For all their stability, dollar bills are intangible. They are linked to no set physical item of value. Even when the country was on the gold standard it did not have enough gold to back all the dollars in the economy.
As for bubbles, the stability of the worth of something (whether its U.S. $ or LindenDollars) depends on the sustainability of the economy (e.g., the extent that its not a Ponzi scheme) in terms of both the materials being traded and the participants. Even real-world tangible goods have no guarantee of stable value. For example, some would argue that real estate in the U.S. is currently a bubble and that the true value of what seems like a very tangible good has become inflated.
The point is that all economies, both virtual and real, are about intangibles defined by people's relationships to each other and to items of reputed value. A dollar is only worth what someone else will trade for it. A block of land or uber sword of death is only worth what someone else will pay for it. Even tangible objects (e.g., a brick of gold) only has value to the extent that others will trade gold for other desirable goods such as food. Value is in the eye of the beholders, both buyer and seller, and has no other value than that. At best, the values of different items may become fixed relative to each other (but not on any absolute scale) becuase of the ability to transform one item (e.g., labor) into another item (e.g., attained goods in a game or in real life).
Economies and the notion of value are a human invention. As such, the dynamics of societies guarantee that even the most tangible of goods can fluctuate in value.
The internet encourages this sort of iterative, distributed approach. Witness Google, public betas of major OS releases, and the ultimate beta, Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that is never complete. Low cost communications let people provide useful feedback after testing/using the product and comparing against their expectations/needs/knowledge. Low cost communications also lets creators distribute patches/updates to inexpensively offer fixes to beta products.
Betas do come with a downside. The notion that one can release unfinished work and fix things latter leads to lower quality. Perfection may be the enemy of good-enough, but are betas god enough? What is clear is that beta-ing lowers the bar on the required quality of the first-time release. But if the creators are not careful they will leave too many problems for the post-beta period and produce seriously flawed products.
Ultimately however, the use of betas is inevitable (and good) because it reflects the rising complexity of the world. Things like a desktop OS or an encyclopedia are just too complex for one person/company to get right the first time. Feedback and assistance from end-users/customers plays a crucial role.
One approach to this is to assume that the other players are markov processes with unknown internal states (sorry for the PDF) . Gathering enough data (and probing the opponents with various betting strategies) helps estimate the internal patterns of the opponents. Humans are terrible at creating random patterns needed for perfect playing strategies. This approach can be used, for example, to create a hard-to-beat paper-rock-scissors game that quickly found the non-random patterns in human players.
The increasing use of spare circuits could let product makers offer variable-performance, gracefully-degrading products. As the product degrades it would map out the bad circuits, but keep functioning. An overclocked GPU might be specced to have 16 vertex shaders, come from the factory with 18 working and then slowly lose them over time (but not drop below 16 during the warranty period). Used long enough, it might steadily lose vertex shaders until it can no longer function.
For example, I wish my ATA hard drives would let me access all of the space on the drive, including spare blocks tagged for remapping of bad blocks. A flexi-capacity drive would show higher-than spec capacity on first install and then gradually degrade. Standard practice of never using 100% of a available space would guarantee the availability of at least a few spare blocks. Current drive logic fails the drive once the spare blocks are used up, but a smarter drive would keep working by steadily shrinking the drive capacity. The OS might show this as a steadily-growing, locked "BAD_BLOCK" file. A well-used hard disk might last much longer, but shrink below rated capacity and still function adequately.
A dynamic version of this technology would be a real boon to over-clockers. Say you buy a heavily multi-cored CPU (guaranteed to have at least 32 of 40 fabricated cores functioning). It might come with 35 of the 40 fabricated cores working at design clock-speed. Over-clocking might knock out a few cores that were marginal but let the system's user optimize the speed of the cores vs. number of usable cores in realtime. A fully dynamic self-testing, self-healing system might automatically bring marginal cores back online once the clock-speed is dropped.
I realize that companies currently sell the same chip with different ratings by testing for speed or usable components (e.g. usable vertex shaders in a GPU), but what I want is different. Rather than use spares to guarantee some fixed spec performance (the current industry practice of leaving only a fixed set of available good components active on a chip), users could enjoy both more initial performance and longer life from products using a dynamic self-testing, self-healing system that uses all know-good components. Such systems would gracefully degrade as vertex shaders, disk blocks, RAM cells, or cores die or stop functioning at high speeds and temperatures.
