Don't mistake those creationist nutjobs for having anything to do with Jewish people or mythology, beyond the general historical links between Christianity and Judaism. There is absolutely no relationship, and I have never heard anyone call them 'Jewish myths' before. And I actually know some people who are creationists (but otherwise fairly normal). Is that a British thing?
No - or at least, I've never heard anyone refer to them that way here.
No, I wouldn't say that's true. Certainly there exist publications with a whole range of different slants on the Palestinian question, but that's a very different thing from being anti-Semitic. And there's always over- and under-emphasis of topics—and plenty of inaccuracy in general—but I don't think a charge of anti-Semitism is justified.
Are you so personally pure that you've never ever even once written anything in a private email that could be misinterpreted by people who intend to damage you and don't care about facts?
As Cardinal Richelieu said: "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I will find something in them to have him hanged."
"if a bridge you design collapses nobody will care whether you made a grave error in your reasoning or were "just" too sloppy to transcribe your numbers correctly from one line to the next.".
There's certainly truth in that, but is the engineer who makes one sloppy mistake in step 10 really vastly better than his colleague who makes one sloppy mistake in step 1? The former will get 90%; the latter will get 0%...
Dirac Pro was made for exactly this. Latency of only 8 scanlines.
That's true, but to do that it has to sacrifice a lot on compression ratio (and to guarantee the latency you have to give up losslessness). That's great for squeezing, say, a 1080p signal into a channel designed for 1080i, but when it comes to having multiple 1080p streams from the different cameras in a studio you'll likely need the higher bandwidth Ethernet can provide anyway. And of course the potential market for fast Ethernet hardware is much bigger than for a codec that is only used within a particular industry - so the economies of scale are potentially much better there.
The latency problem i can understand, but that will be a problem regardless of compression or not.
The trouble is that the more effective codecs tend to require an entire frame before they can do any compression (so that they can compress more effectively by taking the whole frame into consideration). So if you have a series of pieces of equipment processing the video (camera, distribution, control desk(s), effects etc), then each one has to wait until it's received the last lines of a frame before it can even start sending out the first lines of that frame - so each element in the chain adds a whole frame's worth of latency. Whereas if you do it uncompressed, most equipment can start sending out the first line of a frame before it's even received the second line.
Encoding and decoding will not add that much cost compared to the network.
That's dependent on a lot of factors. 100Gbps Ethernet has the potential to reach much bigger economies of scale than broadcast-quality codec hardware (though it has a long way to go before reaching that far as yet).
Compressing/uncompressing only destroys the pic if its lossy. There are numerous lossless codecs that should do the trick and save tons of money in the process.
The trouble with lossless codecs is that they can never guarantee to make a frame smaller - mathematically there must be some frames that are uncompressible. Over the course of a long video, the codec will win on average, but when working with live streams, if you get just one frame that doesn't compress nicely (or worse, a few in succession) then your network has to be able to handle that bandwidth - so you might as well not use the compression in the first place.
I don't know how much data a 100GbE link can truly handle
It's actually very close to 100 gigabits per second. (The encoding overhead is already accounted for in the 100Gb figure, and the protocol overhead is very low: if you're using jumbo packets - and you'd probably want to - then it's easily less than 1%).
"Sharp Mortgages," the name of a company, singular noun.
"Displays" needs the s at the end.
Singular nouns that refer to groups of people often take plural verb agreement in English (admittedly this is more common in British than US English, but it does happen in both). Compare "My family is big" with "My family are big"...
It would've helped if the word "they" was replaced by "it" in reference to "Sharp Mortgages" in the post you replied to.
Yep, exactly - the "they" clearly indicates the company is being thought of as a group in this example.
Of course, the whole thing just goes to show how poorly written the original title was in the first place:-)
I would have to question the legitimacy of double blind tests. It seems really off, 50% of the patients are turned into victims destined to suffer and or die 'Here sucker take the placebo'.
You are assuming that the medication under test actually works. If it doesn't (and we don't know whether it does or not, or else we wouldn't be testing it), then those taking the placebo are no worse off, and indeed may be better off if the medication has side-effects.
and a guy is likely to link the link rather than be redirected to one in the first place, no?
No - that was one of the points of the article.
Increasingly the source of phishing URLs is social media rather than email. In tweets (and to a lesser extent on other social media) it's common to send a shortened URL (tinyurl, bit.ly, goo.gl etc) that redirects to the actual URL, and consequently users won't be surprised to receive such a short URL, and will probably click on it - whereas if they received a massively long "data:" URL with lots of base64 data after it, their suspicions would be more likely to be raised...
