Frankly, I think if you're intelligent enough to know about science, you should be able to sculpt with a great deal of expertise.
I said basic science. What does that have to do with advanced sculpting? If Bush is unable to make basic Playdoh sculptures I wouldn't be a bit surprised, but that's beside the point. The president should have a well rounded education because he or she is supposed to make decisions that impact a wide variety of things. Unless you like pointy haired bosses running your country and personal life as well as your work life.
the exact same logic applies with science. the president doesn't need to know ANY science
And he probably doesn't need to know ANY economics, or ANY war theory, or have ANY morals, because he can always delegate those things to subordinates. Too bad if people vote for a "likable" president who doesn't have ANY common sense and picks horrible advisers who are bad at the things they should be masters at. After all, without ANY management experience or ANY critical thinking ability it will be impossible for the poor president to know anything about the true motives of his or her subordinates or even evaluate their competency.
Frankly, I think if one is competent enough to run a country, then one is more than capable of learning basic science, and should have done so in school for gods sake. That way the president might actually believe the scientists who predict hurricanes are going to fuck up New Orleans. I think most politicians are so used to saying the right thing to the right people at the right time that they imagine everyone else does the same thing. "Those scientists say a hurricane will overwhelm the levies? They just want more funding for dike research!"
Darwinism, as presently constructed, cannot be falsified. It absorbs any data and says "wow, look what evolution did. Isn't that something?"
The alternative is to say (for example) "Wow, these viruses are changing of their own accord to avoid our immune system! I wonder how they do that?" with no further insight.
How are you to approach this simple fact? We know that the DNA and RNA in viruses (and bacteria) change over time, and that our immune system relies on features it can detect on the surface of the virus that are a result of its genetic code. When populations of viruses can infect our immune system, it means they have changed somehow. What causes the change? The result is quite simple; the population of viruses that everyone is immune to simply die off, while their cousins with different genes survive. That is the basic definition of evolution in progress, and evolution or Darwinism is just the label given to describe that process.
Falsifying evolution could be done by finding evidence that viruses do not change as a result of their genes and that our immune systems ignores the successful population for some other reason, perhaps because we lose our immunity to influenza every year randomly, and that for some reason the flu shot works, even though it is based on the theory of evolution. Just find a coherent alternative theory, and you'll disprove evolution.
See, the problem is that you're confusing the theory of evolution with the predictions of evolution and the interpreted evidence in the fossil record. The theory of evolution is only concerned with populations of organisms sharing similar genes, and examining how those populations and their genes change over time. It is a science of direct observation in the case of fruit flies, viruses, cancers, and plenty of other organisms. It is an interpretive science in the case of examining the fossil record, and a predictive science when used to design flu shots and other genetically based disease treatments. If the theory of evolution is flawed, it will not fit the fossil record and will fail to produce cures for diseases and other things. That's how to falsify it. Please try your best to do so, because that's how science progresses. Claiming it's unfalsifiable is completely counterproductive for everyone.
Microsoft is a marketing company. They would much rather have Microsft Reciprocal Licensed Linux VistaXP Edition than GNU-Linux. They can always sell their branded products to clueless managers while scaring them with patent threats against the other guys.
Microsoft is also a follower. They typically are behind the bleeding edge of technology but always attempt to buy up as much as possible and claim they "innovated" it. Microsoft research is a big exception, and I wouldn't doubt that it's people from Microsoft Research driving the new licenses as well.
Microsoft is also not entirely stupid; they intend to attract developers with their licenses not to release any Microsoft products under them, but to bring open source development onto Microsoft platforms. That, ultimately, is a war that open source can only win by having a fundamentally better product. If Microsoft opens its documentation and internals to developers, most of them will see fewer advantages in pure open source/free software systems. All Microsoft has to do to keep making money is keep Windows shipping on every PC shipped in the world. Even if they're forced by the market to open source all of Windows, they will still own the trademarks (and patents) and probably still ship Windows on a significant number of PCs. Most home users don't give a shit what they run and will happily buy Microsoft, especially if their formerly Linux-enthusiast friends now see Microsoft as an open source company.
In the end, cooperation really is the goal of free software/open source anyway. Destroying Microsoft would be a net loss for everyone. Microsoft slowly converting to an open/free development model is a scenario in which everyone wins. Who will care if they run Linux or Windows if both support Posix and Win32 environments using the best elements from each kernel? To be honest I don't think this is very likely; it's much more likely that the Next Big Thing will push the operating system question into the realm of questions like which general purpose sorting algorithm is the best.
