Professional columnists and cartoonists sometimes prepare a few submissions ahead of time. Thought-pieces, retrospectives, discussion of long-term trends, etc. don't depend as much on timely, up-to-the-minute news. If nothing timely inspires an entry or exhaustion strikes, then post one from inventory.
Most of the cost is in the fiber, copper & network boxen . Most of the value is in the content and services. Until someone figures out an equitable way for the services (Google et al) to pay for the costs (SBC et al), these types of disputes will continue.
Assuming that a TLD chooses standards that users like, they might be much more successful than other TLDs. A regulated TLD could be both more trustworthy (assuming some policing for good business practices, antivirus, etc.) and more useful (assuming the use of a pleasing, consistent look and feel).
Requirements don't imply sterility as long as the the structure provides room for creativity. Are sonnets or haiku or limericks considered "sterile" because they have strict rules on structure?
Other warm-blooded "cold-blooded" creatures
on
Warm-blooded Fish?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Many insects also create intentionally elevated body temperatures (generally through shivering). Moths, bees, dung beetles all generate heat to enable greater activity under cold conditions.
For example. Honeybees generate heat in the winter to keep the hive warm and use heat to kill predatory wasps -- surrounding the wasp, heating up to 45 C (113 F) and killing the attacker.
I'm sure that these robots will have more than their share of vulnerabilities. All one needs to do is give the "right" link to a robot and then j00 have pwned it.
Of course, creating a zombie might create even more problems.
I wonder if some future Geneva convention will outlaw this type of mechno-biological warfare.
TFA suggests that this worm (technically a trojan) spoofs a buddy -- making the worm-loading link seem innocent. The advice is to always confirm that your buddy sent you something. I leave aside the reality that most people aren't going to pester their friends with a "Did you just send me something" messages. It may be good advice, but most people probably feel like paranoid lusers asking every time a buddy sends a link.
The bigger point is that malware need only become better at social engineering to convince most people not to ask. If the worm sent two messages -- one with the link and a second one with a friendly confirmation ("Hope you liked that link. See you later."). This could easily convince many people that it was a trusted link from a trusted source. By the time they actually talk to the friend (if they do) and mention it, the friend will deny sending anything, the infected person will check their PC, find no evidence of an infection and just be puzzled by the exchange. But it will be too late.
Yes, some people might still ask or be suspicious. But infectious malware needs only to succeed with a very small % to create a very large and valuable botnet.
Another approach is from some work I saw demoed at an MIT conference in Vienna. If you capture enough video of a person speaking, you can remix/rerender video of that person saying anything you want them to say. The software works at the phonetic level so you can even synthesize words that the person has never even uttered before and even make them appear to speak languages that they don't know. They had some visually convincing video showing people saying things that the researchers claimed they never said. Yes, the demo version worked with clean test video and a professional video/image analyst could probably spot a faked/remized video. But if these technology becomes good enough, I can see it making video a nontrustworthy source of data (like skillfully retouched photos).
"people cannot possibly get any lazier. say you are looking for apple the fruit, then just fucking type "fruit apple" and if it doesn't get you anywhere, just try a few more keyword combinations. that isn't hard."
Thanks for making my point on two levels. First, a search of the term "fruit apple" (just the two words, not the phrase) discards about 3/4 of all pages dealing with apples (the fruit). The vast majority of pages that mention this fruit do not have the word "fruit" on them (this is a very common problem -- its so obvious to the page maker that the page is about fruit that they don't put that keyword anywhere on the page). This a one major problem with keyword search - sometimes the "best" keywords discard large numbers of relevant pages.
Second, yes I am lazy. That is the entire purpose of using a search engine -- to make it easy to find what I want to find.
The bigger issue is that keyword-based search is deeply flawed. Keywords only work to the extent that page creators use them uniformly -- which they don't (as the fruit apple example shows). I'd wager that just as many people fail to find what they want because of over specificity (using too many keywords) as fail due to over generality. Moreover, keywords only work to the extent that the searcher knows the keywords -- which they often don't if the entire point of the search is to learn something new.