Are you fucking retarded? You can't "pirate" GPL software.
Of course you can—that's why you have to be careful sailing near Somalia, in case you get boarded and forced at gunpoint to hand over the source to the latest version of Emacs...
Anyway, coming up with a new unit seems stupid to me. The whole reason SI units use prefixes like mega, giga, milli, micro, nano, pico, femto, etc. is so that you don't need new units for different scales, you just use the appropriate prefix. If this thing is in the picoamps, what's the problem? Aren't picoamps good enough?
You're right, that would be stupid—and, despite what the summary tries to tell us, that's not actually what the article's suggesting.
The ampere is currently (no pun intended) defined as the amount of current that must flow in two parallel wires a specific distance apart, in order to get a certain amount of (magnetic) force between them. (The Coulomb is then defined as the amount of charge that flows past a point in one second when the current is one Ampere.) That definition is good enough for most purposes today, but there are limits to the precision that can be achieved in an experiment that measures current using mechanical forces. If it's now practical to create a stream of precisely counted electrons, then we can define the Coulomb and Ampere directly in terms of numbers of electrons, which then has the potential of being much more precise.
So the value of the Ampere and Coulomb won't change (or at least, not significantly), because any new definition will be chosen to be consistent with the old one—but the way we pin down their meaning may do.
"Our test results show that two 5-minute chunks of consecutive viewing without major interference by other appliances is sufficient to identify the content,"
emphasis added
So what? All you need is a couple of 5-minute periods when major appliances don't change their power consumption significantly. If everyone in the household is sitting watching television, then that's not too unlikely - you might find that the AC or fridge motor turns on or off, but those have a fairly long on-off period so could be handled; lighting and idle computer/hi-fi equipment will have a fairly constant power usage pattern. Of course, this will depend on the equipment in your house and the people using it, but it's not as implausible as it might at first seem.
LCD TVs dont have mesurable power fluctuations due the changing colors/brightness
Are you sure? Modern LCD TVs adjust the backlight brightness according to the image displayed, in order to improve the contrast, and this does appear to be measurable.
Basically, the meters read (or at t least, can read) the power consumption to a very fine degree of accuracy every 2 seconds. That's enough to figure out what TV channel you're watching (by watching power fluctuations caused by varying brightness levels of the TV). And with that level of detail it would also be fairly easy to make good guesses at: what time you leave for / get home from work (lights/kettle/coffee machine/cooker); when you're in the shower; how many people are in your house; whether you're on holiday... it all starts to get creepy pretty quickly...
"Undecidable in general" != "unprovable for any program". Or rather, just because it's not possible to write a general purpose algorithm that will tell you whether any given computer program {terminates, crashes, is secure against a particular threat} doesn't mean that, for any program I'm ever likely to write, there doesn't exist a proof. Or in other words - there exist billions of programs where it's difficult to know for certain whether they terminate - but those programs aren't relevant to determining whether my program terminates - and if I've got any sense I'll write my program in such a way that I can prove that it terminates (if that's the behaviour I want).
"Branch prediction isn't about fallibility or security."
How wrong you are. Ever hear of a Simple Branch Prediction Analysis attack? We covered that back in 2006, if not earlier.
Your original comment said:
And since humans make both hardware and software, it can't be infallible. Hence why we have branch prediction, error correction, and more.
... which implies that you consider branch prediction to be a form of mitigation against errors, similar to error correction — i.e. that the reason branch prediction exists is to improve security.
A Branch Prediction Analysis attack makes use of branch prediction to break security, but that's irrelevant — it doesn't change the reasons why branch prediction existed in the first place, and it certainly doesn't turn branch prediction into a security feature.
Slashdot Mirror
It's appropriately ironic that after fifteen years, Slashdot has decided to use t-shirts instead of software as promotional giveaway items.... why?
Because most Slashdot readers already have all the software they need, but could do with some more clean clothes? ;-)
Don't mistake those creationist nutjobs for having anything to do with Jewish people or mythology, beyond the general historical links between Christianity and Judaism. There is absolutely no relationship, and I have never heard anyone call them 'Jewish myths' before. And I actually know some people who are creationists (but otherwise fairly normal). Is that a British thing?
No - or at least, I've never heard anyone refer to them that way here.
