I realize that you said you wanted a standard, but is USB enough of a standard or you want something more formalized? Because the bidirectional centronics wasn't the printer, it was the transport layer. Bidirectional for 3d printing to the same extent is already there.
More to the point, both printers I'm familiar with (stratasys and makerbot) provide feedback. You wanted:
1. rendering of current status -- that's just silly, you have the printer. More importantly, if you look at the printer you can see what it *really* looks like, not what it is supposed to look like. Some printers offer a camera so that you can monitor the print status (even remotely). Makerbot's software lets you see a visualize of the slicing *before* printing so you can see how it *should* look -- even better than your "render as it progesses" request.
2. information about consumables -- stratasys does this, but it is part of why you pay so much. To get that information from the printer it uses "smart" print spools. Makerbot is moving in that direction, but even with their older printers you get a "this print will use this much filament".
3. hours on the unit -- both stratasys and makerbot do this (shows percent complete/time elapsed).
4. stepping motor accuracy -- what? I'm not really sure what you are asking for here. In case you are confused, the stepping motors of serious printers are *very* accurate. But there's going to be some slop in the print due to the driving method and, inescapably, from printing with what is, essentially, a liquid. Are you wanting lasers to measure the accuracy of the print as it progresses? Sounds kinda cool, but what are you really wanting to measure? How will it be displayed? If it were a 2d color print you could have an image that visually displayed color accuracy, but for a 3d print I'm really not sure what you could do.
As for the "sealed unit" -- there are manufacturers that make that claim right now. As it happens, I don't believe them, but the claims still exist. Your statement about business and investment is a tautology. What a home user does is not an investment, but it is also basically irrelevant.
For what its worth, the reason I personally bought a printer is that it is the only viable option to producing some items. Despite some of the pie-in-the-sky beliefs about "3d printing" displacing traditional manufacturing that is not really even relevant. I can print a lego minifig, but I'd be the first to tell you to buy one rather than printing it (unless, like me, you wanted to print one "just because" -- but, really, if you want something like that just buy it). What I can't do is buy custom parts in a store. And using something like shapeways almost makes a stratasys printer look competitive. Unless you are very wealthy the 3d printing services are not feasible for any significant amount of printing. For work I did a write up comparing different options and, if you are going to do any amount of printing, it is cheaper to buy a 3d printer -- to include "eating" the cost of failures. Much, much cheaper.
3d printing then is viable for rapid prototyping (but you already knew that) and for custom printing needs where the print runs are still too small to justify setup costs for paying a production service, but not small enough for boutique printing like shapeways. That's a pretty narrow home market, but it exists. Whether or not it is actually large enough to support all the competing 3d printer manufacturers remains to be seen.
It is dangerous to challenge people's irrational faith in the god-like powers of their doctors. Over the years I've been forced to realize that there is surprisingly little practical difference between medieval and "modern" medicine. There are definitely areas that have had incredible improvements, but the field *as a whole* is still largely based on belief, or on unscientific empirical evidence. The entire practice of allergy medicine shows that entire fields are still based on magical principles (I was rather surprised to discover that there is no scientific basis for allergy testing or the subsequent "treatments", but you won't see it lumped in with "alternative medicine").
For the people reading this who think that any questioning of "modern" medicine is an endorsement of quakery, I think Edgar Allan Poe put it best in "Never Bet the Devil Your Head", "The homoeopathists did not give him little enough physic, and what little they did give him he hesitated to take." http://classiclit.about.com/li...
Yep. But some people like simple and prefer that all biochemical complexity be reduced to a moronically simple formula.
I know someone who lost a significant amount of weight (~100 pounds) and kept it off for a long time by doing two things: 1) absolutely, positively tracking all calories taken in (it is common for dieters to only consider regular meals and ignore snacking); and 2) starting a strong exercise regimine.
Yes, this matches gp's claim on the face of it and it *is* a good approach (reduce intake, increase output). There's no need for fad dieting, etc. But you can long term hurt your body depending on the particulars of how you go about this. For example, as parent noted, it is *not* as simple as calories in and energy expended. The Atkins diet is good for losing weight fast -- and putting your body into ketosis. It is a harmful diet, more than most fad diets I've seen.
Watching what you eat means more than just tracking calories. You also have to be mindful of how you feel. There's a basic hunger that goes with being thinner. Once you get used to it, the hunger just fades into the background and is lost in the noise. I don't mean paying attention to that basic hunger, but to feeling ill or energetic. Because negative responses can be an early warning that the diet is not properly balanced. Not that you should wait for that feedback: eating balanced meals is a good place to start.
and, unfortunately, this is true of most "modern" pharmaceuticals. The actual requirements for pharma may not be what you think:
1. null hypothesis? You've got to be kidding me 2. trials? yes, but... 3. patentability? *this* is key
If it can't be patented/approved, or will be difficult or expensive to patent/approve, then the drug is no good. If it can be patented and approved there is an expectation of result based on the compound. Conduct experiments to confirm activity. If experiments look okay, move to trials. Otherwise, conduct experiments to see if it has *any* effect -- once you find one, move to trials. Establish trials to confirm the expected activity. This part is pretty easy as doctors are paid for participating in the trial, but not much. There is no meaningful incentive to follow the rules of the trial, only to document participation without passing a limit of unwanted effects.
A specific example of "difficulty of patenting/approving" comes from kombucha: it doesn't cure cancer or have any of the outlandish properties claimed for it, but was promising as an antibiotic. It was studied, but due to the symbiotic culture would have been too difficult to get approval and interest went away immediately.
The problem with initial testing is pretty well known and permeates modern medicine. Basically, results are analyzed to find something, *anything* that passes statistical criteria. Why this makes a mockery of the scientific method is left as an exercise to the reader, but is suffiicent to explain why initial published results are consistently downgraded or completely disappear when re-testing is done. Of course, re-testing to confirm someone's results isn't as prestigious as doing new work so generally researchers focus on conducting tests and then analyzing the results for something, *anything* that passes statistical criteria. This effect has itself been studied and research published on it.