The core challenge is that search is not a function, but a dialog. Currently, Google lacks the kind of interactive refinement of searches that would really help people find what they want. If I search on Apple, Google doesn't know whether I mean Apple (the fruit), Apple Macintosh (the computer), Apple Macintosh (the fruit, again), Apple (Fiona, the singer), Apple (Big = New York City), etc. The first page of hits for a search on "Apple" should offer one each of these various meanings -- something like this search for Apple at Clusty which is good, but doesn't take the concept far enough.
Even if the search engine knows that I want Apple Macintosh (the computer), Google still doesn't know if I want pages that describe hardware, software, peripherals, the company's site, old 68k Macintoshes, new machines, stuff for sale, fan sites, technical support, etc. Yes, I can add more search terms, but adding terms has two great problems. First, added terms often end up throwing away the very pages that I seek if the page doesn't contain the words I use (e.g., a search on Apple Macintosh misses all the sites that just call the computer "Mac"). Second, I may not even know what terms to use or how to spell them, but like pornography I'll know good search hits when I see them.
What would help is some interactive process that directly asks or deduces whether the search hits are on target or not. The second page of hits would differ depending on how the searcher interacts with the first page -- giving the user more or fewer of pages similar to those they liked or didn't like respectively.
Search should be more like a game of "hot-n-cold" in which the searcher can easily tell the search engine which hits are "warmer" (more on target) or "cooler" (less on target).
I grew up with 3 commercial broadcast channels and 1 public broadcast station. It sucked compared to what's available today on basic cable. Sure there's more junk on TV, including public TV and the old commercial stations. But channels with 24 hr news (of varying leanings), home-and-garden, science shows, outdoor/exploration shows, independent films, food, etc. TV has more hours of quality per day than it did in the past.
Yes, total TV crap is up by a factor of 50X and the crap-to-quality factor is worse by a factor of 10, but that still means we have 5X the available hours of quality programming compared to 30 years ago.
I bet that not that many people actually need extra CPU cycles that don't want those cycles on a more permanent basis. Perhaps the only people that need short-term access to computer power are fly-by-night spammers and DDoS extortionists.
The whole point of LLC is to protect investors from the illegal actions (and consequences thereof) of the companies in which they invest.
This is true. The investors enjoy limited liability, but not zero liability. Investors can lose 100% the money they put into a venture (but nothing more than that). The question is: can legal proceedings on a dissolved LLC (or one that distributed significant amounts of capital back to the investors) force a recall of that invested/distributed money?
IANAL, but I wonder if there's some legal mechanism for this. Otherwise LLCs could skip out on liabilities by quickly dissolving before those liabilities are recognized. I also wonder if a clever lawyer could pierce LLC protection if they proved that the investors knew of the liability or participated in the avoidance of that liability by dissolving the entity.
Sound like this might creates some apoplectic lawyers. If a company lasts only a few months, it's going to be a difficult target for lawsuits. By the time the plaintiff finds a lawyer or the case goes to court, the company is gone.
I suppose you can go after the principals, but if most of the money came from (and went to) a set of legally-insulated investors (e.g., in an LLC), then the managers of the company won't be the deep pockets that lawyers love. Can a dissolved entity be reconstituted (and money taken back from investors) if that company is later found liable for something?
As a Macintosh owner I have occasionally really needed Windows. I've spent money on various emulators (e.g., SoftWindows) and even bought a Pentium laptop at a garage sale for $35. But I never used these things as much as I thought -- only 3 or 4 times in the last 20 years. Hosted Windows for $4.99/day would be a good way to use Windows once every 5 years or so.
Of course if MS can provide Hosted Windows then Google could provide hosted whatever (GLinux?) and things would get interesting.
Genetic variations affect how people absorb drugs, metabolize drugs, are helped by drugs, or have dangerous reactions to drugs. People can vary more that 10000:1 in the rate of deactivating (or retaining) drugs and drug metabolites. This variation impacts clinic testing and drug approvals. The result is that some promising medications are knocked out by clinical testing when too few people are helped or too many people are hurt. Genetic testing would help determine which drugs work for which people. Already doctors use 3 different drugs for childhood leukemia as determined by a genetic test (the wrong drug can be lethal). Increasing use of genetic testing will have good and bad effects.