AM radio's susceptibility to interference makes it fun and useful for "listening" to electronics. For example, an AM radio will let you listen to transmissions on an ethernet cable and tell if it is plugged in and handling traffic. Old programmable calculators make the most interesting sounds as they chug through their calculations. Another plus is that you can hear lightening strikes from a great distance and listen as they approach or recede.
If an electronic voting booth is insecure, then the entire system is insecure. Printing ballots from an electronic voting booth is no guarantor of a secure election. What stops someone from rigging the machine to subtly misprint ballots (so they are misread or rejected in the counting stage), or prevents someone from stealing the machine and printing extra ballots?
Moreover, all counting is done electronically. Why is the software in the electronic voting booth any less secure than the current software used to scan and tally votes? Although paper seems more tangible and safer, it is not that much harder to mishandle, miscount, or synthesize as bits on a hard-disk. One could even argue that electronic voting can be more secure because it is possible to securely replicate and backup the data. Paper ballots can be discarded without a trace, but a well designed electronic system would flag (or reconstruct) gaps in the voting record.
The core problem is that the resources of the defender are inevitably overwhelmed by the resources of the attacker.
Relative expected values of gian vs. loss: The attacker thinks "I know I can gain a #BIG_NUM million dollars" and devotes their full effort to the attack. The defender thinks "I'm safe, there's a low probability, and I'm sure I'll catch the problem before it becomes real money, " and does not not devote effort to security becuase a Gartner report told him it was over-hyped. Thus, the attacker's perceived expected value is much higher than the defenders perceived expected loss and each invests accordingly.
Rising Complexity: As IT systems become more complex, they become less secure. Each new device, new networking protocol, new physical layer, new OS feature, new networked application provides new opportunities for the attacker and a dilution of security resources for defenders.
Time: The attacker has the advantage of time. New algorithms, new mathematical theories, new exploits, and faster processors all favor the attacker. What once was supposed to take the age of the universe to crack can be decrypted with a quickly declining number of networked (even zombied) PCs.
Curse of Compatibility: Because so much crypto and security is networking related, it is subject to implementation delays caused by the need to be compatible. Defenders continue to use old, vulnerable systems to maintain compatibility with key partners. Patches don't solve the problem because the patch itself can introduce incompatibilities that make defenders leary of applying the patch with a very real chance of causing problems to avoid a hypothetical security issue.
The bottom line is that the defender must protect all vulnerabilities while going about the day-to-day business of using the computer. In contrast, the attacker can devote full time to any weakness of their choice.
The category(s) of the object are encoded in the metadata of the object
The search is sufficiently broad enough to collect all items that belong in a search (false negatives)
The search is sufficiently narrow enough to exclude items that do not belong in the set (false positives)
Some simple examples of hard-to-define-by-search collections of documents include:
All the documents for a given client (stock photos used for that client, invoices, emails) -- not ever document will have the name of the client in it.
The set of "final" versions of files for given client (with no intermediate or working versions) -- might be doable if EVERY office file in the system were in version control system.
"good" documents from a web search for further workflow processes (requires subjective evaluation)
the set of spams (the imperfection of spam filters is a microcosm of the problem of the inaccuracy of search)
I have used (and created) system that do continuous/recurring searches to create collections. Its a great idea, but it can be awkward to form the right search and even the best search has exceptions (falsely excluded documents and false included documents). Direct manipulation (i.e., putting a file in a folder or removing a file from a folder) is far simpler and faster than typing metadata or refining a search.
What laptops need is a variable voltage and speed controller. A bit of calibration software would map the lower-boundary of core voltage versus speed (maybe as a function of temperature, too) and then use that calibration data in daily operations. The machine would constantly regulate both core voltage and clock speed.
As always in science, the universe mocks our simplifications.
Absolutely. This is what makes science so fascinating.
In fact the cloning end is simply the hook to get people interested in these popular aritcles. It seems to me the real interesting thing is that we can clean up a sample enough to say with some certainty that the sequence is of the specified animal. Then it gets interesting.
What bothers me is the tendency for scientists to promise vaporware. Instead of explaining the real and very interesting meat of the result, we seem to want encourage little bits of brain candy. Yes, stories of cloned cave bears may get the public interested, but it also both misinforms them and creates unrealistic (and ultimately disappointed) expectations about what science can do. I'm not sure whether I should blame scientists (who over-promise), journalists (who elicit and play-up exciting half-truths), or the public (for being bored/clueless).