The problem with trials is not only apparent from the outside, but having known some doctors conducting trials... it is regrettably true that trials are a farce.
Most of what "modern" medicine has going for it is some very significant gains in treating severe trauma (like gun shot wounds, hands/fingers taken off by a chainsaw, etc.). Much of the rest is little (or no) better than the charlatans. Prescribing anti-biotics without any concern for whether or not there is a bacterial (as opposed to viral) infection is a very common example. In fact, most people's exposure to anti-biotics is pretty much the same as if they took a placebo or saw a witch doctor.
you are not describing a ponzi scheme. Hint: bitcoin is a ponzi scheme, Mt. Gox/Madoff is incompetence at best, fraud at worst.
Alright, technically bitcoin isn't a ponzi scheme (as there is no pay-in from new investors and pay-out to prior investors), but it otherwise exhibits the characteristics (namely, that the crook(s) on the ground floor make out like bandits at the loss of everyone else -- with bitcoin this is built in by the successively lower returns). It is an elegant way to defraud libertarians and my hat is off to the criminals who invented it.
you are seriously confusing "random" with "not representable". If you are working in discrete frames, which is what your post says, then there is no partial solution. The implicit limit in binary representation isn't that you get something random if you try to slice between two values, you get either one or the other. The fact that the "real world" does not operate this way does not somehow give weight to the supposition of a discrete time-sliced simulation, it does the opposite. If the "real world" is in fact a simulation then it is not operating in a strictly binary way with discrete frames (which, as others have pointed out, is not a necessity of a simulation even when run on a binary computer).
Of course the whole thing is just mental masturbation nonsense on the same level as solipsism. When children first encounter the idea of solipsism they have a tendency to get caught up in it. But its just spinning the wheels and implicitly cannot ever come to a resolution or in fact derive anything from it. Its only use is to catalog it as such, or to use it as an excuse (for doing nothing, for doing something, it all amounts to the same thing).
i agree with the outrage, but I guess today i'm feeling particularly pessimistic because I honestly don't think anything we do will matter. After all, as long as they maintain ad impressions that's all that counts. Who the fuck cares what the site is about, that can be changed anytime. Just keep those ads coming.
The primary problem with "classic" slashdot is that it devotes entirely too much of the available space to comments when it could have more space for branding and advertising. What the fuck were the morons who developed slashdot thinking? That they were providing a forum or something for people to post in?
so what you are saying (assuming, of course, that the bitcoin algorithm is amenable to computation by a quantum computer) is that bitcoin will be either taken over or killed off by those with the resources to obtain a quantum computer before the general public, should they choose to do so.
Of course, the algorithm might not be amenable to quantum computing in which case its a moot point.
My doctor is now refusing to continue issuing a prescription (innocuous [not a substance restricted by anything other than requiring a prescription], but moderately expensive) because the insurance company has instructed otherwise. The problem (for me) is that the alternatives either don't work or have bad side effects. This is all documented as the insurance company has kept changing the prescription to anything else under the sun. The doctor now refuses to write the script at all and was plainly afraid of the consequences should he do so.
I went to a specialist and at first they refused as well for the same reason. I pressed, and eventually they decided they "could try". I've been notified by the insurance company that they will allow the script (modified for reduced dosage) for a while, but will not pay any part of it.
So: not only will the insurance company not pay for any part of the medication, but they will only allow me to have access to it for a limited time.
Just one example. Once you get old enough to have chronic health issues the system becomes clear. You pay the doctor, the pharmaceuticals pay the doctor, the insurance company pays the doctor, but only the pharmaceuticals and insurance companies have any say in your treatment (and the insurance companies have the most control). Supposedly this (bureaucracy controlling health treatment) is the problem with socialized healthcare, but it is the reality of our capitalist healthcare system.
A physicist/author wrote a book (back in the late 80s I think) that covered some interesting ideas. One for time travel was to build a ring and spin it up. It need enormous mass (I forget if one stellar mass was supposed to be enough) and apparently you could compensate for not quite being able to reach the speed of light in its rotation with a charge. What it would (theoretically) do is distort space time such that the angle passing through the ring would determine the time displacement. You could only come out while it was spinning -- meaning you couldn't travel before it was built or after it stopped.
I always found this sort of thing fascinating. If you think about it, there's no real issue with backward time travel, but hooboy, who you *really* want to be there when it finally becomes live and everyone or thing that is shooting for travel to the past comes through? I'm not sure such a device would stay functional long enough to be used...
It isn't very hard to send a fraudulent email and get away with it. But it is also easy to take precautions and still get caught. One way is the temptation to test. Some spammers do this, as do some hoaxsters. Problem is when they send a test "anonymous" email to their account to be sure that it works, then send the real one from the same source. Easily caught via netflow analysis. Or if they are foolish and authenticate to a different service from the same source. Somewhat different, but the thief who logged on to facebook using the computer of the house he was burglaring comes to mind.
People are caught by their mistakes, not by the parts they do right.
logs are kept because you need them. I wouldn't expect it to be apparent to someone who has never had to manage a real network, but logs and a reasonable retention are essential. There is a basic tension at work, though. You need logs from a management perspective, the more the better, but the more you have the greater your liability.
For something basic like netflow (which any sane network administrator is going to have) you might have months of data. Places will vary, and some insist they need years, others go with less and some do without. But there's more than just netflow (which is just essential metadata about network traffic), you might use Bro to log web requests or copy out executables, or even just dump the whole stream to disk. The latter takes a large amount of disk space and *significantly* increases liability so places vary from not doing it to keeping an incredible amount (12+ months).
