I'd love to see that. Though I would imagine doing it "right" would be expensive for studios. A stopgap measure could be an amp module that added a harmonizing 20kHz+ signal to go along with the 20kHz- signal.
High-energy supersonics are, to my knowledge, being used as non-lethal weapons by the U.S. military in Iraq. I'm not positive they're technically supersonic, as I'm pretty sure that, once you get into *very* high-frequency audio, not much of it penetrates the ear canal, but they're at least very high-pitched. Luckily, high-frequency sound isn't nearly as damaging to ears as low-frequency sound. I doubt if anyone has (publicly) studied whether supersonics can cause any sort of brain damage, temporary or permanent.
effect-->affect. I was a bit too quick to push send.
Anyway, for those who haven't clicked through and read the linked story (or rather, the "Significance of the results" section), here's the relevant information:
"Given the existence of musical-instrument energy above 20 kilohertz, it is natural to ask whether the energy matters to human perception or music recording. The common view is that energy above 20 kHz does not matter, but AES preprint 3207 by Oohashi et al. claims that reproduced sound above 26 kHz "induces activation of alpha-EEG (electroencephalogram) rhythms that persist in the absence of high frequency stimulation, and can affect perception of sound quality." [4]
Oohashi and his colleagues recorded gamelan to a bandwidth of 60 kHz, and played back the recording to listeners through a speaker system with an extra tweeter for the range above 26 kHz. This tweeter was driven by its own amplifier, and the 26 kHz electronic crossover before the amplifier used steep filters. The experimenters found that the listeners' EEGs and their subjective ratings of the sound quality were affected by whether this "ultra-tweeter" was on or off, even though the listeners explicitly denied that the reproduced sound was affected by the ultra-tweeter, and also denied, when presented with the ultrasonics alone, that any sound at all was being played.
From the fact that changes in subjects' EEGs "persist in the absence of high frequency stimulation," Oohashi and his colleagues infer that in audio comparisons, a substantial silent period is required between successive samples to avoid the second evaluation's being corrupted by "hangover" of reaction to the first."
So one would assume the constant presence of high frequencies could affect peoples' moods or thought patterns adversely, whether they report being able to hear them or not. Setting aside the other problems inherent in this approach, I wouldn't recommend operating one of these devices at ones place of business for this reason alone.
I think this is a terrible idea for any number of reasons, one being that supposedly "inaudible" noises effect people subconsciously. Even if the people involved don't report hearing anything.
Google is acting like a webhost here. It's legal precedent (and this precedent doesn't come from either Betamax or Grockster) that webhosts are not liable for copyright infringement if they act to take down copyrighted material after they're notified.
However, the copyright status of collections of facts (presumably a large portion of what people would be uploading to Google Base), though established, is extremely murky in practice. The decision tree for what Google should do in case of being emailed regarding copyright will be extremely complicated. And that's just one thing people will use Google Base for.
Yeah, that could be part of it. But it's certainly not the whole story.
I've known people to prefer a MUD PK war to a date with a beautiful woman; a game of capture the flag to sex; Word of Warcraft to their loving SOs. There's something about the gamer/coder personality type that is more than a function of 1. Being good at analytical thinking 2. Poor performance in social situations.
It's more of an attraction to certain modes of thinking and systems of reward than failing at the "real world". In some people, at least.
I think this is a valuable line of thought, but ultimately a non-issue.
In killing bacteria with cold plasma, I'm hypothesizing that you'd be selecting for properties which are almost certainly either not correlated with, or negatively correlated with, what we'd normally count as "fitness" in bacteria. The better they are at surviving cold plasma, the worse they will be at being bacteria.
Of course, mass bacteriacide always has the chance of producing super bacteria. It was originally thought that our widespread use of antibiotics selected for bacteria that were good at resisting antibiotics, but bad at competing with other bacteria without resistance genes-- just as a regular Humvee will beat an armour-plated Humvee in a race-- but we were wrong. Widespread use of antibiotics has resulted in rapid bacterial evolution which has resulted in better / more versatile bacteria, period.
