adaptive Optics instead of Active Optics. Active optics occurs on a much slower time interval and doesn't provide nearly the same results. Adaptive Optics makes the secondary mirror change several times per second, whereas the active optics changes on the minute timescale.
There is a technology called active optics that can be applied to ground-based observations to 'clean up' the optical distortions (seeing) caused by the atmosphere.
Most research-grade telescopes these days are Cassegrain telescopes, which means they have two distinct mirrors, the big primary mirror (When you hear sizes of telescopes, they are making reference to the diameter of this mirror: Keck = 10M, UKIRT=4M, etc.), and the smaller secondary mirror which further focuses the beam from the primary into a tight beam suitable for an eyepiece or camera. Basically how active optics works is there are is an extra camera that picks up the wavefronts of the light as it comes through the atmosphere. It then flexes and bends the secondary mirror (much smaller than the primary) in slight ways in order to accomodate for the atmospheric distortions.
The results are drastic. Images that have been created using active optics are much clearer than non-AO images. However, AO is very expensive to use, and to some extent, degrades the quality of the image. Since some of the light is taken away from the original image as it is sent to the wavefront-detecting camera, it reduces the overall light-gathering power of the telescope. Thus, when a telescope is in AO mode, it creates clearer images, but it isn't as sensitive to deeper/fainter sources as when it isn't in AO mode.
I don't think that AO will make earth-based telescopes behave like Space-based ones, but it will indeed help earth-based telescopy to create better images.
If all continues to go well, the camera will also spend some time on an improbable quest to take the first picture of a planet outside our solar system.
I don't think that HST is going to be the first telescope to successfully image an extrasolar planet. It's magnification and capabilities are just barely at the point where it would be able to spot one. I think the first telescope to image an extrasolar planet will be SIM (Space Interferometry Mission), which is currently slated to go up some time around 2009. It uses optical interferometry to gain tremendous increase in magnification and precision. It will be ~100,000x more precise than HST with an accuracy of 1-4 Microarcseconds. Of course, it is made to have a very small field of view so it won't make HST or other medium to wide field of view scopes obsolete. But I can't wait to find some of the results that come out of that project.
I think music/noise is the biggest constructor/destructor of the zone for me. I will listen to either music I know really well (so I don't get caught listening to the lyrics and hence distracting me), or wordless music (classical, trance, ambient, etc). This tends to work well for me. I also have to take my phone off of the hook, disconnect any IM programs or auto-email checkers. Any little thing on my machine that can pull me out of the zone while I'm coding I need to purge. Light doesn't seem to have much of an effect on me. I also like to code alone, but with some sort of person/advisor/boss/mentor within walking distance...in case I really get stuck.
An easy to use interface and pgp/opengpg compatibility are included in the free email service Hushmail. It does encryption as transparently as I've seen it done. Their tech support sucks for fixing problems because they never respond to queries from their paying members (I hope they're reading this), but other than that, it is a relatively good service.
It seems to me that MS could be accepting of this business model despite the fact that they choose not to follow it. MS could acknowledge that there are good things that come out of the open source methodology but also show that there are certain tasks better suited to a proprietary market. Security products are definitely more suited to an open source environment, I think almost everyone in the tech industry will agree with that. So why does MS choose to disagree? --because it would lose them money on their proprietary security products, and they'd have to go back on all of the slanders they've made against the open source dynamic. It has turned into a holy war, and I don't think either side will easily admit any defeat.
I just think it is impressive that an ancient Greek came up with a very elegant way of finding all prime numbers over 2k years ago. I know it doesn't rank up there as a deep algorithm, but I think it is a fundamental algorithm.
Re:Basic of algorithms
on
Deep Algorithms?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Dictionary.com defines an algorithm as:
A step-by-step problem-solving procedure, especially an established, recursive computational procedure for solving a problem in a finite number of steps.