How does it help network administrators? Netflow data is pretty essential to almost any trouble shooting task on the network. A complaint about traffic being dropped can be confirmed or denied by netflow lookup. Need to know what hosts an IP talked to? On certain ports? Doing a basic plausability check for data exfiltration? URL logging gives a trace for a compromise and can then be used to construct indicators of compromise. Capturing exe's on the fly is helpful in post mortem: what exe was downloaded to a compromised host? Do AV companies know about it yet? Full packet captures are extremely helpful in retrospection and can fill in the rest of the blanks. Especially if you are into the questionable practice of MITM the SSL connections.
How does it increase liability? When hit with ediscovery if you've got it you have to produce it. This can get expensive, very expensive if you are doing full pcaps.
Setting retention is a matter of finding a balance between what you need for trouble shooting and can afford to copy and maintain indefinitely. Without dropping below a certain minimum retention that is not really defined, but can hit you in court (a while back slashdot miscovered a company that got in trouble because they didn't log anything to disk which was sufficiently out of line with norms for the line of business they were in to get them in trouble). It matters what your peers are doing.
We have varying retention even for essentially the same data depending on where/how it is being logged/stored. Sometimes these differences amount to bureaucratic/political, other times it is based on capacity of a particular data store. Retention might be defined as a volume of data (10GB), fraction of capacity (90%) or a span of time (30 days).
Access control logging (I assume you are referring to logging authentication events) very likely have considerable lifetime at any facility, but the ability to map specific traffic to a user might be considerably less. For example, many universities employ NAT and depending on specifics of the implementation may or may not be able to map traffic to a user in any given circumstance regardless of retention.
To the point of ensuring provision of service to users, QoS doesn't cut it -- at least not on a subscriber network. If it was just QoS rules access controls wouldn't even be relevant. But to do meaningful traffic shaping (which QoS is not) does require *some* form of user mapping. It could be done anonymously, though in practice I don't see how that would work well (for reasons having nothing to do with fair queuing).
I think I've answered the question as to why keep logs. If not then talk to an administrator, whether it be server or network. Once you gain an understanding of what the job requires the keeping of logs makes sense and there's the risk of going whole hog and keeping too much. Which is when the legal liability aspect needs to be considered.
A major issue with "fortified" foods is that they are fortified in an economic, not biological, way. If you eat dirt is your body going to get the minerals it needs? The truth is that just because you ingest a substance does not mean that your body will be able to use it. And, although this is especially true for "fortified foods", it is also true to an extent for multivitamins.
Two things stand out immediately from the summary: first, the insistence that if you are not malnourished then you gain no benefit from ensuring you are nourished and second, no evidence that they addressed absorption/utilization in any fashion. Speaking as someone who does *not* take multivitamins both are indications that this study is more of the entrenched pharmaceutical backed doctors saying "trust us" than meaningful science.
Sure, there are problems with many vitamin products on the market and they are not a panacea. But even if you are nominally well nourished (which is *not* established by the minimum daily requirements -- notice the term "minimum") it is easy enough for your body to become deficient due to your *particular* circumstances at a *specific* point in time.
Ah, another point: they take on multivitamins as a whole rather than addressing the already established utility of taking specific supplements. One utility had by individuals taking a multivitamin is covering their bases. Is it worth it? Individually or as a group? Well, if you start out with the premise that the group is well nourished then you may not find any benefit, but individually where circumstances can result in depletion it may be worthwhile. Note: I'm not arguing people should be taking multivitamins (and I don't) but it is certainly not a cut and dried case that they useless.
And anyone who points to "fortified" or "enriched" food (especially breakfast cereals) knows very little about nutrition.
read that last paragraph again. Companies aren't allowed to deduct *foreign royalties* but are allowed to deduct *foreign taxes*. Oil companies get special treatment and are allowed to claim *foreign royalties* as *foreign taxes* which then allows them to deduct, even though other companies can.
To help creationists a bit more: as others have noted you described natural selection. What you are missing/getting wrong is this notion about "nothing being created" (a bit stuck on the "creating" aspect -- creationists care, no one else does, get over it) or "bacteria didn't change it". You seem to be rooting for Lamarckism which is not taken seriously (other than fantasy novels/movies/comic books a blacksmith does not father stronger sons, giraffes did not get long necks from each generation stretching farther).
Mostly "new attributes" come from the genetic soup. That is, the traits already existed but a change in environment results in their being selected more often in reproduction. But not all possible attributes exist or have existed. Instead there's this thing called mutation. When you reproduce there are errors. Mostly the errors are insignificant and essentially become part of the genetic soup. It would be pretty unlikely, X-Men aside, for a mutation to occur and immediately have a dominant expression that was not decidedly unhealthy.
Really, it is in the best interest of a population to have a lot of diversity (minor variations) as some of these may prove beneficial. If a species is too focused, too niche, then it lacks the flexibility to deal with evolving conditions (that is, happen to have an existing set of attributes that work better than the current dominant traits in surviving some environmental change). Without a method for change (mutation) then natural selection would result in complete extinction given the reality of changing environments. Natural selection doesn't *create* any adaptation, it is a description for how a population's dominant traits are determined.
So to further your understanding of evolution take what you know (natural selection) and add random change (mutation).
no offense, not picking on you, but the "trained spy" reference makes me laugh. There is/was a military course intended to acclimate trainees to interrogation (and other aspects of being captured). But it wasn't for spies. Made most famous in (IIRC) the 80s when the first female candidate was allowed in. An instructor used the course as an excuse to rape her.
or just not think of a number at all. But if you do that you'll make the operator nervous and diminish your chances of passing the polygraph. and, if you are taking one, you generally want to pass it.
Maybe I could write a book that would get me in trouble with the gov't...