The good news: drug companies might be able to resurrect some failed medications if they can determine which genetic variants are helped by the drug versus being harmed by the drug. Some promising but previously unapproved medications will make it on to the market.
The bad news: Current drug development focuses on blockbusters. Finding something that millions of people will need to take. This pushes development to help the greatest number of people. If the treatment works for most people (based on genetic screening), there's little reason to develop a cure for genetic minority populations. Genetic orphan populations will be marginalized.
See, no one is going to "print" optical traces. Unless you consider gluing fiber to a board "printing." Fiber optic cables are cheaper than PCB by a long shot, which is why they are used for optical interconnect now, and will be in the forseeable future
Yes, fiber is cheap for point-to-point routings, but I doubt it scales well. What happens when a motherboard becomes 100% optical interconnect -- with virtually every chip and attached device using optics to communicate? Optical connections would run from the CPU (maybe each core of the CPU) to memory controller, cache, main memory banks (perhaps one fiber per optically connected RAM card), I/O controllers, mass storage devices, I/O ports, expansion bus slots (again, one fiber per slot), etc. A single motherboard might have easily have dozens of optical interconnections. I'm suggesting that printing the channels becomes cheaper than mechanically laying dozens of fibers.
With discrete fibers, doubling the number of interconnections doubles the cost because each added fiber must be laid into place during the manufacturing phase. With printed optical traces, the cost is nearly independent of the number of interconnections -- just add another trace in the mask during the design phase. It's the same logic that means that people use PCBs and not wire-wrap boards for mass-produced electronics. If N is the number of interconnections, then printing is cheaper than routing fiber for some value of N.
Perhaps you and I have different expectations for both the cross-over value of N (where printing makes sense) and the likely future value of N for intensively optical motherboards.
From what I have seen, Visual Studio seems to automagically impose a bunch of programming cruft on any project. The default code structures make it hard to fully understand the what and why. In contrast, Hyerpcard let the programmer draw all the UI elements with a Drawing tools palette and easily add event-driven code into each UI object (Cm-Option-Click took you right to the code space of a UI object). A simple message passing heirarchy let UI messages flow intuitively from UI objects such as buttons to the card with that button to the background of the card to the file (called a stack) that contained all the cards. In short, Hypercard provided an excellent interface for creating interfaces.
Hypercard had some serious limitations (no data structures, monochrome, single-user applications, sometimes slow on machines under 50 MHz, etc.), but it had a very nice approach to both constructing UI-intensive applications and an extremely fast edit-run-debug cycle.
This tech will mean a new opportunity for a new kind of "PCB" maker. Circuit boards with embedded optical traces will replace (or layered on to) traditional electronic circuit boards. New optical chip-to-board interconnects will also become a new, growing business. I know that people do make all-optical circuits (I've seen these at Lucent's museum in NJ), but it looks like the current tech is very expensive (etched channels in a sliced wafer).
The first company to develop a low-cost, high-quality tech for "printing" optical traces will make a mint once these interconnects become common. I'd bet that the ultimate technology will be a sandwich of resins with etched channels and vapor-deposited reflective layers, walls, corners (or high-index resin filling). For most applications, the optical interconnect can be single-layer because the non-interference on crossing beams will let two traces/channels cross each other with interference.
Inventions like this one are a great start. But until they find away to make cheap circuits to route optical connections on a board, this tech won't see widespread adoption.
I fear that Google's payment service will ruin the company's reputation. The potential for fraud, money laundering, phishing, mis-representation of goods, charge-back disputes, illegitimate charities, etc. will force Google to implement the same draconian policies that Paypal has. The high cost of customer service will force Google to use the same anonymous/automated resolution processes that do more to piss-off customers that resolve disputes. Erroneously banned account holders, defrauded account holders will be mad that Google isn't spending hours on the phone with them and resolving situations to their liking.
Currently it's very easy for Google to be non-evil -- Google search, Google maps, GMail are all low-consequence activities. Once real money is involved this will change. Doing payment services will require a portfolio of automated processes that will, at times, appear both unfriendly and profit-motivated.
I wish them luck in the service, but fear it is the end of the Google honeymoon.