As someone of both an engineering and scientific mindset, I want to understand what it will really take to do something (e.g., clone a cave bear). Understanding the systems design issues underlying some discovery or invention help make informed research and investment decisions. Breathless promises of some eye-catching idea may create short-term excitement, but they breed long-term cynicism.
Furthermore we could have a better estimate of the rate genes mutate
Yes, this would be valuable information. We already know that the mutation rate does change and is subject to evolutionary pressures -- studies on bacteria show that they can quickly evolve different efficacy levels for their DNA repair mechanisms and thus evolve to have different mutation rates (and different rates of evolution). Also, mutation rates vary between species, so it won't be a surprise if the data shows mutation rates vary in time. Understanding what makes them vary would be interesting.
Like so many things in science, we need the clone distractions to keep the average person from falling asleep, but the reality is really so much more exciting.
I agree, but am saddened by this. Living in this very technical age makes me think that people (both voters and consumers) would be better off if they were more technically literate.
If this is going to work, scientists will need copies of both the DNA in the nucleus AND mitochondria (and ways to synthesize the nucleus and mitochondria of the target organism). Implanting a neanderthal nucleus in a human (or any other) kind of egg will not necessarily create a pure neanderthal clone (we might even need to clone the cytoplasmic contents). A study of cloning fish across species boundaries showed that some very basic physical characteristics (e.g., the number of vertebra in the backbone) were controlled by the mitochondria or cytoplasm of the egg, not by the genes in the nucleus.
It's amazing that they can reconstruct the DNA of long-dead creatures but its also clear that nuclear DNA is not the only information-carrying object in biological organisms.
You can't brute-force 10,000 combinations with a good hope of succeeding if you only get three tries. Even a 25 second wait after 3 incorrect PINs would make the attack last a full day.
Actually the "brute force" is not done by communication so the victim cannot stall the attack. The brute force attack is entirely computed in software by the attacker's PC. The attacker simulates all 10,000 combinations until he/she gets a match with what was sniffed during listening to the re-pairing processes. The attacker only sends two communications to the victim's device: 1) a "I've lost the PIN, lets re-pair please" message. and 2) a successful here's the valid 128-bit key. Thus, the victim cannot make the attacker wait 25 seconds between tries because the cracking attempts are all done inside the attacker's PC.
That is what makes this attack so evil. The victim only sees one message (if that) and probably thinks "Oh, one of my Bluetooth devices has glitched/crashed and I need to re-enter the PIN." Given the general unreliability of most computing devices these days I bet the victim is not even that surprised/suspicious of the message.
Reading between the lines, it seems that the short nature of the PIN code is a key to the exploit. The attacker forces a re-pairing, listens to the re-pairing exchange, and then tries all possible PIN codes to determine which one is the right one. Because a 4-digit PIN has only 10,000 possibilities, it's easy to brute force it.
A longer alphanumeric PIN might be a first step to making this exploit much less practical -- increasing the PIN search time from a fraction of a second to hours or days.
This looks like another classic example of the fundemental tradeoff between usability and security.
Wait - are you suggesting that every time we "stick it to the evil megalocorps" with higher taxes those tax dollars actually come from me, passed along in the cost of goods?
Shhhh... Don't let the secret out or everyone will vote Republican.
That would imply that if a state like Maryland forced WalMart to provide health insurance to its workers their health insurance would be paid for by the Walmart shoppers - the segment of Maryland's population probably least able to absorb additional costs of living. It would further suggest that given administrative overhead and corporate taxation, it would be cheaper for the State of Maryland to just provide the healthcare costs directly and that they're really putting a regressive tax in place.
Tricky! I've never understood what employers have to do with healthcare in the first place (except as an accident of history). Employer provided healthcare only makes sense in an ideal world of 0% unemployment, life-time jobs at one company, and one-earner traditional families. In the real world, people need health insurance even when unemployed, some people switch jobs, some people work part-time, some people leave the workforce to care for families, families that need insurance and some families have one or two-earners. It all creates a big disconnect between the employer and the need for insurance.
Whether the state (e.g., Maryland) should take care of health insurance depends on how much of a nanny-world you want to live in or whether people should be personally responsible for their own insurance needs (as with car insurance, home insurtance, life insurance, etc.).