Yes, part of the process in a poly is to "lead up" to the real questions. There's the "baseline" established by answering questions truthfully part ("what is your name", "what is your occupation", etc.) and some lie questions. The myth that it is more effective if someone believes in it is also played on: "think of a number between one and ten. Don't tell me the number just think about... 1... 2... 3... 4... 5... 6... 7... 8... 9... 10..." and the operator will tell you the number you had picked. I tried to denote the long pauses between numbers. Basically, there is typically a gradual tension build up as the selected number is approached and relief/release when it has been passed. The long delays help to ensure a clear reading of this and the idea is that by demonstrating mind reading the subject will believe in the poly making it more reliable.
Too bad it just isn't so. That is, there is no clear, causative relationship between lying and what the polygraph measures. Belief in the poly (and I've met folks who are absolutely convinced in their reliability) provides no help in passing one when being truthful, or failing one when lying. It is immaterial.
Something people who haven't been around polys don't seem to be aware of and isn't something they think of is that subjects often fall asleep during a poly. They are slow and tedious. They take a long time. There's lots of waiting. You are required to lay there absolutely still. And if you fall asleep it negates the entire poly and it has to be redone.
Another thing is the pretense that the polygraph tells whether or not someone is lying. It does no such thing. Instead, it is a set of graphs that are correlated with questions. In a serious polygraph this data is provided to two examiners who work independently. The goal is to yield a pass/fail, not a "subject was lying on points A, B and C, but lying on D, E and F". If the two examiners reach opposing conclusions then the data is provided to a third examiner and his determination is the ultimate finding. So with a polygraph there cannot be an uncertain answer: it is either pass or fail, nothing in between. It is graded by humans who the system expects will frequently have opposing findings and instead of that resulting in equivocacy it is simply referred to a single examiner to provide that authoritative result.
It is hard to not see this as being the subjective, flawed system that it is, but for those that have a deep psychological and/or political need for it to be objective and accurate it appears to suffice.
It isn't a matter of realizing that the polygraph is flawed. The NSA uses the counterintelligence scope poly for all employees, the CIA uses the more invasive "lifestyle" poly, and so on. All of this despite the fact that the inventor of the polygraph was a charlatan, it has been thoroughly debunked by scientific investigation, and all though intelligence people who have sold out their country (such as Aldritch Ames) passed the poly.
The importance isn't in its efficacy, but in having something "tangible" to hold on to. The powers that be are like Linus -- they need a security blanket to hold on to and they have seized on the polygraph. When you are in charge of a department that is going to have access to the deepest and darkest secrets, the most politically damaging truths, you want -- as a person in charge -- you *need* for these things to remain secret. You do background checks, have agents investigate backgrounds, interview the person and people they know.
But a clever person can conceal past malfeasance so that it does not come to light during the investigation. All you have from the personal interview is a *subjective* assessment of the person's honesty, truthfulness, and so on. What is needed is something more, something objective, something with a *score* that passes or fails the person being considered for this very sensitive position.
That is where the polygraph comes in. Thanks to the salesmanship of the original charlatan, people who *need* it are willing to overlook the rather glaring flaws and falacies in its foundation. And once it gets embedded in the government you have bureaucratic inertia keeping it in place. So the security blanket is here to stay. Now more than ever those in power feel a need to have additional assurance that their employees won't turn on them. The demonstrated lack of efficacy in this regard just makes them all the more frantic.
One point: your statement leaves the reader with the impression that the polygraph can work, and does if the person believes in it. This is tempting and perhaps plays a role in the self-deceit on the part of those who purvey and utilize polygraphs. But it simply isn't true. It *never* works to detect a lie. By coincidence a person may fail the polygraph while lying, but it is just a coincidence. Polygraphs have been studied and debunked.
Polygraphs are less effective than voodoo where if someone brought up in a culture that believes in the efficacy of voodoo has a curse put on them they will become ill (of course, they have to *know* about the curse, but that is part and parcel of how voodoo works). In other words, strong indoctrination can invoke a placebo effect to cause harm. This same effect has not been successfully demonstrated with polygraphs and is implausible given there is no unique, causative mechanism between lying and the physiological effects being measured. And that's assuming there's *any* causative mechanism.
Unfortunately you are wrong on one point: at least some courts can and do accept polygraphs as evidence. I don't recall enough of the case I'm thinking of to get a citation, but where they generally come into play is when someone is duped into taking it under the condition that the results will be admitted as evidence. Basically, it can (in at least some jurisdications) be admitted if both sides agree on it before hand. Some defendants are conned into this, either by thinking they will "pass" because they are innocent or believing they can beat it.
Beating a polygraph isn't that hard, unless the examiner knows what the finding will be before he starts. In that case it is easy enough to find anyone as having failed.
Never, ever submit to a polygraph. Its equivalent to turning yourself in to the inquisition for "questioning". The Malleus Maleficarum should be required reading for polygraph examiners if it isn't already.
That is not the distinction you are looking for. The distinction is that AT&T was not accused of committing a crime and these guys have been. It might seem related until you understand something about the legal system: there are different rules for different things.
In the case of Weev, he accessed data without authority. (No, I haven't reviewed the case to see exactly what the charges were, but it was something along those lines). Weev was then accused of having broken a law (pertaining to unauthorized access).
In this case the defendents' attorney argued that the evidence was not collected properly and was thus inadmissable. It is not the case that the police were charged with unauthorized access (which charge would not hold for what I would hope are obvious reasons). There are restrictions on what and how evidence can be collected. This is one of the complaints frequently made by law enforcement: an assertion that criminals often go free because they have collected evidence improperly so that it cannot be admitted, or that they cannot collect evidence due to legal restrictions.
So, while these are related, they are two distinct issues not because of details of collection but because they are concerned with different parts of the legal process
Slashdot Mirror
I realize that you said you wanted a standard, but is USB enough of a standard or you want something more formalized? Because the bidirectional centronics wasn't the printer, it was the transport layer. Bidirectional for 3d printing to the same extent is already there.