Thank you for the correction, I hadn't realized extended attributes were independent of the ADS mechanism.
I imagine that the shell probably uses IFileOperations internally, so is the bug in the API or explorer.exe? What about FileCopyEx? Even though extended attributes are a legacy feature it's kind of hard to claim that they are supported if they're buggy and a patch doesn't make it into the first major service pack...
Very few files have data streams, so the vast majority of users won't ever see a problem. Kaspersky choses to pollute every single file with a stream, however, which is why systems with it installed exhibit the problem.
So it's Kaspersky's fault that alternate data streams are apparently no longer supported by Vista, despite being a basic part of NTFS?
What you're looking for is ZFS that guarantees to cover those scenarios and can protect from faulty cables, controllers, bit rot and more. Linus isn't excited about ZFS for nothing!
Problem: If you suffer random corruption on a disk, ZFS won't know anything about it. The RAID subsystem will have to try to guess which disk has actually failed, and if the RAID gets it right ZFS is happy. If not, ZFS fails a checksum and is stuck because the RAID layer already decided wrong, and probably overwrote the good data with the incorrectly recovered stripe.
What's needed is either RAID6 which can unambiguously recover from single disk failures or to have some thunk layer between the file system and the RAID to decide which blocks in the stripe are valid.
Okay, that's great. Hard drives will get bigger. The problem is they aren't getting any faster. I'm having a hard time trying to get RAID 6 working well with my 1TB drives (think rebuild times, RAID 5 will be on its way out). How do I manage a RAID array of 4TB disks that still only give me about 60MB/s real-world write performance. So I put 12 in a RAID 6 and end up with 40TB. How many days will it take to rebuild a failed drive in real-world work loads? Capacity is great - but at some point we are all going to wake up and start begging for faster speeds as well. I think hybrid drives might have a shot, 1TB of flash with 3TB disk might be the right match - but you're still waiting forever on rebuilds (and a policy to manage it).
First of all I assume you mean a 10TB array, given 12 1TB disks of which 2 are parity. Dividing it out, you should expect 4.6 hours to completely write 1TB of data to a disk. Whether or not you can read 10TB of data off your other disks in the same time is up to your SATA controller. Hardware RAID would have no problem, I assume, but unless you have PCI Express SATA controllers and lots of processor speed it will be pretty difficult to make a sustained 600MB/s read and 60MB/s write.
I imagine some of you out there, like myself, are starting to see problems with data integrity as the mountain of data you are sitting on climbs in to the petabytes. All I can say is: bit flips suck! Do you KNOW your data is intact? Do you REALLY believe your dozens of 750GB-1TB SATA drives are keeping your data safe? Do you think your RAID card knows what to do if your parity doesn't match on read - does it even CHECK? I hope your backup didn't copy over the silent corruption. I further hope you have the several days it will take to copy your data back over to your super big - super slow - hard drive.
RAID6 takes care of that for you, if it's implemented right. RAID6 is just a Reed Solomon (n,n-2) code over n disks which means that a single corrupted disk can be completely recovered without having to guess which disk has gone bad. This is sufficient for all single bit errors, and most multi-bit errors unless you have a noisy bus, since they'll probably be confined to a single disk, or at least a single stripe. Obviously if you know which disks are defective, RAID6 can recover from two failed disks. Whether or not your RAID drivers read every stripe from disk and check the parity on every read is another matter. Do you want performance, or do you want reliability? If you just want reliability, go hack that into the OS of your choice. I haven't heard of any full integrity checking mode for software RAID6 (but I haven't looked), and I know even less about RAID6 hardware. It would be relatively simple to write, because it's essentially just running the parity generation on every read and comparing it to what's stored on the parity. For very large arrays where n is quite a bit bigger than 2, and where you're reading large blocks of data a lot (say, movies or backup files), the performance hit will probably not be too great.
Now I'm going to have to go look at the Linux RAID6 code and see if any of that is implemented...
I advise that you actually look at the tools that investment banks use. They in fact use Excel! Sure there is back end stuff, but traders and quants like Excel because it lets them very quickly come up with ideas and strategies.
Amazing! If I put $77.10 in a bank account every month for 850 months at %1 annual interest I'll have $95296.08, but if I just put $77.10 in my mattress for 850 months I'll have $100,000!!!