It seems that the British media is generally somewhat anti-Semitic
No, I wouldn't say that's true. Certainly there exist publications with a whole range of different slants on the Palestinian question, but that's a very different thing from being anti-Semitic. And there's always over- and under-emphasis of topics—and plenty of inaccuracy in general—but I don't think a charge of anti-Semitism is justified.
Your only hope is to save two lines from every script on a USB stick, then flood the rest.
Is that what's known as an ark-hive?
Are you so personally pure that you've never ever even once written anything in a private email that could be misinterpreted by people who intend to damage you and don't care about facts?
As Cardinal Richelieu said: "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I will find something in them to have him hanged."
"if a bridge you design collapses nobody will care whether you made a grave error in your reasoning or were "just" too sloppy to transcribe your numbers correctly from one line to the next.".
There's certainly truth in that, but is the engineer who makes one sloppy mistake in step 10 really vastly better than his colleague who makes one sloppy mistake in step 1? The former will get 90%; the latter will get 0%...
Dirac Pro was made for exactly this. Latency of only 8 scanlines.
That's true, but to do that it has to sacrifice a lot on compression ratio (and to guarantee the latency you have to give up losslessness). That's great for squeezing, say, a 1080p signal into a channel designed for 1080i, but when it comes to having multiple 1080p streams from the different cameras in a studio you'll likely need the higher bandwidth Ethernet can provide anyway. And of course the potential market for fast Ethernet hardware is much bigger than for a codec that is only used within a particular industry - so the economies of scale are potentially much better there.
The latency problem i can understand, but that will be a problem regardless of compression or not.
The trouble is that the more effective codecs tend to require an entire frame before they can do any compression (so that they can compress more effectively by taking the whole frame into consideration). So if you have a series of pieces of equipment processing the video (camera, distribution, control desk(s), effects etc), then each one has to wait until it's received the last lines of a frame before it can even start sending out the first lines of that frame - so each element in the chain adds a whole frame's worth of latency. Whereas if you do it uncompressed, most equipment can start sending out the first line of a frame before it's even received the second line.
Encoding and decoding will not add that much cost compared to the network.
That's dependent on a lot of factors. 100Gbps Ethernet has the potential to reach much bigger economies of scale than broadcast-quality codec hardware (though it has a long way to go before reaching that far as yet).
Compressing/uncompressing only destroys the pic if its lossy. There are numerous lossless codecs that should do the trick and save tons of money in the process.
The trouble with lossless codecs is that they can never guarantee to make a frame smaller - mathematically there must be some frames that are uncompressible. Over the course of a long video, the codec will win on average, but when working with live streams, if you get just one frame that doesn't compress nicely (or worse, a few in succession) then your network has to be able to handle that bandwidth - so you might as well not use the compression in the first place.
I don't know how much data a 100GbE link can truly handle
It's actually very close to 100 gigabits per second. (The encoding overhead is already accounted for in the 100Gb figure, and the protocol overhead is very low: if you're using jumbo packets - and you'd probably want to - then it's easily less than 1%).
Noun-verb agreement.
"Sharp Mortgages," the name of a company, singular noun.
"Displays" needs the s at the end.
Singular nouns that refer to groups of people often take plural verb agreement in English (admittedly this is more common in British than US English, but it does happen in both). Compare "My family is big" with "My family are big"...
It would've helped if the word "they" was replaced by "it" in reference to "Sharp Mortgages" in the post you replied to.
Yep, exactly - the "they" clearly indicates the company is being thought of as a group in this example.
Of course, the whole thing just goes to show how poorly written the original title was in the first place :-)
Oh, and it's "Displays" not "Display."
Really? I'm not sure that's an improvement...
I would have to question the legitimacy of double blind tests. It seems really off, 50% of the patients are turned into victims destined to suffer and or die 'Here sucker take the placebo'.
You are assuming that the medication under test actually works. If it doesn't (and we don't know whether it does or not, or else we wouldn't be testing it), then those taking the placebo are no worse off, and indeed may be better off if the medication has side-effects.
and a guy is likely to link the link rather than be redirected to one in the first place, no?
No - that was one of the points of the article.
Increasingly the source of phishing URLs is social media rather than email. In tweets (and to a lesser extent on other social media) it's common to send a shortened URL (tinyurl, bit.ly, goo.gl etc) that redirects to the actual URL, and consequently users won't be surprised to receive such a short URL, and will probably click on it - whereas if they received a massively long "data:" URL with lots of base64 data after it, their suspicions would be more likely to be raised...