Another way to think about an algorithm is this, you start out with input data in a given format, and then run some set steps on that input data until eventually it gives you output data. The nice thing about algorithms is that when they are correctly formulated, they can work without human intervention or without thinking/reasoning (just following the steps on the data). That is why they are particularly useful for computers. But they don't have to be limited to computers. Most recipes for food could be considered algorithms, that is, a set of procedures that bring you from input to output.
A good example of a computer algorithm is one of the many sorting programs. Quicksort, bubblesort, mergesort, heapsort...these are just different algorithms for taking a list of unorganized integers and by following their steps, you get a list of integers in numerical order.
When it comes to beauty in algorithms, people are generally referring to simplicity and efficiency in algorithms. Doing things in a way that most people wouldn't normally think to do them, yet doing them in terse and efficient ways (elegance).
I'm not exactly sure what is meant by a 'deep' algorithm, but I would think it would reference just how complex the task that the algorithm solves is.
My vote for best algorithms are: Sieve of Eratosthenes (an ancient greek method for finding a list of all prime numbers), and the Fast Fourier Transform, an algorithm that has revolutionized several industries.
It would be cool if you could make an athletic suit out of this material for athletes to wear to prevent being overheated. It would block the sun's rays (reducing heat), but allow excess thermal energy to slough off a runner into his/her surroundings. Maybe the foam would be too rigid to make into a wearable apparatus, but it sounds like a cool idea. Either way, it beats sweating in order to cool down.
Kuhn did in fact invent this technique. The technique is for figuring out what is on a CRT based on the light signals that it gives off (even against a wall producing a diffuse signal). Van Eck phreaking deals with using the radio signals produced in the monitor's rastering process. van Eck phreaking is the basis of TEMPEST. This Kuhn method is entirely different.
Did you even read the article? It states that there are different classes of objects that emanate information through LEDs. Class III objects emanate enough information to give an observer knowledge as to WHAT was being sent, not just traffic analysis. In other words, they DO go on for 1 and off for 0. All but one of the modem/modem-like devices tested were class III objects. At least read the article before you make entirely incorrect comments about the content therein.
"...but there is good reason to think that it was not a fearsome predator like many of its smaller terrestrial and aquatic relatives"
If this thing doesn't have a stinging tail and all the stuff that its terrestrial counterparts have, I wonder what it would look like. A big hard-shelled manatee lumbering along through the deep?
I drink to prepare for a fight; tonight I'm very prepared. -Soda Popinksi
"You are building in a surveillance infrastructure, and how it's used now is not likely how it's going to be used two years from now or five years from now."
A very telling statement. A lot of people here in the US trust that their government and all of its agencies will always do 'the right thing' in the end, and that no one in our government is out there to turn the world into a 1984esque police state. Although I don't think that the government will transition to this dystopia in one clear cut step, it will reach a police state if it continues making tiny steps towards this ultimate goal.
Building a surveillance infrastructure is one of those steps -- not necessarily a huge deal in and of itself, but it sets the stage for misuse. Maybe the people using it ARE only using it to get the bad guys, but what happens when they think YOU are the bad guy. I, for one, don't trust every government employee to not be corrupt, nor do I think that this is necessarily a tool that we want any agency to have.
On Book record subpoenaing
"It's a business record, a single business record," he said. "We're not exploring the reading habits of the suspect. We're not asking [them] to tell us everyone they sold the book to. The warrant only seeks to know if the suspect bought books about manufacturing of methamphetamine at meth labs."
Where does it stop after that? Giving away ANY information impinges on my First Amendment rights. I don't want to base my book purchases on what other people think I should or should not read. People shouldn't have to worry about what books they read or what movies they watch because they fear what would happen if it came to public light. Here again, certain agencies within the government are trying to create an infrastructure which allows them to discover information to which they should not have access. I realize that this could expedite certain legal cases (a few were listed in the article), but the potential for misuse in the future is not a risk that I think the American people should be willing to take.
Because people are afraid they will be obsoleted! As long as their aren't designer babies I can convince myself I am valuable for who I am. As soon as a man appears who is better looking smarter faster etc.. what do I have left.