No way... stick it to the Man!
Phew! "We now return to our regularly scheduled liberal views.":)
Until they can make circuits with traces that are only a few hundred or few thousand atoms long, I doubt this molecular switch will be of much use. The capacitance of long interconnecting traces will mean that it will take too long for a switched signal to propagate to the next gate.
Making a small switch is a great first step. The trick will be to make an entire circuit on this atomic scale so that the switch is matched to the load it must drive.
It may not solve the disposal problem, but services such as FreeCycle helps old, but usable, items find new homes. The longer people can use an item, the fewer items per year that need to be disposed.
It does not matter who pays for it, it is the consumer's burden. Consider the four alterantives for disposal:
If the buyer/consumer is legally required "properly dispose" of a the computer, then the consumer pays directly.
If the seller (computer maker/dealer) is required to do it, then the consumer will still pay for it in the form of a higher price on the computer
If the government offers "free" disposal then the taxpayer (= the consumer) pays for it. (Admittedly it may be non-computer-using taxpayers that shoulder some of the burden)
If we let old computers be dumped and create toxic waste then some future consumer will bear the burden for either disease or cleanup. (Again, it may be non-computer-using taxpayers that shoulder some of the burden)
Business and government never "pay" for anything, they only provide convenient (and sometimes efficient) mechanisms for collecting costs from consumers/taxpayers to achieve some collective goal.
This is the (relatively) easy part
on
Photoshop for DNA
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Designing DNA to create a given protein is no big deal. The hardest problem is figuring out how the new gene/protein will act inside the organism. Biological systems don't have a nice layered OSI model for what connects to what -- its like nearly everything is a global-accessible variable so side-effects are a real problem. New drugs require huge amounts of R&D in the testing phase, not the synthesis phase.
I'd be more impressed if someone created an accurate in silico system for testing new drugs, rather than just designing new DNA sequences that MIGHT make useful new proteins that MIGHT make a useful new drug.
Fixed price retail was invented because retailers did not have the skilled staff or the IT to offer dynamic/negotiated pricing. It is really only a temporary phase in the evolution of retailing.
Customers may hate paying different prices, but it is the only way to both maximize the number of customers that can buy a given product and fairly allocate profit (difference between the value received and price paid) across both the sellers and the buyers. In a fixed-price system some extremely wealthy buyers get a great deal (i.e., they would have been willing to pay far more) and extremely poor customers get nothing (i.e., they cannot afford the fixed price). If you work out the math for the system, you can show that different customers paying different prices maximizes the total number of customers that can afford the product and maximizes profit for the seller. In a competitive marketplace, maximizing profit is actually lets companies offer goods at lower prices because a profit-maximizing strategy lets a company undercut the competition.
Dynamic pricing also lets a company change prices to reflect the fact that some customers are more expensive than others.
The High Pressure Fuel Turbopump on the space shuttle has this power-to-weight ratio beat by a mile. The two-stage, eleven-inch diameter by 3 foot long turbine delivers 75,000 horsepower and weighs about 775 pounds. That works out to 100 hp per pound.
Of course, you need a supply of liquid hydrogen and oxygen to run the beastie, but if your really need the power, this is the way to get it.
If LH2 and LOX are too exotic, then try a helicopter gas-turbine. A 600 pound gas turbine can easily provide 5,000 hp.
The counter-argument is that a gas turbine needs a serious transmission, which adds to the weight of the unit. The counter-counter-argument is that these electric motors need batteries or a motor-gen set which also adds (arguably more) weight to the vehicle.
What you're saying is "any game more advanced than tetris is bloatware, and who wants to watch movies on the move anyway, read a book."
I can't decide if you're a troll or just a luddite.
I did not intend to be either a troll or a luddite. I'm saying that 1) a very large number of CPU cycles are wasted 2) smarter game design means more fun while using less of the limited battery power.
The bigger issue is vast gulf in the relative performance improvements for various technologies. The price-performance curve for batteries is far flatter than the price-performance curve for either silicon or clever programming. Chip performance advances more in one month than battery performance changes in a year. If one wants to watch movies on the move, then a silicon decoder would probably be far more efficient than a general purpose CPU running a bloated OS. At some point, adding another few million transistors becomes much cheaper than adding a bigger battery.