That is the basis for societal morays,
What have eels got to do with it?
Are you fucking retarded? You can't "pirate" GPL software.
Of course you can—that's why you have to be careful sailing near Somalia, in case you get boarded and forced at gunpoint to hand over the source to the latest version of Emacs...
Anyway, coming up with a new unit seems stupid to me. The whole reason SI units use prefixes like mega, giga, milli, micro, nano, pico, femto, etc. is so that you don't need new units for different scales, you just use the appropriate prefix. If this thing is in the picoamps, what's the problem? Aren't picoamps good enough?
You're right, that would be stupid—and, despite what the summary tries to tell us, that's not actually what the article's suggesting.
The ampere is currently (no pun intended) defined as the amount of current that must flow in two parallel wires a specific distance apart, in order to get a certain amount of (magnetic) force between them. (The Coulomb is then defined as the amount of charge that flows past a point in one second when the current is one Ampere.) That definition is good enough for most purposes today, but there are limits to the precision that can be achieved in an experiment that measures current using mechanical forces. If it's now practical to create a stream of precisely counted electrons, then we can define the Coulomb and Ampere directly in terms of numbers of electrons, which then has the potential of being much more precise.
So the value of the Ampere and Coulomb won't change (or at least, not significantly), because any new definition will be chosen to be consistent with the old one—but the way we pin down their meaning may do.
2) "Amps" is dependent on voltage.
Umm... are you sure about that?
"Our test results show that two 5-minute chunks of consecutive viewing without major interference by other appliances is sufficient to identify the content,"
emphasis added
So what? All you need is a couple of 5-minute periods when major appliances don't change their power consumption significantly. If everyone in the household is sitting watching television, then that's not too unlikely - you might find that the AC or fridge motor turns on or off, but those have a fairly long on-off period so could be handled; lighting and idle computer/hi-fi equipment will have a fairly constant power usage pattern. Of course, this will depend on the equipment in your house and the people using it, but it's not as implausible as it might at first seem.
LCD TVs dont have mesurable power fluctuations due the changing colors/brightness
Are you sure? Modern LCD TVs adjust the backlight brightness according to the image displayed, in order to improve the contrast, and this does appear to be measurable.
That link really doesn't demonstrate the answer to the question of "how will they read power consumption down to the device level"?
No, but this one does.
Basically, the meters read (or at t least, can read) the power consumption to a very fine degree of accuracy every 2 seconds. That's enough to figure out what TV channel you're watching (by watching power fluctuations caused by varying brightness levels of the TV). And with that level of detail it would also be fairly easy to make good guesses at: what time you leave for / get home from work (lights/kettle/coffee machine/cooker); when you're in the shower; how many people are in your house; whether you're on holiday... it all starts to get creepy pretty quickly...
And, unlike China and Iran, has veto powers.
Ummm... China does have a veto.
Would you tell a compiler:
there's irrelevant crap at the beginning of this statement but this's the important part: if( x > y ) { ...
Yes. I call it "indentation" ;-)
"Undecidable in general" != "unprovable for any program". Or rather, just because it's not possible to write a general purpose algorithm that will tell you whether any given computer program {terminates, crashes, is secure against a particular threat} doesn't mean that, for any program I'm ever likely to write, there doesn't exist a proof. Or in other words - there exist billions of programs where it's difficult to know for certain whether they terminate - but those programs aren't relevant to determining whether my program terminates - and if I've got any sense I'll write my program in such a way that I can prove that it terminates (if that's the behaviour I want).
"Branch prediction isn't about fallibility or security."
How wrong you are. Ever hear of a Simple Branch Prediction Analysis attack? We covered that back in 2006, if not earlier.
Your original comment said:
And since humans make both hardware and software, it can't be infallible. Hence why we have branch prediction, error correction, and more.
... which implies that you consider branch prediction to be a form of mitigation against errors, similar to error correction — i.e. that the reason branch prediction exists is to improve security.
A Branch Prediction Analysis attack makes use of branch prediction to break security, but that's irrelevant — it doesn't change the reasons why branch prediction existed in the first place, and it certainly doesn't turn branch prediction into a security feature.
Insecure means not confident, not safe is unsecure.
Not according to the dictionary. One word can have more than one meaning :)
It's highers-up, not higher-ups. Arrrgh!
No it isn't.