I agree that people are afraid for this reason. I genuinely would be afraid of someone being all-around better at everything that I am good at, if they had been engineered that way. But that isn't the issue. The issue is that once the technology is introduced for say 1% of the population to be able to genetically engineer their children, then the decision for all of the population has already been made.
Take as an analogy a game of poker. Say technology came out that allowed a person to be able to win at poker 80% of the time compared to the average shmoe who can only win 30% of the time (I pulled that figure out of my ass.) Even if only 1% of the population out there gets this technology, then the winning percentage of the average man will go down. The only way to ever be back on an even playing field is to have everybody get that technology. Either the people don't use this technology (perhaps on the grounds that it is immoral or other) and they end up losing overall, or you accept this technology to get back on evenfooting.
Either way, you are left with a skewed result: the people who don't accept the technology eventually fail and die off, or everyone is forced to use the technology in order to keep up. Once the technology is there, then we have already decided. I think that we need to evaluate the morality of the issue before it is upon us (which is fast approaching).
Slashdot Mirror
I think this law is just plain dumb. I mean, I guess I can understand people not wanting their children to be exposed to 'Rated R' type games, however, parents should take an active role in their child's life and interests. Trying to legislate morality into the public realm is not the way to solve this, as you tend to blanket-censor too much, and you leave it up to some government committee to decide what your child should or should not view. Take the time to review things for yourself, so that YOU are the one deciding what is right for your children.
When a government forbids minors from drinking or smoking or playing video games, it just makes it that much more cool to do it at a young age. Countries with less strict regulations on alcohol/smoking (most of europe) tend to have a lot less problems with the whole taboo/cool issue associations. When will our government learn that this is not the way?
This seems like a really cool contest to raise awareness on security matters. This feels kind of like an ACM problem, except less programming and probably a lot more real-world experience. Anyway, I've never tried to figure out what binary files do...I always refer to source files. Are there many tools available for looking at or figuring out what binaries do? Any reference pages? (the one linked on the article page isn't very helpful). Can someone provide more information about forensics with binaries? Thank you.
A direct measurement is not an image. Of course we've measured extrasolar planets, that is not the issue; the issue is imaging them.
That means the apparent luminosity scales as: 1 / (r1^2 r2^2)
.8 or .9, yikes!). So objects in the outer solar, with relatively low albedos, and large r1s and r2s, combined with their miniscule sizes are very difficult to see.
No, it does not mean that. The light is travelling the sum of the two distances so its magnitude (if the object were reflecting all light it encountered) would be:
1 / ( (r1+r2)^2 )
What makes things so faint, is that most objects DON't reflect all light they encounter. There is a property, known as albedo, which determines how reflective an object is. For instance, the moon has an albedo of ~.1 which means that it reflects only 10% of the light that strikes it (imagine how bright the moon would be if it had an albedo of
Last I checked that stood for "National American Space Association," so this would be quite a surprise!
Last "I" checked, NASA stood for National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
My bad, I meant Adaptive Optics instead of Active Optics. Active optics occurs on a much slower time interval and doesn't provide nearly the same results. Adaptive Optics makes the secondary mirror change several times per second, whereas the active optics changes on the minute timescale.
There is a technology called active optics that can be applied to ground-based observations to 'clean up' the optical distortions (seeing) caused by the atmosphere.
Most research-grade telescopes these days are Cassegrain telescopes, which means they have two distinct mirrors, the big primary mirror (When you hear sizes of telescopes, they are making reference to the diameter of this mirror: Keck = 10M, UKIRT=4M, etc.), and the smaller secondary mirror which further focuses the beam from the primary into a tight beam suitable for an eyepiece or camera. Basically how active optics works is there are is an extra camera that picks up the wavefronts of the light as it comes through the atmosphere. It then flexes and bends the secondary mirror (much smaller than the primary) in slight ways in order to accomodate for the atmospheric distortions.
The results are drastic. Images that have been created using active optics are much clearer than non-AO images. However, AO is very expensive to use, and to some extent, degrades the quality of the image. Since some of the light is taken away from the original image as it is sent to the wavefront-detecting camera, it reduces the overall light-gathering power of the telescope. Thus, when a telescope is in AO mode, it creates clearer images, but it isn't as sensitive to deeper/fainter sources as when it isn't in AO mode.