My Psion 5mx PDA gets more than 30 hours battery life (on store-bought alkaline batteries) and its 5 year-old technology. I'm sure that a few carefully designed chips and software would enable a high level of functionality and low level of power consumption.
The same people that insist they need a 100 watt, multi-GHz processor are the same people that insist they need a hulking V8 SUV for their around-town driving.
To the people that claim that games can't work without the utmost in computer power, I say get a chess set because a good toy doesn't necessarily need electricity
If we want to avoid "obvious" patents, then we need to educate the patent examiners so they understand the state of the art. Obvious ideas and ones clearly found in other's prior art should not get patents, but it is up to the examiner to decide that. Perhaps someone will create a database of prior art and historical innovations that patent examiners can use to weed out the bad patents.
If an idea is not in the prior art and a couple of geeks can't quickly imagine/document the idea for the database, then perhaps it is worthy of a patent.
I would think that a spring-loaded double-screw drive would be better than legs. The front half of the probe would have a right-handed screw and the back-half of the unit woud have a left-handed screw. A motor would drive the front half relative to the back-half -- screwing the front half to pull the unit forward and unscrewing the back half to also push the unit forward. A set of spring arms on the front half would gently rub against the intestinal wall and use a mutli-spectral scanner to do a quick check/map of the tissue as it moves through the gut. The unit could also have an ultrasonic transponder to signal its location in the body.
It will be interesting to see if Earthlink/Xandros keeps selling this unit (or ones like it) in perpetuity. If Earthlink can make money on a low-dollar, low monthly subscription Linux desktop, then it proves that Linux is ready for the masses. With the high cost of tech support calls, any technology that is not drop-dead simple becomes a money-losing nightmare for the provider.
I'm going to watch this experiment carefully because, if it succeeds, then Linux desktop share should climb significantly.
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For all their stability, dollar bills are intangible. They are linked to no set physical item of value. Even when the country was on the gold standard it did not have enough gold to back all the dollars in the economy.
As for bubbles, the stability of the worth of something (whether its U.S. $ or LindenDollars) depends on the sustainability of the economy (e.g., the extent that its not a Ponzi scheme) in terms of both the materials being traded and the participants. Even real-world tangible goods have no guarantee of stable value. For example, some would argue that real estate in the U.S. is currently a bubble and that the true value of what seems like a very tangible good has become inflated.
The point is that all economies, both virtual and real, are about intangibles defined by people's relationships to each other and to items of reputed value. A dollar is only worth what someone else will trade for it. A block of land or uber sword of death is only worth what someone else will pay for it. Even tangible objects (e.g., a brick of gold) only has value to the extent that others will trade gold for other desirable goods such as food. Value is in the eye of the beholders, both buyer and seller, and has no other value than that. At best, the values of different items may become fixed relative to each other (but not on any absolute scale) becuase of the ability to transform one item (e.g., labor) into another item (e.g., attained goods in a game or in real life).
Economies and the notion of value are a human invention. As such, the dynamics of societies guarantee that even the most tangible of goods can fluctuate in value.
The internet encourages this sort of iterative, distributed approach. Witness Google, public betas of major OS releases, and the ultimate beta, Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that is never complete. Low cost communications let people provide useful feedback after testing/using the product and comparing against their expectations/needs/knowledge. Low cost communications also lets creators distribute patches/updates to inexpensively offer fixes to beta products.
Betas do come with a downside. The notion that one can release unfinished work and fix things latter leads to lower quality. Perfection may be the enemy of good-enough, but are betas god enough? What is clear is that beta-ing lowers the bar on the required quality of the first-time release. But if the creators are not careful they will leave too many problems for the post-beta period and produce seriously flawed products.
Ultimately however, the use of betas is inevitable (and good) because it reflects the rising complexity of the world. Things like a desktop OS or an encyclopedia are just too complex for one person/company to get right the first time. Feedback and assistance from end-users/customers plays a crucial role.
One approach to this is to assume that the other players are markov processes with unknown internal states (sorry for the PDF) . Gathering enough data (and probing the opponents with various betting strategies) helps estimate the internal patterns of the opponents. Humans are terrible at creating random patterns needed for perfect playing strategies. This approach can be used, for example, to create a hard-to-beat paper-rock-scissors game that quickly found the non-random patterns in human players.