More to the point, both printers I'm familiar with (stratasys and makerbot) provide feedback. You wanted:
1. rendering of current status -- that's just silly, you have the printer. More importantly, if you look at the printer you can see what it *really* looks like, not what it is supposed to look like. Some printers offer a camera so that you can monitor the print status (even remotely). Makerbot's software lets you see a visualize of the slicing *before* printing so you can see how it *should* look -- even better than your "render as it progesses" request.
2. information about consumables -- stratasys does this, but it is part of why you pay so much. To get that information from the printer it uses "smart" print spools. Makerbot is moving in that direction, but even with their older printers you get a "this print will use this much filament".
3. hours on the unit -- both stratasys and makerbot do this (shows percent complete/time elapsed).
4. stepping motor accuracy -- what? I'm not really sure what you are asking for here. In case you are confused, the stepping motors of serious printers are *very* accurate. But there's going to be some slop in the print due to the driving method and, inescapably, from printing with what is, essentially, a liquid. Are you wanting lasers to measure the accuracy of the print as it progresses? Sounds kinda cool, but what are you really wanting to measure? How will it be displayed? If it were a 2d color print you could have an image that visually displayed color accuracy, but for a 3d print I'm really not sure what you could do.
As for the "sealed unit" -- there are manufacturers that make that claim right now. As it happens, I don't believe them, but the claims still exist. Your statement about business and investment is a tautology. What a home user does is not an investment, but it is also basically irrelevant.
For what its worth, the reason I personally bought a printer is that it is the only viable option to producing some items. Despite some of the pie-in-the-sky beliefs about "3d printing" displacing traditional manufacturing that is not really even relevant. I can print a lego minifig, but I'd be the first to tell you to buy one rather than printing it (unless, like me, you wanted to print one "just because" -- but, really, if you want something like that just buy it). What I can't do is buy custom parts in a store. And using something like shapeways almost makes a stratasys printer look competitive. Unless you are very wealthy the 3d printing services are not feasible for any significant amount of printing. For work I did a write up comparing different options and, if you are going to do any amount of printing, it is cheaper to buy a 3d printer -- to include "eating" the cost of failures. Much, much cheaper.
3d printing then is viable for rapid prototyping (but you already knew that) and for custom printing needs where the print runs are still too small to justify setup costs for paying a production service, but not small enough for boutique printing like shapeways. That's a pretty narrow home market, but it exists. Whether or not it is actually large enough to support all the competing 3d printer manufacturers remains to be seen.
It is dangerous to challenge people's irrational faith in the god-like powers of their doctors. Over the years I've been forced to realize that there is surprisingly little practical difference between medieval and "modern" medicine. There are definitely areas that have had incredible improvements, but the field *as a whole* is still largely based on belief, or on unscientific empirical evidence. The entire practice of allergy medicine shows that entire fields are still based on magical principles (I was rather surprised to discover that there is no scientific basis for allergy testing or the subsequent "treatments", but you won't see it lumped in with "alternative medicine").
For the people reading this who think that any questioning of "modern" medicine is an endorsement of quakery, I think Edgar Allan Poe put it best in "Never Bet the Devil Your Head", "The homoeopathists did not give him little enough physic, and what little they did give him he hesitated to take." http://classiclit.about.com/li...
Yep. But some people like simple and prefer that all biochemical complexity be reduced to a moronically simple formula.
I know someone who lost a significant amount of weight (~100 pounds) and kept it off for a long time by doing two things: 1) absolutely, positively tracking all calories taken in (it is common for dieters to only consider regular meals and ignore snacking); and 2) starting a strong exercise regimine.
Yes, this matches gp's claim on the face of it and it *is* a good approach (reduce intake, increase output). There's no need for fad dieting, etc. But you can long term hurt your body depending on the particulars of how you go about this. For example, as parent noted, it is *not* as simple as calories in and energy expended. The Atkins diet is good for losing weight fast -- and putting your body into ketosis. It is a harmful diet, more than most fad diets I've seen.
Watching what you eat means more than just tracking calories. You also have to be mindful of how you feel. There's a basic hunger that goes with being thinner. Once you get used to it, the hunger just fades into the background and is lost in the noise. I don't mean paying attention to that basic hunger, but to feeling ill or energetic. Because negative responses can be an early warning that the diet is not properly balanced. Not that you should wait for that feedback: eating balanced meals is a good place to start.
and, unfortunately, this is true of most "modern" pharmaceuticals. The actual requirements for pharma may not be what you think:
1. null hypothesis? You've got to be kidding me
2. trials? yes, but...
3. patentability? *this* is key
If it can't be patented/approved, or will be difficult or expensive to patent/approve, then the drug is no good.
If it can be patented and approved there is an expectation of result based on the compound. Conduct experiments to confirm activity.
If experiments look okay, move to trials. Otherwise, conduct experiments to see if it has *any* effect -- once you find one, move to trials.
Establish trials to confirm the expected activity. This part is pretty easy as doctors are paid for participating in the trial, but not much. There is no meaningful incentive to follow the rules of the trial, only to document participation without passing a limit of unwanted effects.
A specific example of "difficulty of patenting/approving" comes from kombucha: it doesn't cure cancer or have any of the outlandish properties claimed for it, but was promising as an antibiotic. It was studied, but due to the symbiotic culture would have been too difficult to get approval and interest went away immediately.
The problem with initial testing is pretty well known and permeates modern medicine. Basically, results are analyzed to find something, *anything* that passes statistical criteria. Why this makes a mockery of the scientific method is left as an exercise to the reader, but is suffiicent to explain why initial published results are consistently downgraded or completely disappear when re-testing is done. Of course, re-testing to confirm someone's results isn't as prestigious as doing new work so generally researchers focus on conducting tests and then analyzing the results for something, *anything* that passes statistical criteria. This effect has itself been studied and research published on it.