If you want to argue utility, do you suppose that Hitachi and GE would have been able to market MRI machines as quickly and allow them to become as widespread if they had licensed the patent in the first place? Or would they have waited until 1997(!) when the patent had expired just out of spite and good business sense? It's impossible to know how the original inventors would have marketed the device, or if he would have been able to produce them economically, and if the result would have been cheap enough for widespread adoption.
Furthermore, if you bothered to read the entire history you will realize that a lot of the work was done by other researchers, but only Dr. Raymond Damadian filed for the patent. For instance, the fast fourier transform was necessary to compute imaging results from MRI scans, but Dr. Damadian didn't invent that. Look at the autobiographies for the other two researchers in that about.com story you linked to. Why is it fair that a single person should hold an exclusive patent on MRI technology when many researchers devoted their time to it? Frankly, patents don't fit with open scientific research.
Given that there is apparently an organ in the brain for sensing God, I would say that the burden of proof is on those who say it is for something other than sensing God.
That's not a given. There's an organ in the brain that when stimulated gives people an experience they relate to religion. That almost certainly means that other religious activities are what stimulated their brain in that way before, otherwise they would not have connected the artificial stimulation with their previous experiences. What should be investigated is how those religious practices stimulate the brain in the first place.
Frankly, a sensor for the presence of a god who is supposed to be omnipresent doesn't sound very useful.
About time some hard evidence confirmed what us duelists have known all along. Finally the old dogma of reductionism can be laid to rest.
So you consider random brain activity to be free will? Fine with me, but how does that support dualism? Randomness can come directly from nature due to the uncertainty principle.
Is this story somehow an example of bad journalism? I think it's good journalism. Computer repair (just like car repair and health care) are problems that free markets just don't solve very well. There's no way for consumers to make informed decisions since diagnosing the problem is the job. Most people not only can't diagnose these problems themselves, but don't make this type of purchase very often, and have little or no objective data to go by. It's a tough problem.
What do you propose? The Department of Auto Mechanics and the Computer Repair Agency? We'll need the Senate Hairdressers Oversight Committee and the Federal Landscaping Commission, too. Don't forget the government watchdogs to keep track of wayward newspaper boys who can't land it on the porch.
Seriously, that's what consumer reports and the Internet are for.
What is quantum suicide, and why does it help resolve whether or not the many worlds hypothesis is true? Similarly, how does immortality help resolve the issue?
Google it if you want. Basically, the idea is that you set up a machine to test a random property of a quantum state in superposition. If it detects one value, it does nothing, but if it detects the other value it kills you. If the many-worlds hypothesis is true, some copy of you will survive indefinite running of the machine, thus proving to you and anyone else who observes that either the many-worlds hypothesis is true or that you are arbitrarily lucky.
Quantum immortality takes it one step further and assumes that anything that kills you is dependent on only the most likely outcome of collapsing a wave function, and that in some universe nothing ever kills you, your cells (or technology) manages to keep you alive despite all odds, and you become immortal.
Either one could prove to the subject that the many-worlds hypothesis is true, but at the cost of killing the subject off in most of the other universes, or leaving them horribly maimed, and not proving anything in the universes in which they didn't survive unscathed.
One argument suggests that for each individual, most immortality results will have relatively simple explanations; probably the most likely outcome for any given individual is to be saved essentially on their death bed by a technological singularity type of event simply because such a thing is unlikely to come in any one person's lifetime, but slightly more likely than the body spontaneously achieving the ability to live indefinitely. Similarly with quantum suicide, the most likely survivable event is the failure of the machinery or some other mundane event that interrupts the experiment. In that sense, it may actually be very difficult to prove to ones self that the many-worlds hypothesis is true.
The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics doesn't fit a primary requirement which is that it be falsifiable. We need to be able to do an experiment that would have a different outcome of the hypothesis were true or false. As far as I know, nobody has thought of any such experiment yet. The many world interpretation is a philosophical debate, but not yet a scientific one.
That's not quite true, there's quantum suicide and immortality. Still, tests that require personal death are generally about as useful as religious beliefs. Even if many-worlds is true, a majority of universes will not have any proof. Even if a quantum suicide machine includes the entire earth, there will be a huge number of universes where humanity decides never to try it.
. . . so it "can" explain (mathematically) the outcome of quantum level observations using the many worlds theory. But is it falsifiable?
It is falsifiable. Kill yourself (or wait until you die). If you succeed in dying, you have disproved the many-worlds interpretation. Quantum immortality predicts you will live forever.