But I'd have to think this is different enough such that that wouldn't happen.
Maybe. There's nothing inherently egalitarian about the internet.
Lessig's "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace" touches on this. Code is law-- how the 'net is structured determines how it's used, with the nigh force of law.
The internet is fairly favorable to the "little guy" right now, but Lessig says there's nothing inherently unchangeable about the internet's Code. The battle for the internet *has not been won*.
So, after those R&D costs are regained, why don't the prices drop?
Unfortunately a business in a vacuum doesn't say, "We spent 2 billion dollars developing product X and we've made our investment back-- time to sell it at cost."
It'd be interesting to look into just which genotyes/genes are being selected for in modern life. I think your comment that we now mainly select for aesthetics (i.e. on the average, we choose who we marry by whether we find them attractive, which is quite a recent development) is part of the picture, but not all of it. Also, just speaking of mating selection, many things external to one's appearance/aesthetics can influence their perceived attractiveness.
And aesthetics varying by culture or race... another ball of wax.:)
On the heavy tail, I believe the common term for this is "the long tail" and the 80/20 rule (80 percent of the profits come from 20 percent of the product) is often quoted. New technology can increase the amount of product and also influence who gets in that 20 percent.
I don't think the GGP or GP cover the concept of "fitness" very well. Anyway, you say,
"And do you really think a hundred years or so of "societal support structures" is going to have a lasting effect on the gene pool?"
I think you'd be amazed at how quickly and subtly a gene pool can change-- our gene pool is substantially different than the one we had 2000 years ago. If we limit ourselves to even 100 years, a lot has changed (think of the genocides, the varying rates of reproduction, the various hybridizations between groups, and so forth).
Even a few generations of wildly different selection criteria (i.e. the last 100 years) can leave a lasting imprint on a gene pool.
To be fair, it isn't clear whether this is a "the quantity of uniquely identifiable information just isn't there" flaw or an "instrument precision" flaw. Most probably, nobody knows.
So, I wouldn't count it out just yet.
Also, I'm not so sure on your comment, "Unless they can bump that number into the billions or more, it's pointless because it's too easy to manufacture a duplicate of any given document that has an identical fingerprint just by brute force."
In some circumstances, yes, you'll be able to see the original document you're trying to forge, and get a "pretty decent fingerprint match". On some documents you don't-- and in that case, this system *will* stop you if implimented correctly.
1. This processor is 95% MIPS compatible. I understand incompatible, and 100% compatible. What do they mean by this?
2. You're right that this is mainly a PR release- and though it doesn't flat-out say that this processor infringes on any MIPS patents, it's certainly implied. You seem to be strongly implying that this processor *doesn't* infringe on any MIPS patents. Do you have any facts about this, or is it your intuition?
3. If the Godson-2 is "pretty much a copy of the MIPS R10000" that seems to make performance claims (rather than just saying it's "MIPS compatible"). I'm not sure your Opteron-8086 analogy architecture analogy holds up.
Yes, it's very difficult to 'sanitize' the internet for 100 million people, especially over TCP/IP.
However, let's not get complacent. What the network giveth, the network can taketh away, with enough tweaks and censors, from all but the most skilled computer users.
Also, the chilling effect of government censorship-- that if you post things the Chinese government does not approve of, your post may go away (at best) is hard to quantify.
The real news here, if I can interpret the press release correctly, is not that the nanoparticle is the trojan horse, but that its small size *allowed* the researchers to construct the trojan horse.
The article summary is a bit brief- basically, cancer needs a lot of folate. Moreso than normal cells. These folks attached both an anti-cancer drug and a bunch of folate to a nanoparticle, which, due to both its small size and tasty-looking folate, is able to enter cells and deliver the anti-cancer payload rather than slowly diffuse it through the cell wall.
This is still a bit of a shotgun approach, as normal cells still get targetted to some extent, but *much* less so than previous methods.