The problem with trials is not only apparent from the outside, but having known some doctors conducting trials... it is regrettably true that trials are a farce.
Most of what "modern" medicine has going for it is some very significant gains in treating severe trauma (like gun shot wounds, hands/fingers taken off by a chainsaw, etc.). Much of the rest is little (or no) better than the charlatans. Prescribing anti-biotics without any concern for whether or not there is a bacterial (as opposed to viral) infection is a very common example. In fact, most people's exposure to anti-biotics is pretty much the same as if they took a placebo or saw a witch doctor.
you are not describing a ponzi scheme. Hint: bitcoin is a ponzi scheme, Mt. Gox/Madoff is incompetence at best, fraud at worst.
Alright, technically bitcoin isn't a ponzi scheme (as there is no pay-in from new investors and pay-out to prior investors), but it otherwise exhibits the characteristics (namely, that the crook(s) on the ground floor make out like bandits at the loss of everyone else -- with bitcoin this is built in by the successively lower returns). It is an elegant way to defraud libertarians and my hat is off to the criminals who invented it.
you are seriously confusing "random" with "not representable". If you are working in discrete frames, which is what your post says, then there is no partial solution. The implicit limit in binary representation isn't that you get something random if you try to slice between two values, you get either one or the other. The fact that the "real world" does not operate this way does not somehow give weight to the supposition of a discrete time-sliced simulation, it does the opposite. If the "real world" is in fact a simulation then it is not operating in a strictly binary way with discrete frames (which, as others have pointed out, is not a necessity of a simulation even when run on a binary computer).
Of course the whole thing is just mental masturbation nonsense on the same level as solipsism. When children first encounter the idea of solipsism they have a tendency to get caught up in it. But its just spinning the wheels and implicitly cannot ever come to a resolution or in fact derive anything from it. Its only use is to catalog it as such, or to use it as an excuse (for doing nothing, for doing something, it all amounts to the same thing).
hollywood is paying for slashbeta. Fuck beta. fuck hollywood
exactly, throw the book at whoever is pushing slashbeta.
i agree with the outrage, but I guess today i'm feeling particularly pessimistic because I honestly don't think anything we do will matter. After all, as long as they maintain ad impressions that's all that counts. Who the fuck cares what the site is about, that can be changed anytime. Just keep those ads coming.
The primary problem with "classic" slashdot is that it devotes entirely too much of the available space to comments when it could have more space for branding and advertising. What the fuck were the morons who developed slashdot thinking? That they were providing a forum or something for people to post in?
Here's the beta feedback. "leave slashdot alone, or we're leaving"
it isn't just you. I tried to post a comment, but slashdot solved that problem: it hid the "reply to this" link.
Yeah, I know, I'm sure the site didn't really do that. But it had the same net effect. fuck the beta.
so what you are saying (assuming, of course, that the bitcoin algorithm is amenable to computation by a quantum computer) is that bitcoin will be either taken over or killed off by those with the resources to obtain a quantum computer before the general public, should they choose to do so.
Of course, the algorithm might not be amenable to quantum computing in which case its a moot point.
+1
My doctor is now refusing to continue issuing a prescription (innocuous [not a substance restricted by anything other than requiring a prescription], but moderately expensive) because the insurance company has instructed otherwise. The problem (for me) is that the alternatives either don't work or have bad side effects. This is all documented as the insurance company has kept changing the prescription to anything else under the sun. The doctor now refuses to write the script at all and was plainly afraid of the consequences should he do so.
I went to a specialist and at first they refused as well for the same reason. I pressed, and eventually they decided they "could try". I've been notified by the insurance company that they will allow the script (modified for reduced dosage) for a while, but will not pay any part of it.
So: not only will the insurance company not pay for any part of the medication, but they will only allow me to have access to it for a limited time.
Just one example. Once you get old enough to have chronic health issues the system becomes clear. You pay the doctor, the pharmaceuticals pay the doctor, the insurance company pays the doctor, but only the pharmaceuticals and insurance companies have any say in your treatment (and the insurance companies have the most control). Supposedly this (bureaucracy controlling health treatment) is the problem with socialized healthcare, but it is the reality of our capitalist healthcare system.
A physicist/author wrote a book (back in the late 80s I think) that covered some interesting ideas. One for time travel was to build a ring and spin it up. It need enormous mass (I forget if one stellar mass was supposed to be enough) and apparently you could compensate for not quite being able to reach the speed of light in its rotation with a charge. What it would (theoretically) do is distort space time such that the angle passing through the ring would determine the time displacement. You could only come out while it was spinning -- meaning you couldn't travel before it was built or after it stopped.
I always found this sort of thing fascinating. If you think about it, there's no real issue with backward time travel, but hooboy, who you *really* want to be there when it finally becomes live and everyone or thing that is shooting for travel to the past comes through? I'm not sure such a device would stay functional long enough to be used...
It isn't very hard to send a fraudulent email and get away with it. But it is also easy to take precautions and still get caught. One way is the temptation to test. Some spammers do this, as do some hoaxsters. Problem is when they send a test "anonymous" email to their account to be sure that it works, then send the real one from the same source. Easily caught via netflow analysis. Or if they are foolish and authenticate to a different service from the same source. Somewhat different, but the thief who logged on to facebook using the computer of the house he was burglaring comes to mind.
People are caught by their mistakes, not by the parts they do right.
logs are kept because you need them. I wouldn't expect it to be apparent to someone who has never had to manage a real network, but logs and a reasonable retention are essential. There is a basic tension at work, though. You need logs from a management perspective, the more the better, but the more you have the greater your liability.
For something basic like netflow (which any sane network administrator is going to have) you might have months of data. Places will vary, and some insist they need years, others go with less and some do without. But there's more than just netflow (which is just essential metadata about network traffic), you might use Bro to log web requests or copy out executables, or even just dump the whole stream to disk. The latter takes a large amount of disk space and *significantly* increases liability so places vary from not doing it to keeping an incredible amount (12+ months).