There is no way (unless you're writing something with hundreds, rather than thousands of lines of code) that every code path is going to be audited carefully enough to catch every possible bug. Good coding practices aside, programmers are human and make errors. You do your best to catch as many as you can, and that's all you can do. When you're a "consumer" of code, you look for an organization that seems to be doing this and use their stuff. There's no complete, proactive solution to bugs.
I hate it when people say things like this, because it's mostly untrue. It's possible to use safely typed languages that can generate a formal proof that there are no buffer overflows or other random typing errors. Furthermore, security and access policies can be proved as well. The software side can be as correct as you want it to be (and have the time and knowledge to work with a proof generator), and that will eliminate the most common errors. Designing a user friendly security policy is another difficult task because most operating systems were designed in almost the opposite direction; allow any program to present any interface it wants to the user without oversight. To have a working, user friendly security policy the operating system and window manager have to be both trusted and unable to be impersonated by other applications. It should also be relatively seamless for users.
I have heard all the arguments about how formal proofs are too hard, and how users will still be able to violate their own security policy by clicking Allow on the "allow, deny, cancel" dialog box, etc. I still don't think those are the right answers. There are capability based security mechanisms that enforce a need-to-know access policy for all processes. The web browser does not need access to every document a user owns. The user should specifically grant it access to individual objects through a secure, trusted mechanism; this is where the OS and UI design is important. Capabilities are revokable, time or action limited, and can be specified for very granular (trusted) operations like sending a file. Ultimately, such a framework requires a very large set of secure and trusted protocol and interface functions and APIs that normal applications can call in order to process user documents securely. Letting a web browser have full read access to a document you want to upload to a remote site is silly; the web browser should have a secure interface to an HTTP client that will perform the upload for it without exposing any data to the web browser. This becomes more apparent if the web browser is replaced by an IM client or some other less common or trusted application that supports file transfer.
My guess is that until there is a major incident like 60 million drives wiped over a weekend or every personal document being made available on a p2p network of owned systems, nothing will change. Until then, I'll keep blathering about how real security is possible in the off chance that someone will remember it when it's time to design software with security in mind from the ground up.
Oh, give me a break that's FUD and you know it. No, your open source programs may not be able to touch TC applications or TC data, but there's nothing inherently magic about open source code. To prevent open source you'd have to prevent any unsigned code, which would bring pretty much all of Windows development, proprietary, in education or otherwise to a screeching halt. That $600 million anti-trust fine would be a $6 billion fine if Microsoft ever tried to pull something like that. What is likely is that it'll be another Windows/IE/WMP/TC required lock-in, and maybe some very secure closed networks will refuse to let non-attestated machines on, which could be a good thing since MAC spoofing is trivial and bringing a hostile host on a network with stolen credentials is too easy. To think that your average residential ISP will give a shit about your Linux machine is tinfoil loony-bin scaremongering, and won't get you taken seriously anywhere.
Unless they make hacker tools illegal. Seriously, you think the U.S. government wouldn't love to ban unsigned software to protect the children from terrorists, porn, and pedophiles? The SSSCA aka Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act was essentially the legislation that could have done it. Thank god Hollings is gone at least.
And as we all know, all revenue generated by this criminal activity by big records and movie labels is used to fund terrorism.
Flame bait? It's a well known fact that the media cartels, like many other big businesses, routinely buy politicians. This practice is deplorable and ends up indirectly funding attacks on sovereign nations by the U.S. government, which is one of the ultimate roots of terrorism.
You don't think Afghanistan and Iraq are bad enough? Just wait until the U.S. attack Iran, a completely neutral third party so far except that they have centrifuges (a bunch of test tubes on a big motor) and uranium (it comes out of the ground, people) and apparently a few of them are crossing the border into Iraq with weapons to help fight off the foreign invaders. Not like the U.S. has ever sold arms to rogue nations or anything... Oh, of course North Korea has nukes already but we'd never think of invading them, just a lot of empty talk and embargoes.
No, big business has nothing to do with helping to elect scumbag leaders who will go to war just to further the interests of their corporate constituents while completely ignoring public opinion and common sense.
Slashdot Mirror
Frankly, I think if you're intelligent enough to know about science, you should be able to sculpt with a great deal of expertise.