A used computer is far cheaper than a new computer. As with cars, people seem to want to pay through the nose for something new and shiny. The price then drops the minute they get the box home. For most computing activities these days, a top-of-line machine that is a year or so old does a good job relative to a brand new low-end or mid-range system. And for basic work (web/email/word), a 5 year old machine can be both very affordable and provide acceptable performance.
My wife uses a 12" Powerbooks with a 22" Cinema display, USB keyboard, and USB multi-button mouse. On the road, she has something very compact. On her desk, she has a large screen and comfortable input devices.
I believe that all of Apple's current Powerbooks come with DVI and I would assume that some PC laptops include it too. It's a great way to have a big screen that you don't have to carry.
PageRank appears to assume that each link is made independently of the target site. These splogs and other SEO tricks violate that assumption when commercially linked entities create links to each other's sites. Biasing the vote of a link based on some site credibility measure only helps slightly as automation lets sloggers create massive numbers of spurious links. With PageRank, its too easy to buy votes.
Google needs some mechanism judging if a link is a fair link (made by an independent person/process) or "bought" link created by on on behalf of the same site that being linked to. I'd bet if Google analyzed these splogs and other SEO-generated sites, they'd find an excessive number of links from the splog to the target (or other in-network splogs) but few links from the splog to other relevant sites. Perhaps Google should reweight sites that seem to focus too many links in one direction. Of course, this is only a temporary solution as SEOs/sploggers could just use Google to find a set of random, but relevant, links to add to their splog.
The deeper problem is that no matter what Google does, some clever SEO will find a way around it. And since sites seeking to be at the top of the search out number Google engineers by a wide margin, the SEOs would seem to have the advantage. The only group with greater numbers than the SEOs are Google users. I suspect the ultimate solution will mean social ranking systems where each Google user gets to rank pages and have a reputation for page ranking. The user reputation system would mitigate attempts by SEOs to either up-rank their pages or down-rank competitor's pages.
I think both role-playing and programming involve a "what if I do X" future-conditional thought process. Controlling a character in game or a byte-character in a program are not that different. They both require some explicit thought of future consequences of scripted actions in the context of a mechanistic system. This is especially true for DMs or scenario developers who must constantly think about how their setup will affect the player's future actions to guide those players toward some attainable game goal.
Thinking abstractly about "what-if" is key to creating code that does what you want and expect it to do. Thinking about what-if is fantasy, by definition.
TFA suggests that the device continues to work even after the cells die. This suggests a simple physical response -- these ugly bags of mostly water tend to swell in the presence of humidity. If the device had ceased to function when the bacteria died, then we'd have something.
In any event, it does suggest an approach to more sensitive humidity detectors using gold-coated hydrophilic particles. Replacing the bacteria with some other polymer capsules could lead to a more repeatable sensor with ultra-high sensitivity.
Slashdot Mirror
Professional columnists and cartoonists sometimes prepare a few submissions ahead of time. Thought-pieces, retrospectives, discussion of long-term trends, etc. don't depend as much on timely, up-to-the-minute news. If nothing timely inspires an entry or exhaustion strikes, then post one from inventory.
Most of the cost is in the fiber, copper & network boxen . Most of the value is in the content and services. Until someone figures out an equitable way for the services (Google et al) to pay for the costs (SBC et al), these types of disputes will continue.
Requirements don't imply sterility as long as the the structure provides room for creativity. Are sonnets or haiku or limericks considered "sterile" because they have strict rules on structure?
For example. Honeybees generate heat in the winter to keep the hive warm and use heat to kill predatory wasps -- surrounding the wasp, heating up to 45 C (113 F) and killing the attacker.
Of course, creating a zombie might create even more problems.
I wonder if some future Geneva convention will outlaw this type of mechno-biological warfare.
I'm just waiting for an iPod cube.
The bigger point is that malware need only become better at social engineering to convince most people not to ask. If the worm sent two messages -- one with the link and a second one with a friendly confirmation ("Hope you liked that link. See you later."). This could easily convince many people that it was a trusted link from a trusted source. By the time they actually talk to the friend (if they do) and mention it, the friend will deny sending anything, the infected person will check their PC, find no evidence of an infection and just be puzzled by the exchange. But it will be too late.