I'd be angry too. About how the Forbes article portrayed me as a raving lunatic out for blood, after giving what was probably a thoughtful interview.
All the article consisted of was trotting Theo out for choice quotes about how Linux sucks, and a tiny bit of BSD history. Only 2 out of the 16 paragraphs even started to cover *why* Theo thinks the way he does. The rest is tabloid-style trash-talk and what seems to be an ADD-inspired history lesson. There's nothing approaching a coherent argument.
I'm giving Theo the benefit of the doubt on this one- he probably gave a fleshed-out argument then Forbes eviscerated it. Even if that's not the case, they should have written a better article. This is awfully shitty journalism.
The article tells a good story about how Linux is at the center of a massive nexus of script-kiddies who are eager to destroy anyone standing in their way. And how unions are powerful things.
I don't think, however, that this has much to do with IT unionization.
There will always be vandals. There will always be workers who would benefit from a union. The story failed to connect these ideas.
The language translation aspect of this system is impressive. However...
Is this a key component of the future of programming?
Give it thousands of high-level design documents. Give it the thousands of corresponding pieces of code which resulted from said documents. Do you get a system that can translate between design documents and code?
Perhaps there's going to be some pre-processing and post-processing, but I don't think this is out of the question. Think about it.
I hope you're giving the phishing sites numerically valid credit card numbers- essentially there's a checksum hidden in a card number. Phishers can screen out completely randomly generated card numbers because their checksum doesn't match.
I'm not sure whether this is completely appropriate to include in a press release.
Insofar as the intelligence community is coming up with possible scenarios, yes, I think this is a possible scenario. And worth looking into.
Insofar as the government- MY government- is identifying and singling-out anti-globalization folks as "The Enemy" and "anti-American," I'm a bit frustrated. I'm an American who is also somewhat anti-globalization*.
So, thumbs up for doing some preparation that might actually matter. Thumbs down, however, for singling out anti-globalization as "The Enemy" and "anti-American."
You're the government. You have a responsibility to your citizens to not insult moderate views commonly held by U.S. citizens, however accidentally you do so. If you're going to put out press releases, hire some rhetoric Ph.Ds or something.
*There a lot of ins-and-outs to globalization. I'm against greedy globalization, which so far has unfortunately been rampant.
Besides all the functional benefits something like this would have over a little notebook, which are significant (but also mixed), some people are more productive- and perhaps even think better- when at a keyboard than with a pencil and notebook.
People should use whatever device allows them to get their thoughts out into some coherent form. For some, that's going to be a little pocket notebook, and for others who usually do their thinking in front of a keyboard, it'll be a device such as this fellow is looking for.
I'm much more productive (at this point in my life, at least) with a keyboard under my hands than with a pencil in my fingers. Said like that it sounds so unromantic... but I'm interested to hear what sorts of devices are out there.
Google is gaining geek mindshare, true. This includes gaining mindshare from geeks who work at Microsoft.
This is in fact *why* Ballmer is making such brash comments about Google being gone in 5 years (and why Gates said the iPod is a fad last week). It's not that they believe their predictions-- it's that they want to minimize the mindshare leakage that's happening now.
They don't have any cool, functional products in these markets. But it's better to talk loud and present a brave face to the world and give people (especially those inside your own company) who might lose faith in you something to hang on to while you try to come up with some real products than to allow the loss of mindshare without a fight. Think of it as attempting a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So, Ballmer and Gates are doing the smart thing by grandstanding, even if Slashdot calls them stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd love to see that. Though I would imagine doing it "right" would be expensive for studios. A stopgap measure could be an amp module that added a harmonizing 20kHz+ signal to go along with the 20kHz- signal.