I said basic science. What does that have to do with advanced sculpting? If Bush is unable to make basic Playdoh sculptures I wouldn't be a bit surprised, but that's beside the point. The president should have a well rounded education because he or she is supposed to make decisions that impact a wide variety of things. Unless you like pointy haired bosses running your country and personal life as well as your work life.
the exact same logic applies with science. the president doesn't need to know ANY science
And he probably doesn't need to know ANY economics, or ANY war theory, or have ANY morals, because he can always delegate those things to subordinates. Too bad if people vote for a "likable" president who doesn't have ANY common sense and picks horrible advisers who are bad at the things they should be masters at. After all, without ANY management experience or ANY critical thinking ability it will be impossible for the poor president to know anything about the true motives of his or her subordinates or even evaluate their competency.
Frankly, I think if one is competent enough to run a country, then one is more than capable of learning basic science, and should have done so in school for gods sake. That way the president might actually believe the scientists who predict hurricanes are going to fuck up New Orleans. I think most politicians are so used to saying the right thing to the right people at the right time that they imagine everyone else does the same thing. "Those scientists say a hurricane will overwhelm the levies? They just want more funding for dike research!"
Vote Robot Nixon!
Screw that, I want YOU for president.
Darwinism, as presently constructed, cannot be falsified. It absorbs any data and says "wow, look what evolution did. Isn't that something?"
The alternative is to say (for example) "Wow, these viruses are changing of their own accord to avoid our immune system! I wonder how they do that?" with no further insight.
How are you to approach this simple fact? We know that the DNA and RNA in viruses (and bacteria) change over time, and that our immune system relies on features it can detect on the surface of the virus that are a result of its genetic code. When populations of viruses can infect our immune system, it means they have changed somehow. What causes the change? The result is quite simple; the population of viruses that everyone is immune to simply die off, while their cousins with different genes survive. That is the basic definition of evolution in progress, and evolution or Darwinism is just the label given to describe that process.
Falsifying evolution could be done by finding evidence that viruses do not change as a result of their genes and that our immune systems ignores the successful population for some other reason, perhaps because we lose our immunity to influenza every year randomly, and that for some reason the flu shot works, even though it is based on the theory of evolution. Just find a coherent alternative theory, and you'll disprove evolution.
See, the problem is that you're confusing the theory of evolution with the predictions of evolution and the interpreted evidence in the fossil record. The theory of evolution is only concerned with populations of organisms sharing similar genes, and examining how those populations and their genes change over time. It is a science of direct observation in the case of fruit flies, viruses, cancers, and plenty of other organisms. It is an interpretive science in the case of examining the fossil record, and a predictive science when used to design flu shots and other genetically based disease treatments. If the theory of evolution is flawed, it will not fit the fossil record and will fail to produce cures for diseases and other things. That's how to falsify it. Please try your best to do so, because that's how science progresses. Claiming it's unfalsifiable is completely counterproductive for everyone.
Microsoft is a marketing company. They would much rather have Microsft Reciprocal Licensed Linux VistaXP Edition than GNU-Linux. They can always sell their branded products to clueless managers while scaring them with patent threats against the other guys.
Microsoft is also a follower. They typically are behind the bleeding edge of technology but always attempt to buy up as much as possible and claim they "innovated" it. Microsoft research is a big exception, and I wouldn't doubt that it's people from Microsoft Research driving the new licenses as well.
Microsoft is also not entirely stupid; they intend to attract developers with their licenses not to release any Microsoft products under them, but to bring open source development onto Microsoft platforms. That, ultimately, is a war that open source can only win by having a fundamentally better product. If Microsoft opens its documentation and internals to developers, most of them will see fewer advantages in pure open source/free software systems. All Microsoft has to do to keep making money is keep Windows shipping on every PC shipped in the world. Even if they're forced by the market to open source all of Windows, they will still own the trademarks (and patents) and probably still ship Windows on a significant number of PCs. Most home users don't give a shit what they run and will happily buy Microsoft, especially if their formerly Linux-enthusiast friends now see Microsoft as an open source company.
In the end, cooperation really is the goal of free software/open source anyway. Destroying Microsoft would be a net loss for everyone. Microsoft slowly converting to an open/free development model is a scenario in which everyone wins. Who will care if they run Linux or Windows if both support Posix and Win32 environments using the best elements from each kernel? To be honest I don't think this is very likely; it's much more likely that the Next Big Thing will push the operating system question into the realm of questions like which general purpose sorting algorithm is the best.
Thank you for the correction, I hadn't realized extended attributes were independent of the ADS mechanism.