Yes, some people might still ask or be suspicious. But infectious malware needs only to succeed with a very small % to create a very large and valuable botnet.
Another approach is from some work I saw demoed at an MIT conference in Vienna. If you capture enough video of a person speaking, you can remix/rerender video of that person saying anything you want them to say. The software works at the phonetic level so you can even synthesize words that the person has never even uttered before and even make them appear to speak languages that they don't know. They had some visually convincing video showing people saying things that the researchers claimed they never said. Yes, the demo version worked with clean test video and a professional video/image analyst could probably spot a faked/remized video. But if these technology becomes good enough, I can see it making video a nontrustworthy source of data (like skillfully retouched photos).
Thanks for making my point on two levels. First, a search of the term "fruit apple" (just the two words, not the phrase) discards about 3/4 of all pages dealing with apples (the fruit). The vast majority of pages that mention this fruit do not have the word "fruit" on them (this is a very common problem -- its so obvious to the page maker that the page is about fruit that they don't put that keyword anywhere on the page). This a one major problem with keyword search - sometimes the "best" keywords discard large numbers of relevant pages.
Second, yes I am lazy. That is the entire purpose of using a search engine -- to make it easy to find what I want to find.
The bigger issue is that keyword-based search is deeply flawed. Keywords only work to the extent that page creators use them uniformly -- which they don't (as the fruit apple example shows). I'd wager that just as many people fail to find what they want because of over specificity (using too many keywords) as fail due to over generality. Moreover, keywords only work to the extent that the searcher knows the keywords -- which they often don't if the entire point of the search is to learn something new.
Even if the search engine knows that I want Apple Macintosh (the computer), Google still doesn't know if I want pages that describe hardware, software, peripherals, the company's site, old 68k Macintoshes, new machines, stuff for sale, fan sites, technical support, etc. Yes, I can add more search terms, but adding terms has two great problems. First, added terms often end up throwing away the very pages that I seek if the page doesn't contain the words I use (e.g., a search on Apple Macintosh misses all the sites that just call the computer "Mac"). Second, I may not even know what terms to use or how to spell them, but like pornography I'll know good search hits when I see them.
What would help is some interactive process that directly asks or deduces whether the search hits are on target or not. The second page of hits would differ depending on how the searcher interacts with the first page -- giving the user more or fewer of pages similar to those they liked or didn't like respectively.
Search should be more like a game of "hot-n-cold" in which the searcher can easily tell the search engine which hits are "warmer" (more on target) or "cooler" (less on target).
Yes, total TV crap is up by a factor of 50X and the crap-to-quality factor is worse by a factor of 10, but that still means we have 5X the available hours of quality programming compared to 30 years ago.
I bet that not that many people actually need extra CPU cycles that don't want those cycles on a more permanent basis. Perhaps the only people that need short-term access to computer power are fly-by-night spammers and DDoS extortionists.
This is true. The investors enjoy limited liability, but not zero liability. Investors can lose 100% the money they put into a venture (but nothing more than that). The question is: can legal proceedings on a dissolved LLC (or one that distributed significant amounts of capital back to the investors) force a recall of that invested/distributed money?
IANAL, but I wonder if there's some legal mechanism for this. Otherwise LLCs could skip out on liabilities by quickly dissolving before those liabilities are recognized. I also wonder if a clever lawyer could pierce LLC protection if they proved that the investors knew of the liability or participated in the avoidance of that liability by dissolving the entity.
I suppose you can go after the principals, but if most of the money came from (and went to) a set of legally-insulated investors (e.g., in an LLC), then the managers of the company won't be the deep pockets that lawyers love. Can a dissolved entity be reconstituted (and money taken back from investors) if that company is later found liable for something?
Of course if MS can provide Hosted Windows then Google could provide hosted whatever (GLinux?) and things would get interesting.
The good news: drug companies might be able to resurrect some failed medications if they can determine which genetic variants are helped by the drug versus being harmed by the drug. Some promising but previously unapproved medications will make it on to the market.