High-energy supersonics are, to my knowledge, being used as non-lethal weapons by the U.S. military in Iraq. I'm not positive they're technically supersonic, as I'm pretty sure that, once you get into *very* high-frequency audio, not much of it penetrates the ear canal, but they're at least very high-pitched. Luckily, high-frequency sound isn't nearly as damaging to ears as low-frequency sound. I doubt if anyone has (publicly) studied whether supersonics can cause any sort of brain damage, temporary or permanent.
effect-->affect. I was a bit too quick to push send.
Anyway, for those who haven't clicked through and read the linked story (or rather, the "Significance of the results" section), here's the relevant information:
"Given the existence of musical-instrument energy above 20 kilohertz, it is natural to ask whether the energy matters to human perception or music recording. The common view is that energy above 20 kHz does not matter, but AES preprint 3207 by Oohashi et al. claims that reproduced sound above 26 kHz "induces activation of alpha-EEG (electroencephalogram) rhythms that persist in the absence of high frequency stimulation, and can affect perception of sound quality." [4]
Oohashi and his colleagues recorded gamelan to a bandwidth of 60 kHz, and played back the recording to listeners through a speaker system with an extra tweeter for the range above 26 kHz. This tweeter was driven by its own amplifier, and the 26 kHz electronic crossover before the amplifier used steep filters. The experimenters found that the listeners' EEGs and their subjective ratings of the sound quality were affected by whether this "ultra-tweeter" was on or off, even though the listeners explicitly denied that the reproduced sound was affected by the ultra-tweeter, and also denied, when presented with the ultrasonics alone, that any sound at all was being played.
From the fact that changes in subjects' EEGs "persist in the absence of high frequency stimulation," Oohashi and his colleagues infer that in audio comparisons, a substantial silent period is required between successive samples to avoid the second evaluation's being corrupted by "hangover" of reaction to the first."
So one would assume the constant presence of high frequencies could affect peoples' moods or thought patterns adversely, whether they report being able to hear them or not. Setting aside the other problems inherent in this approach, I wouldn't recommend operating one of these devices at ones place of business for this reason alone.
I think this is a terrible idea for any number of reasons, one being that supposedly "inaudible" noises effect people subconsciously. Even if the people involved don't report hearing anything.
h tm
Relevant link with EEG results-
http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~boyk/spectra/spectra.
This was a great, clear-headed post. Whomever you may be, please consider making an account so your writings get read by more people.
I think this is far from clear-cut.
Google is acting like a webhost here. It's legal precedent (and this precedent doesn't come from either Betamax or Grockster) that webhosts are not liable for copyright infringement if they act to take down copyrighted material after they're notified.
However, the copyright status of collections of facts (presumably a large portion of what people would be uploading to Google Base), though established, is extremely murky in practice. The decision tree for what Google should do in case of being emailed regarding copyright will be extremely complicated. And that's just one thing people will use Google Base for.
A project on this scale blazes new territory.
Yeah, that could be part of it. But it's certainly not the whole story.
I've known people to prefer a MUD PK war to a date with a beautiful woman; a game of capture the flag to sex; Word of Warcraft to their loving SOs. There's something about the gamer/coder personality type that is more than a function of
1. Being good at analytical thinking
2. Poor performance in social situations.
It's more of an attraction to certain modes of thinking and systems of reward than failing at the "real world". In some people, at least.
I think this is a valuable line of thought, but ultimately a non-issue.
In killing bacteria with cold plasma, I'm hypothesizing that you'd be selecting for properties which are almost certainly either not correlated with, or negatively correlated with, what we'd normally count as "fitness" in bacteria. The better they are at surviving cold plasma, the worse they will be at being bacteria.
Of course, mass bacteriacide always has the chance of producing super bacteria. It was originally thought that our widespread use of antibiotics selected for bacteria that were good at resisting antibiotics, but bad at competing with other bacteria without resistance genes-- just as a regular Humvee will beat an armour-plated Humvee in a race-- but we were wrong. Widespread use of antibiotics has resulted in rapid bacterial evolution which has resulted in better / more versatile bacteria, period.
But I'd have to think this is different enough such that that wouldn't happen.