I imagine that the shell probably uses IFileOperations internally, so is the bug in the API or explorer.exe? What about FileCopyEx? Even though extended attributes are a legacy feature it's kind of hard to claim that they are supported if they're buggy and a patch doesn't make it into the first major service pack...
Very few files have data streams, so the vast majority of users won't ever see a problem. Kaspersky choses to pollute every single file with a stream, however, which is why systems with it installed exhibit the problem.
So it's Kaspersky's fault that alternate data streams are apparently no longer supported by Vista, despite being a basic part of NTFS?
What you're looking for is ZFS that guarantees to cover those scenarios and can protect from faulty cables, controllers, bit rot and more. Linus isn't excited about ZFS for nothing!
Problem: If you suffer random corruption on a disk, ZFS won't know anything about it. The RAID subsystem will have to try to guess which disk has actually failed, and if the RAID gets it right ZFS is happy. If not, ZFS fails a checksum and is stuck because the RAID layer already decided wrong, and probably overwrote the good data with the incorrectly recovered stripe.
What's needed is either RAID6 which can unambiguously recover from single disk failures or to have some thunk layer between the file system and the RAID to decide which blocks in the stripe are valid.
Okay, that's great. Hard drives will get bigger. The problem is they aren't getting any faster. I'm having a hard time trying to get RAID 6 working well with my 1TB drives (think rebuild times, RAID 5 will be on its way out). How do I manage a RAID array of 4TB disks that still only give me about 60MB/s real-world write performance. So I put 12 in a RAID 6 and end up with 40TB. How many days will it take to rebuild a failed drive in real-world work loads? Capacity is great - but at some point we are all going to wake up and start begging for faster speeds as well. I think hybrid drives might have a shot, 1TB of flash with 3TB disk might be the right match - but you're still waiting forever on rebuilds (and a policy to manage it).
First of all I assume you mean a 10TB array, given 12 1TB disks of which 2 are parity. Dividing it out, you should expect 4.6 hours to completely write 1TB of data to a disk. Whether or not you can read 10TB of data off your other disks in the same time is up to your SATA controller. Hardware RAID would have no problem, I assume, but unless you have PCI Express SATA controllers and lots of processor speed it will be pretty difficult to make a sustained 600MB/s read and 60MB/s write.
I imagine some of you out there, like myself, are starting to see problems with data integrity as the mountain of data you are sitting on climbs in to the petabytes. All I can say is: bit flips suck! Do you KNOW your data is intact? Do you REALLY believe your dozens of 750GB-1TB SATA drives are keeping your data safe? Do you think your RAID card knows what to do if your parity doesn't match on read - does it even CHECK? I hope your backup didn't copy over the silent corruption. I further hope you have the several days it will take to copy your data back over to your super big - super slow - hard drive.
RAID6 takes care of that for you, if it's implemented right. RAID6 is just a Reed Solomon (n,n-2) code over n disks which means that a single corrupted disk can be completely recovered without having to guess which disk has gone bad. This is sufficient for all single bit errors, and most multi-bit errors unless you have a noisy bus, since they'll probably be confined to a single disk, or at least a single stripe. Obviously if you know which disks are defective, RAID6 can recover from two failed disks. Whether or not your RAID drivers read every stripe from disk and check the parity on every read is another matter. Do you want performance, or do you want reliability? If you just want reliability, go hack that into the OS of your choice. I haven't heard of any full integrity checking mode for software RAID6 (but I haven't looked), and I know even less about RAID6 hardware. It would be relatively simple to write, because it's essentially just running the parity generation on every read and comparing it to what's stored on the parity. For very large arrays where n is quite a bit bigger than 2, and where you're reading large blocks of data a lot (say, movies or backup files), the performance hit will probably not be too great.
Now I'm going to have to go look at the Linux RAID6 code and see if any of that is implemented...
I advise that you actually look at the tools that investment banks use. They in fact use Excel! Sure there is back end stuff, but traders and quants like Excel because it lets them very quickly come up with ideas and strategies.
Amazing! If I put $77.10 in a bank account every month for 850 months at %1 annual interest I'll have $95296.08, but if I just put $77.10 in my mattress for 850 months I'll have $100,000!!!
If you want to argue utility, do you suppose that Hitachi and GE would have been able to market MRI machines as quickly and allow them to become as widespread if they had licensed the patent in the first place? Or would they have waited until 1997(!) when the patent had expired just out of spite and good business sense? It's impossible to know how the original inventors would have marketed the device, or if he would have been able to produce them economically, and if the result would have been cheap enough for widespread adoption.