The bad news: Current drug development focuses on blockbusters. Finding something that millions of people will need to take. This pushes development to help the greatest number of people. If the treatment works for most people (based on genetic screening), there's little reason to develop a cure for genetic minority populations. Genetic orphan populations will be marginalized.
Yes, fiber is cheap for point-to-point routings, but I doubt it scales well. What happens when a motherboard becomes 100% optical interconnect -- with virtually every chip and attached device using optics to communicate? Optical connections would run from the CPU (maybe each core of the CPU) to memory controller, cache, main memory banks (perhaps one fiber per optically connected RAM card), I/O controllers, mass storage devices, I/O ports, expansion bus slots (again, one fiber per slot), etc. A single motherboard might have easily have dozens of optical interconnections. I'm suggesting that printing the channels becomes cheaper than mechanically laying dozens of fibers.
With discrete fibers, doubling the number of interconnections doubles the cost because each added fiber must be laid into place during the manufacturing phase. With printed optical traces, the cost is nearly independent of the number of interconnections -- just add another trace in the mask during the design phase. It's the same logic that means that people use PCBs and not wire-wrap boards for mass-produced electronics. If N is the number of interconnections, then printing is cheaper than routing fiber for some value of N.
Perhaps you and I have different expectations for both the cross-over value of N (where printing makes sense) and the likely future value of N for intensively optical motherboards.
Hypercard had some serious limitations (no data structures, monochrome, single-user applications, sometimes slow on machines under 50 MHz, etc.), but it had a very nice approach to both constructing UI-intensive applications and an extremely fast edit-run-debug cycle.
The first company to develop a low-cost, high-quality tech for "printing" optical traces will make a mint once these interconnects become common. I'd bet that the ultimate technology will be a sandwich of resins with etched channels and vapor-deposited reflective layers, walls, corners (or high-index resin filling). For most applications, the optical interconnect can be single-layer because the non-interference on crossing beams will let two traces/channels cross each other with interference.
Inventions like this one are a great start. But until they find away to make cheap circuits to route optical connections on a board, this tech won't see widespread adoption.
Currently it's very easy for Google to be non-evil -- Google search, Google maps, GMail are all low-consequence activities. Once real money is involved this will change. Doing payment services will require a portfolio of automated processes that will, at times, appear both unfriendly and profit-motivated.
I wish them luck in the service, but fear it is the end of the Google honeymoon.
A used computer is far cheaper than a new computer. As with cars, people seem to want to pay through the nose for something new and shiny. The price then drops the minute they get the box home. For most computing activities these days, a top-of-line machine that is a year or so old does a good job relative to a brand new low-end or mid-range system. And for basic work (web/email/word), a 5 year old machine can be both very affordable and provide acceptable performance.
I believe that all of Apple's current Powerbooks come with DVI and I would assume that some PC laptops include it too. It's a great way to have a big screen that you don't have to carry.
Google needs some mechanism judging if a link is a fair link (made by an independent person/process) or "bought" link created by on on behalf of the same site that being linked to. I'd bet if Google analyzed these splogs and other SEO-generated sites, they'd find an excessive number of links from the splog to the target (or other in-network splogs) but few links from the splog to other relevant sites. Perhaps Google should reweight sites that seem to focus too many links in one direction. Of course, this is only a temporary solution as SEOs/sploggers could just use Google to find a set of random, but relevant, links to add to their splog.
The deeper problem is that no matter what Google does, some clever SEO will find a way around it. And since sites seeking to be at the top of the search out number Google engineers by a wide margin, the SEOs would seem to have the advantage. The only group with greater numbers than the SEOs are Google users. I suspect the ultimate solution will mean social ranking systems where each Google user gets to rank pages and have a reputation for page ranking. The user reputation system would mitigate attempts by SEOs to either up-rank their pages or down-rank competitor's pages.
Thinking abstractly about "what-if" is key to creating code that does what you want and expect it to do. Thinking about what-if is fantasy, by definition.
In any event, it does suggest an approach to more sensitive humidity detectors using gold-coated hydrophilic particles. Replacing the bacteria with some other polymer capsules could lead to a more repeatable sensor with ultra-high sensitivity.