RD
The question is, whatever Apple plans to do, why would they say anything else after this latest ipod (nano) launch?
You don't cannibalize your business with promises of imminent future products with more capabilities.
Maybe. There's nothing inherently egalitarian about the internet.
Lessig's "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace" touches on this. Code is law-- how the 'net is structured determines how it's used, with the nigh force of law.
The internet is fairly favorable to the "little guy" right now, but Lessig says there's nothing inherently unchangeable about the internet's Code. The battle for the internet *has not been won*.
Unfortunately a business in a vacuum doesn't say, "We spent 2 billion dollars developing product X and we've made our investment back-- time to sell it at cost."
It takes competition to drop prices.
I think that's fair.
:)
It'd be interesting to look into just which genotyes/genes are being selected for in modern life. I think your comment that we now mainly select for aesthetics (i.e. on the average, we choose who we marry by whether we find them attractive, which is quite a recent development) is part of the picture, but not all of it. Also, just speaking of mating selection, many things external to one's appearance/aesthetics can influence their perceived attractiveness.
And aesthetics varying by culture or race... another ball of wax.
Well said about many topics.
On the heavy tail, I believe the common term for this is "the long tail" and the 80/20 rule (80 percent of the profits come from 20 percent of the product) is often quoted. New technology can increase the amount of product and also influence who gets in that 20 percent.
I don't think the GGP or GP cover the concept of "fitness" very well. Anyway, you say,
"And do you really think a hundred years or so of "societal support structures" is going to have a lasting effect on the gene pool?"
I think you'd be amazed at how quickly and subtly a gene pool can change-- our gene pool is substantially different than the one we had 2000 years ago. If we limit ourselves to even 100 years, a lot has changed (think of the genocides, the varying rates of reproduction, the various hybridizations between groups, and so forth).
Even a few generations of wildly different selection criteria (i.e. the last 100 years) can leave a lasting imprint on a gene pool.
To be fair, it isn't clear whether this is a "the quantity of uniquely identifiable information just isn't there" flaw or an "instrument precision" flaw. Most probably, nobody knows.
So, I wouldn't count it out just yet.
Also, I'm not so sure on your comment,
"Unless they can bump that number into the billions or more, it's pointless because it's too easy to manufacture a duplicate of any given document that has an identical fingerprint just by brute force."
In some circumstances, yes, you'll be able to see the original document you're trying to forge, and get a "pretty decent fingerprint match". On some documents you don't-- and in that case, this system *will* stop you if implimented correctly.
A few points-
1. This processor is 95% MIPS compatible. I understand incompatible, and 100% compatible. What do they mean by this?
2. You're right that this is mainly a PR release- and though it doesn't flat-out say that this processor infringes on any MIPS patents, it's certainly implied. You seem to be strongly implying that this processor *doesn't* infringe on any MIPS patents. Do you have any facts about this, or is it your intuition?
3. If the Godson-2 is "pretty much a copy of the MIPS R10000" that seems to make performance claims (rather than just saying it's "MIPS compatible"). I'm not sure your Opteron-8086 analogy architecture analogy holds up.
Good catch that this is was a PR release.
Yes, it's very difficult to 'sanitize' the internet for 100 million people, especially over TCP/IP.
However, let's not get complacent. What the network giveth, the network can taketh away, with enough tweaks and censors, from all but the most skilled computer users.
Also, the chilling effect of government censorship-- that if you post things the Chinese government does not approve of, your post may go away (at best) is hard to quantify.
The real news here, if I can interpret the press release correctly, is not that the nanoparticle is the trojan horse, but that its small size *allowed* the researchers to construct the trojan horse.
The article summary is a bit brief- basically, cancer needs a lot of folate. Moreso than normal cells. These folks attached both an anti-cancer drug and a bunch of folate to a nanoparticle, which, due to both its small size and tasty-looking folate, is able to enter cells and deliver the anti-cancer payload rather than slowly diffuse it through the cell wall.