How does it help network administrators? Netflow data is pretty essential to almost any trouble shooting task on the network. A complaint about traffic being dropped can be confirmed or denied by netflow lookup. Need to know what hosts an IP talked to? On certain ports? Doing a basic plausability check for data exfiltration? URL logging gives a trace for a compromise and can then be used to construct indicators of compromise. Capturing exe's on the fly is helpful in post mortem: what exe was downloaded to a compromised host? Do AV companies know about it yet? Full packet captures are extremely helpful in retrospection and can fill in the rest of the blanks. Especially if you are into the questionable practice of MITM the SSL connections.
How does it increase liability? When hit with ediscovery if you've got it you have to produce it. This can get expensive, very expensive if you are doing full pcaps.
Setting retention is a matter of finding a balance between what you need for trouble shooting and can afford to copy and maintain indefinitely. Without dropping below a certain minimum retention that is not really defined, but can hit you in court (a while back slashdot miscovered a company that got in trouble because they didn't log anything to disk which was sufficiently out of line with norms for the line of business they were in to get them in trouble). It matters what your peers are doing.
We have varying retention even for essentially the same data depending on where/how it is being logged/stored. Sometimes these differences amount to bureaucratic/political, other times it is based on capacity of a particular data store. Retention might be defined as a volume of data (10GB), fraction of capacity (90%) or a span of time (30 days).
Access control logging (I assume you are referring to logging authentication events) very likely have considerable lifetime at any facility, but the ability to map specific traffic to a user might be considerably less. For example, many universities employ NAT and depending on specifics of the implementation may or may not be able to map traffic to a user in any given circumstance regardless of retention.
To the point of ensuring provision of service to users, QoS doesn't cut it -- at least not on a subscriber network. If it was just QoS rules access controls wouldn't even be relevant. But to do meaningful traffic shaping (which QoS is not) does require *some* form of user mapping. It could be done anonymously, though in practice I don't see how that would work well (for reasons having nothing to do with fair queuing).
I think I've answered the question as to why keep logs. If not then talk to an administrator, whether it be server or network. Once you gain an understanding of what the job requires the keeping of logs makes sense and there's the risk of going whole hog and keeping too much. Which is when the legal liability aspect needs to be considered.
A major issue with "fortified" foods is that they are fortified in an economic, not biological, way. If you eat dirt is your body going to get the minerals it needs? The truth is that just because you ingest a substance does not mean that your body will be able to use it. And, although this is especially true for "fortified foods", it is also true to an extent for multivitamins.
Two things stand out immediately from the summary: first, the insistence that if you are not malnourished then you gain no benefit from ensuring you are nourished and second, no evidence that they addressed absorption/utilization in any fashion. Speaking as someone who does *not* take multivitamins both are indications that this study is more of the entrenched pharmaceutical backed doctors saying "trust us" than meaningful science.
Sure, there are problems with many vitamin products on the market and they are not a panacea. But even if you are nominally well nourished (which is *not* established by the minimum daily requirements -- notice the term "minimum") it is easy enough for your body to become deficient due to your *particular* circumstances at a *specific* point in time.
Ah, another point: they take on multivitamins as a whole rather than addressing the already established utility of taking specific supplements. One utility had by individuals taking a multivitamin is covering their bases. Is it worth it? Individually or as a group? Well, if you start out with the premise that the group is well nourished then you may not find any benefit, but individually where circumstances can result in depletion it may be worthwhile. Note: I'm not arguing people should be taking multivitamins (and I don't) but it is certainly not a cut and dried case that they useless.
And anyone who points to "fortified" or "enriched" food (especially breakfast cereals) knows very little about nutrition.
read that last paragraph again. Companies aren't allowed to deduct *foreign royalties* but are allowed to deduct *foreign taxes*. Oil companies get special treatment and are allowed to claim *foreign royalties* as *foreign taxes* which then allows them to deduct, even though other companies can.
To help creationists a bit more: as others have noted you described natural selection. What you are missing/getting wrong is this notion about "nothing being created" (a bit stuck on the "creating" aspect -- creationists care, no one else does, get over it) or "bacteria didn't change it". You seem to be rooting for Lamarckism which is not taken seriously (other than fantasy novels/movies/comic books a blacksmith does not father stronger sons, giraffes did not get long necks from each generation stretching farther).
Mostly "new attributes" come from the genetic soup. That is, the traits already existed but a change in environment results in their being selected more often in reproduction. But not all possible attributes exist or have existed. Instead there's this thing called mutation. When you reproduce there are errors. Mostly the errors are insignificant and essentially become part of the genetic soup. It would be pretty unlikely, X-Men aside, for a mutation to occur and immediately have a dominant expression that was not decidedly unhealthy.
Really, it is in the best interest of a population to have a lot of diversity (minor variations) as some of these may prove beneficial. If a species is too focused, too niche, then it lacks the flexibility to deal with evolving conditions (that is, happen to have an existing set of attributes that work better than the current dominant traits in surviving some environmental change). Without a method for change (mutation) then natural selection would result in complete extinction given the reality of changing environments. Natural selection doesn't *create* any adaptation, it is a description for how a population's dominant traits are determined.
So to further your understanding of evolution take what you know (natural selection) and add random change (mutation).
no offense, not picking on you, but the "trained spy" reference makes me laugh. There is/was a military course intended to acclimate trainees to interrogation (and other aspects of being captured). But it wasn't for spies. Made most famous in (IIRC) the 80s when the first female candidate was allowed in. An instructor used the course as an excuse to rape her.
But spy school? It isn't that hard core.
or just not think of a number at all. But if you do that you'll make the operator nervous and diminish your chances of passing the polygraph. and, if you are taking one, you generally want to pass it.