Furthermore, if you bothered to read the entire history you will realize that a lot of the work was done by other researchers, but only Dr. Raymond Damadian filed for the patent. For instance, the fast fourier transform was necessary to compute imaging results from MRI scans, but Dr. Damadian didn't invent that. Look at the autobiographies for the other two researchers in that about.com story you linked to. Why is it fair that a single person should hold an exclusive patent on MRI technology when many researchers devoted their time to it? Frankly, patents don't fit with open scientific research.
Done often enough and the folks who do the innovative things are going to find themselves bankrupt - then what?
Then they'll work on open source and open hardware from their basement?
FUD unless you provide either patent numbers or at least the name of the company suing you.
Note that this does not involve Linux either, only Apache/Tomcat.
A good question to ask this company is what would happen if you switched to IBM's Websphere which is just apache and java.
Who would ever imagine that kuro5hin would be useful?
Given that there is apparently an organ in the brain for sensing God, I would say that the burden of proof is on those who say it is for something other than sensing God.
That's not a given. There's an organ in the brain that when stimulated gives people an experience they relate to religion. That almost certainly means that other religious activities are what stimulated their brain in that way before, otherwise they would not have connected the artificial stimulation with their previous experiences. What should be investigated is how those religious practices stimulate the brain in the first place.
Frankly, a sensor for the presence of a god who is supposed to be omnipresent doesn't sound very useful.
They are nothing more than scalpers.
Damn straight! Service charge here, convenience charge there, credit card processing fee at the end... You were talking about ticketmaster, right?
About time some hard evidence confirmed what us duelists have known all along. Finally the old dogma of reductionism can be laid to rest.
So you consider random brain activity to be free will? Fine with me, but how does that support dualism? Randomness can come directly from nature due to the uncertainty principle.
Is this story somehow an example of bad journalism? I think it's good journalism. Computer repair (just like car repair and health care) are problems that free markets just don't solve very well. There's no way for consumers to make informed decisions since diagnosing the problem is the job. Most people not only can't diagnose these problems themselves, but don't make this type of purchase very often, and have little or no objective data to go by. It's a tough problem.
What do you propose? The Department of Auto Mechanics and the Computer Repair Agency? We'll need the Senate Hairdressers Oversight Committee and the Federal Landscaping Commission, too. Don't forget the government watchdogs to keep track of wayward newspaper boys who can't land it on the porch.
Seriously, that's what consumer reports and the Internet are for.
What is quantum suicide, and why does it help resolve whether or not the many worlds hypothesis is true? Similarly, how does immortality help resolve the issue?
Google it if you want. Basically, the idea is that you set up a machine to test a random property of a quantum state in superposition. If it detects one value, it does nothing, but if it detects the other value it kills you. If the many-worlds hypothesis is true, some copy of you will survive indefinite running of the machine, thus proving to you and anyone else who observes that either the many-worlds hypothesis is true or that you are arbitrarily lucky.
Quantum immortality takes it one step further and assumes that anything that kills you is dependent on only the most likely outcome of collapsing a wave function, and that in some universe nothing ever kills you, your cells (or technology) manages to keep you alive despite all odds, and you become immortal.
Either one could prove to the subject that the many-worlds hypothesis is true, but at the cost of killing the subject off in most of the other universes, or leaving them horribly maimed, and not proving anything in the universes in which they didn't survive unscathed.
One argument suggests that for each individual, most immortality results will have relatively simple explanations; probably the most likely outcome for any given individual is to be saved essentially on their death bed by a technological singularity type of event simply because such a thing is unlikely to come in any one person's lifetime, but slightly more likely than the body spontaneously achieving the ability to live indefinitely. Similarly with quantum suicide, the most likely survivable event is the failure of the machinery or some other mundane event that interrupts the experiment. In that sense, it may actually be very difficult to prove to ones self that the many-worlds hypothesis is true.
The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics doesn't fit a primary requirement which is that it be falsifiable. We need to be able to do an experiment that would have a different outcome of the hypothesis were true or false. As far as I know, nobody has thought of any such experiment yet. The many world interpretation is a philosophical debate, but not yet a scientific one.
That's not quite true, there's quantum suicide and immortality. Still, tests that require personal death are generally about as useful as religious beliefs. Even if many-worlds is true, a majority of universes will not have any proof. Even if a quantum suicide machine includes the entire earth, there will be a huge number of universes where humanity decides never to try it.