This is still a bit of a shotgun approach, as normal cells still get targetted to some extent, but *much* less so than previous methods.
I'd be angry too. About how the Forbes article portrayed me as a raving lunatic out for blood, after giving what was probably a thoughtful interview.
All the article consisted of was trotting Theo out for choice quotes about how Linux sucks, and a tiny bit of BSD history. Only 2 out of the 16 paragraphs even started to cover *why* Theo thinks the way he does. The rest is tabloid-style trash-talk and what seems to be an ADD-inspired history lesson. There's nothing approaching a coherent argument.
I'm giving Theo the benefit of the doubt on this one- he probably gave a fleshed-out argument then Forbes eviscerated it. Even if that's not the case, they should have written a better article. This is awfully shitty journalism.
... as to where the evil clerics are.
The article tells a good story about how Linux is at the center of a massive nexus of script-kiddies who are eager to destroy anyone standing in their way. And how unions are powerful things.
I don't think, however, that this has much to do with IT unionization.
There will always be vandals. There will always be workers who would benefit from a union. The story failed to connect these ideas.
Meh.
The language translation aspect of this system is impressive. However...
Is this a key component of the future of programming?
Give it thousands of high-level design documents. Give it the thousands of corresponding pieces of code which resulted from said documents. Do you get a system that can translate between design documents and code?
Perhaps there's going to be some pre-processing and post-processing, but I don't think this is out of the question. Think about it.
RD
Hah. Good idea.
I hope you're giving the phishing sites numerically valid credit card numbers- essentially there's a checksum hidden in a card number. Phishers can screen out completely randomly generated card numbers because their checksum doesn't match.
Here's a link to the algorithm*
http://www.beachnet.com/~hstiles/cardtype.html
Enjoy.
*No, reverse-engineering the algorithm won't generate a valid card, but it'll generate a "not obviously invalid" card.
I'm not sure whether this is completely appropriate to include in a press release.
Insofar as the intelligence community is coming up with possible scenarios, yes, I think this is a possible scenario. And worth looking into.
Insofar as the government- MY government- is identifying and singling-out anti-globalization folks as "The Enemy" and "anti-American," I'm a bit frustrated. I'm an American who is also somewhat anti-globalization*.
So, thumbs up for doing some preparation that might actually matter. Thumbs down, however, for singling out anti-globalization as "The Enemy" and "anti-American."
You're the government. You have a responsibility to your citizens to not insult moderate views commonly held by U.S. citizens, however accidentally you do so. If you're going to put out press releases, hire some rhetoric Ph.Ds or something.
*There a lot of ins-and-outs to globalization. I'm against greedy globalization, which so far has unfortunately been rampant.
Besides all the functional benefits something like this would have over a little notebook, which are significant (but also mixed), some people are more productive- and perhaps even think better- when at a keyboard than with a pencil and notebook.
People should use whatever device allows them to get their thoughts out into some coherent form. For some, that's going to be a little pocket notebook, and for others who usually do their thinking in front of a keyboard, it'll be a device such as this fellow is looking for.
I'm much more productive (at this point in my life, at least) with a keyboard under my hands than with a pencil in my fingers. Said like that it sounds so unromantic... but I'm interested to hear what sorts of devices are out there.
Google is gaining geek mindshare, true. This includes gaining mindshare from geeks who work at Microsoft.
This is in fact *why* Ballmer is making such brash comments about Google being gone in 5 years (and why Gates said the iPod is a fad last week). It's not that they believe their predictions-- it's that they want to minimize the mindshare leakage that's happening now.
They don't have any cool, functional products in these markets. But it's better to talk loud and present a brave face to the world and give people (especially those inside your own company) who might lose faith in you something to hang on to while you try to come up with some real products than to allow the loss of mindshare without a fight. Think of it as attempting a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So, Ballmer and Gates are doing the smart thing by grandstanding, even if Slashdot calls them stupid.
They're not, believe me.