Maybe I could write a book that would get me in trouble with the gov't...
Yes, part of the process in a poly is to "lead up" to the real questions. There's the "baseline" established by answering questions truthfully part ("what is your name", "what is your occupation", etc.) and some lie questions. The myth that it is more effective if someone believes in it is also played on: "think of a number between one and ten. Don't tell me the number just think about... 1... 2... 3... 4... 5... 6... 7... 8... 9... 10..." and the operator will tell you the number you had picked. I tried to denote the long pauses between numbers. Basically, there is typically a gradual tension build up as the selected number is approached and relief/release when it has been passed. The long delays help to ensure a clear reading of this and the idea is that by demonstrating mind reading the subject will believe in the poly making it more reliable.
Too bad it just isn't so. That is, there is no clear, causative relationship between lying and what the polygraph measures. Belief in the poly (and I've met folks who are absolutely convinced in their reliability) provides no help in passing one when being truthful, or failing one when lying. It is immaterial.
Something people who haven't been around polys don't seem to be aware of and isn't something they think of is that subjects often fall asleep during a poly. They are slow and tedious. They take a long time. There's lots of waiting. You are required to lay there absolutely still. And if you fall asleep it negates the entire poly and it has to be redone.
Another thing is the pretense that the polygraph tells whether or not someone is lying. It does no such thing. Instead, it is a set of graphs that are correlated with questions. In a serious polygraph this data is provided to two examiners who work independently. The goal is to yield a pass/fail, not a "subject was lying on points A, B and C, but lying on D, E and F". If the two examiners reach opposing conclusions then the data is provided to a third examiner and his determination is the ultimate finding. So with a polygraph there cannot be an uncertain answer: it is either pass or fail, nothing in between. It is graded by humans who the system expects will frequently have opposing findings and instead of that resulting in equivocacy it is simply referred to a single examiner to provide that authoritative result.
It is hard to not see this as being the subjective, flawed system that it is, but for those that have a deep psychological and/or political need for it to be objective and accurate it appears to suffice.
It isn't a matter of realizing that the polygraph is flawed. The NSA uses the counterintelligence scope poly for all employees, the CIA uses the more invasive "lifestyle" poly, and so on. All of this despite the fact that the inventor of the polygraph was a charlatan, it has been thoroughly debunked by scientific investigation, and all though intelligence people who have sold out their country (such as Aldritch Ames) passed the poly.
The importance isn't in its efficacy, but in having something "tangible" to hold on to. The powers that be are like Linus -- they need a security blanket to hold on to and they have seized on the polygraph. When you are in charge of a department that is going to have access to the deepest and darkest secrets, the most politically damaging truths, you want -- as a person in charge -- you *need* for these things to remain secret. You do background checks, have agents investigate backgrounds, interview the person and people they know.
But a clever person can conceal past malfeasance so that it does not come to light during the investigation. All you have from the personal interview is a *subjective* assessment of the person's honesty, truthfulness, and so on. What is needed is something more, something objective, something with a *score* that passes or fails the person being considered for this very sensitive position.
That is where the polygraph comes in. Thanks to the salesmanship of the original charlatan, people who *need* it are willing to overlook the rather glaring flaws and falacies in its foundation. And once it gets embedded in the government you have bureaucratic inertia keeping it in place. So the security blanket is here to stay. Now more than ever those in power feel a need to have additional assurance that their employees won't turn on them. The demonstrated lack of efficacy in this regard just makes them all the more frantic.
One point: your statement leaves the reader with the impression that the polygraph can work, and does if the person believes in it. This is tempting and perhaps plays a role in the self-deceit on the part of those who purvey and utilize polygraphs. But it simply isn't true. It *never* works to detect a lie. By coincidence a person may fail the polygraph while lying, but it is just a coincidence. Polygraphs have been studied and debunked.
Polygraphs are less effective than voodoo where if someone brought up in a culture that believes in the efficacy of voodoo has a curse put on them they will become ill (of course, they have to *know* about the curse, but that is part and parcel of how voodoo works). In other words, strong indoctrination can invoke a placebo effect to cause harm. This same effect has not been successfully demonstrated with polygraphs and is implausible given there is no unique, causative mechanism between lying and the physiological effects being measured. And that's assuming there's *any* causative mechanism.
Unfortunately you are wrong on one point: at least some courts can and do accept polygraphs as evidence. I don't recall enough of the case I'm thinking of to get a citation, but where they generally come into play is when someone is duped into taking it under the condition that the results will be admitted as evidence. Basically, it can (in at least some jurisdications) be admitted if both sides agree on it before hand. Some defendants are conned into this, either by thinking they will "pass" because they are innocent or believing they can beat it.
Beating a polygraph isn't that hard, unless the examiner knows what the finding will be before he starts. In that case it is easy enough to find anyone as having failed.
Never, ever submit to a polygraph. Its equivalent to turning yourself in to the inquisition for "questioning". The Malleus Maleficarum should be required reading for polygraph examiners if it isn't already.
That is not the distinction you are looking for. The distinction is that AT&T was not accused of committing a crime and these guys have been. It might seem related until you understand something about the legal system: there are different rules for different things.
In the case of Weev, he accessed data without authority. (No, I haven't reviewed the case to see exactly what the charges were, but it was something along those lines). Weev was then accused of having broken a law (pertaining to unauthorized access).
In this case the defendents' attorney argued that the evidence was not collected properly and was thus inadmissable. It is not the case that the police were charged with unauthorized access (which charge would not hold for what I would hope are obvious reasons). There are restrictions on what and how evidence can be collected. This is one of the complaints frequently made by law enforcement: an assertion that criminals often go free because they have collected evidence improperly so that it cannot be admitted, or that they cannot collect evidence due to legal restrictions.
So, while these are related, they are two distinct issues not because of details of collection but because they are concerned with different parts of the legal process