I don't think that AO will make earth-based telescopes behave like Space-based ones, but it will indeed help earth-based telescopy to create better images.
If all continues to go well, the camera will also spend some time on an improbable quest to take the first picture of a planet outside our solar system.
I don't think that HST is going to be the first telescope to successfully image an extrasolar planet. It's magnification and capabilities are just barely at the point where it would be able to spot one. I think the first telescope to image an extrasolar planet will be SIM (Space Interferometry Mission), which is currently slated to go up some time around 2009. It uses optical interferometry to gain tremendous increase in magnification and precision. It will be ~100,000x more precise than HST with an accuracy of 1-4 Microarcseconds. Of course, it is made to have a very small field of view so it won't make HST or other medium to wide field of view scopes obsolete. But I can't wait to find some of the results that come out of that project.
I don't think anyone is going to drive a submarine to a telephone switch in Nevada...I don't care how much technology or how many people they have.
I think music/noise is the biggest constructor/destructor of the zone for me. I will listen to either music I know really well (so I don't get caught listening to the lyrics and hence distracting me), or wordless music (classical, trance, ambient, etc). This tends to work well for me. I also have to take my phone off of the hook, disconnect any IM programs or auto-email checkers. Any little thing on my machine that can pull me out of the zone while I'm coding I need to purge. Light doesn't seem to have much of an effect on me. I also like to code alone, but with some sort of person/advisor/boss/mentor within walking distance...in case I really get stuck.
An easy to use interface and pgp/opengpg compatibility are included in the free email service Hushmail. It does encryption as transparently as I've seen it done. Their tech support sucks for fixing problems because they never respond to queries from their paying members (I hope they're reading this), but other than that, it is a relatively good service.
It seems to me that MS could be accepting of this business model despite the fact that they choose not to follow it. MS could acknowledge that there are good things that come out of the open source methodology but also show that there are certain tasks better suited to a proprietary market. Security products are definitely more suited to an open source environment, I think almost everyone in the tech industry will agree with that. So why does MS choose to disagree? --because it would lose them money on their proprietary security products, and they'd have to go back on all of the slanders they've made against the open source dynamic. It has turned into a holy war, and I don't think either side will easily admit any defeat.
I just think it is impressive that an ancient Greek came up with a very elegant way of finding all prime numbers over 2k years ago. I know it doesn't rank up there as a deep algorithm, but I think it is a fundamental algorithm.
Dictionary.com defines an algorithm as:
A step-by-step problem-solving procedure, especially an established, recursive computational procedure for solving a problem in a finite number of steps.
Another way to think about an algorithm is this, you start out with input data in a given format, and then run some set steps on that input data until eventually it gives you output data. The nice thing about algorithms is that when they are correctly formulated, they can work without human intervention or without thinking/reasoning (just following the steps on the data). That is why they are particularly useful for computers. But they don't have to be limited to computers. Most recipes for food could be considered algorithms, that is, a set of procedures that bring you from input to output.
A good example of a computer algorithm is one of the many sorting programs. Quicksort, bubblesort, mergesort, heapsort...these are just different algorithms for taking a list of unorganized integers and by following their steps, you get a list of integers in numerical order.
When it comes to beauty in algorithms, people are generally referring to simplicity and efficiency in algorithms. Doing things in a way that most people wouldn't normally think to do them, yet doing them in terse and efficient ways (elegance).
I'm not exactly sure what is meant by a 'deep' algorithm, but I would think it would reference just how complex the task that the algorithm solves is.
My vote for best algorithms are: Sieve of Eratosthenes (an ancient greek method for finding a list of all prime numbers), and the Fast Fourier Transform, an algorithm that has revolutionized several industries.
It would be cool if you could make an athletic suit out of this material for athletes to wear to prevent being overheated. It would block the sun's rays (reducing heat), but allow excess thermal energy to slough off a runner into his/her surroundings. Maybe the foam would be too rigid to make into a wearable apparatus, but it sounds like a cool idea. Either way, it beats sweating in order to cool down.