Whose up for a game of quantum suicide?
Whenever I play that game it just never works!
. . . so it "can" explain (mathematically) the outcome of quantum level observations using the many worlds theory. But is it falsifiable?
It is falsifiable. Kill yourself (or wait until you die). If you succeed in dying, you have disproved the many-worlds interpretation. Quantum immortality predicts you will live forever.
There is no way (unless you're writing something with hundreds, rather than thousands of lines of code) that every code path is going to be audited carefully enough to catch every possible bug. Good coding practices aside, programmers are human and make errors. You do your best to catch as many as you can, and that's all you can do. When you're a "consumer" of code, you look for an organization that seems to be doing this and use their stuff. There's no complete, proactive solution to bugs.
I hate it when people say things like this, because it's mostly untrue. It's possible to use safely typed languages that can generate a formal proof that there are no buffer overflows or other random typing errors. Furthermore, security and access policies can be proved as well. The software side can be as correct as you want it to be (and have the time and knowledge to work with a proof generator), and that will eliminate the most common errors. Designing a user friendly security policy is another difficult task because most operating systems were designed in almost the opposite direction; allow any program to present any interface it wants to the user without oversight. To have a working, user friendly security policy the operating system and window manager have to be both trusted and unable to be impersonated by other applications. It should also be relatively seamless for users.
I have heard all the arguments about how formal proofs are too hard, and how users will still be able to violate their own security policy by clicking Allow on the "allow, deny, cancel" dialog box, etc. I still don't think those are the right answers. There are capability based security mechanisms that enforce a need-to-know access policy for all processes. The web browser does not need access to every document a user owns. The user should specifically grant it access to individual objects through a secure, trusted mechanism; this is where the OS and UI design is important. Capabilities are revokable, time or action limited, and can be specified for very granular (trusted) operations like sending a file. Ultimately, such a framework requires a very large set of secure and trusted protocol and interface functions and APIs that normal applications can call in order to process user documents securely. Letting a web browser have full read access to a document you want to upload to a remote site is silly; the web browser should have a secure interface to an HTTP client that will perform the upload for it without exposing any data to the web browser. This becomes more apparent if the web browser is replaced by an IM client or some other less common or trusted application that supports file transfer.
My guess is that until there is a major incident like 60 million drives wiped over a weekend or every personal document being made available on a p2p network of owned systems, nothing will change. Until then, I'll keep blathering about how real security is possible in the off chance that someone will remember it when it's time to design software with security in mind from the ground up.
Oh, give me a break that's FUD and you know it. No, your open source programs may not be able to touch TC applications or TC data, but there's nothing inherently magic about open source code. To prevent open source you'd have to prevent any unsigned code, which would bring pretty much all of Windows development, proprietary, in education or otherwise to a screeching halt. That $600 million anti-trust fine would be a $6 billion fine if Microsoft ever tried to pull something like that. What is likely is that it'll be another Windows/IE/WMP/TC required lock-in, and maybe some very secure closed networks will refuse to let non-attestated machines on, which could be a good thing since MAC spoofing is trivial and bringing a hostile host on a network with stolen credentials is too easy. To think that your average residential ISP will give a shit about your Linux machine is tinfoil loony-bin scaremongering, and won't get you taken seriously anywhere.
Unless they make hacker tools illegal. Seriously, you think the U.S. government wouldn't love to ban unsigned software to protect the children from terrorists, porn, and pedophiles? The SSSCA aka Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act was essentially the legislation that could have done it. Thank god Hollings is gone at least.
And as we all know, all revenue generated by this criminal activity by big records and movie labels is used to fund terrorism.
Flame bait? It's a well known fact that the media cartels, like many other big businesses, routinely buy politicians. This practice is deplorable and ends up indirectly funding attacks on sovereign nations by the U.S. government, which is one of the ultimate roots of terrorism.
You don't think Afghanistan and Iraq are bad enough? Just wait until the U.S. attack Iran, a completely neutral third party so far except that they have centrifuges (a bunch of test tubes on a big motor) and uranium (it comes out of the ground, people) and apparently a few of them are crossing the border into Iraq with weapons to help fight off the foreign invaders. Not like the U.S. has ever sold arms to rogue nations or anything... Oh, of course North Korea has nukes already but we'd never think of invading them, just a lot of empty talk and embargoes.
No, big business has nothing to do with helping to elect scumbag leaders who will go to war just to further the interests of their corporate constituents while completely ignoring public opinion and common sense.