Kuhn did in fact invent this technique. The technique is for figuring out what is on a CRT based on the light signals that it gives off (even against a wall producing a diffuse signal). Van Eck phreaking deals with using the radio signals produced in the monitor's rastering process. van Eck phreaking is the basis of TEMPEST. This Kuhn method is entirely different.
Did you even read the article? It states that there are different classes of objects that emanate information through LEDs. Class III objects emanate enough information to give an observer knowledge as to WHAT was being sent, not just traffic analysis. In other words, they DO go on for 1 and off for 0. All but one of the modem/modem-like devices tested were class III objects. At least read the article before you make entirely incorrect comments about the content therein.
"...but there is good reason to think that it was not a fearsome predator like many of its smaller terrestrial and aquatic relatives"
If this thing doesn't have a stinging tail and all the stuff that its terrestrial counterparts have, I wonder what it would look like. A big hard-shelled manatee lumbering along through the deep?
I drink to prepare for a fight; tonight I'm very prepared. -Soda Popinksi
On DC surveillance:
"You are building in a surveillance infrastructure, and how it's used now is not likely how it's going to be used two years from now or five years from now."
A very telling statement. A lot of people here in the US trust that their government and all of its agencies will always do 'the right thing' in the end, and that no one in our government is out there to turn the world into a 1984esque police state. Although I don't think that the government will transition to this dystopia in one clear cut step, it will reach a police state if it continues making tiny steps towards this ultimate goal.
Building a surveillance infrastructure is one of those steps -- not necessarily a huge deal in and of itself, but it sets the stage for misuse. Maybe the people using it ARE only using it to get the bad guys, but what happens when they think YOU are the bad guy. I, for one, don't trust every government employee to not be corrupt, nor do I think that this is necessarily a tool that we want any agency to have.
On Book record subpoenaing
"It's a business record, a single business record," he said. "We're not exploring the reading habits of the suspect. We're not asking [them] to tell us everyone they sold the book to. The warrant only seeks to know if the suspect bought books about manufacturing of methamphetamine at meth labs."
Where does it stop after that? Giving away ANY information impinges on my First Amendment rights. I don't want to base my book purchases on what other people think I should or should not read. People shouldn't have to worry about what books they read or what movies they watch because they fear what would happen if it came to public light. Here again, certain agencies within the government are trying to create an infrastructure which allows them to discover information to which they should not have access. I realize that this could expedite certain legal cases (a few were listed in the article), but the potential for misuse in the future is not a risk that I think the American people should be willing to take.
You could also compare it to inside of harwood dorm at Pomona College, 1 mile south of you. That is where that particular scene was shot.
2001-03-13 23:04:27
We'll see if my birthday/time is lucky.
Because people are afraid they will be obsoleted! As long as their aren't designer babies I can convince myself I am valuable for who I am. As soon as a man appears who is better looking smarter faster etc.. what do I have left.
I agree that people are afraid for this reason. I genuinely would be afraid of someone being all-around better at everything that I am good at, if they had been engineered that way. But that isn't the issue. The issue is that once the technology is introduced for say 1% of the population to be able to genetically engineer their children, then the decision for all of the population has already been made.
Take as an analogy a game of poker. Say technology came out that allowed a person to be able to win at poker 80% of the time compared to the average shmoe who can only win 30% of the time (I pulled that figure out of my ass.) Even if only 1% of the population out there gets this technology, then the winning percentage of the average man will go down. The only way to ever be back on an even playing field is to have everybody get that technology. Either the people don't use this technology (perhaps on the grounds that it is immoral or other) and they end up losing overall, or you accept this technology to get back on evenfooting.
Either way, you are left with a skewed result: the people who don't accept the technology eventually fail and die off, or everyone is forced to use the technology in order to keep up. Once the technology is there, then we have already decided. I think that we need to evaluate the morality of the issue before it is upon us (which is fast approaching).