The increasing use of spare circuits could let product makers offer variable-performance, gracefully-degrading products. As the product degrades it would map out the bad circuits, but keep functioning. An overclocked GPU might be specced to have 16 vertex shaders, come from the factory with 18 working and then slowly lose them over time (but not drop below 16 during the warranty period). Used long enough, it might steadily lose vertex shaders until it can no longer function.
For example, I wish my ATA hard drives would let me access all of the space on the drive, including spare blocks tagged for remapping of bad blocks. A flexi-capacity drive would show higher-than spec capacity on first install and then gradually degrade. Standard practice of never using 100% of a available space would guarantee the availability of at least a few spare blocks. Current drive logic fails the drive once the spare blocks are used up, but a smarter drive would keep working by steadily shrinking the drive capacity. The OS might show this as a steadily-growing, locked "BAD_BLOCK" file. A well-used hard disk might last much longer, but shrink below rated capacity and still function adequately.
A dynamic version of this technology would be a real boon to over-clockers. Say you buy a heavily multi-cored CPU (guaranteed to have at least 32 of 40 fabricated cores functioning). It might come with 35 of the 40 fabricated cores working at design clock-speed. Over-clocking might knock out a few cores that were marginal but let the system's user optimize the speed of the cores vs. number of usable cores in realtime. A fully dynamic self-testing, self-healing system might automatically bring marginal cores back online once the clock-speed is dropped.
I realize that companies currently sell the same chip with different ratings by testing for speed or usable components (e.g. usable vertex shaders in a GPU), but what I want is different. Rather than use spares to guarantee some fixed spec performance (the current industry practice of leaving only a fixed set of available good components active on a chip), users could enjoy both more initial performance and longer life from products using a dynamic self-testing, self-healing system that uses all know-good components. Such systems would gracefully degrade as vertex shaders, disk blocks, RAM cells, or cores die or stop functioning at high speeds and temperatures.
AM radio's susceptibility to interference makes it fun and useful for "listening" to electronics. For example, an AM radio will let you listen to transmissions on an ethernet cable and tell if it is plugged in and handling traffic. Old programmable calculators make the most interesting sounds as they chug through their calculations. Another plus is that you can hear lightening strikes from a great distance and listen as they approach or recede.
If an electronic voting booth is insecure, then the entire system is insecure. Printing ballots from an electronic voting booth is no guarantor of a secure election. What stops someone from rigging the machine to subtly misprint ballots (so they are misread or rejected in the counting stage), or prevents someone from stealing the machine and printing extra ballots?
Moreover, all counting is done electronically. Why is the software in the electronic voting booth any less secure than the current software used to scan and tally votes? Although paper seems more tangible and safer, it is not that much harder to mishandle, miscount, or synthesize as bits on a hard-disk. One could even argue that electronic voting can be more secure because it is possible to securely replicate and backup the data. Paper ballots can be discarded without a trace, but a well designed electronic system would flag (or reconstruct) gaps in the voting record.
- Relative expected values of gian vs. loss: The attacker thinks "I know I can gain a #BIG_NUM million dollars" and devotes their full effort to the attack. The defender thinks "I'm safe, there's a low probability, and I'm sure I'll catch the problem before it becomes real money, " and does not not devote effort to security becuase a Gartner report told him it was over-hyped. Thus, the attacker's perceived expected value is much higher than the defenders perceived expected loss and each invests accordingly.
- Rising Complexity: As IT systems become more complex, they become less secure. Each new device, new networking protocol, new physical layer, new OS feature, new networked application provides new opportunities for the attacker and a dilution of security resources for defenders.
- Time: The attacker has the advantage of time. New algorithms, new mathematical theories, new exploits, and faster processors all favor the attacker. What once was supposed to take the age of the universe to crack can be decrypted with a quickly declining number of networked (even zombied) PCs.
- Curse of Compatibility: Because so much crypto and security is networking related, it is subject to implementation delays caused by the need to be compatible. Defenders continue to use old, vulnerable systems to maintain compatibility with key partners. Patches don't solve the problem because the patch itself can introduce incompatibilities that make defenders leary of applying the patch with a very real chance of causing problems to avoid a hypothetical security issue.
The bottom line is that the defender must protect all vulnerabilities while going about the day-to-day business of using the computer. In contrast, the attacker can devote full time to any weakness of their choice.- The category(s) of the object are encoded in the metadata of the object
- The search is sufficiently broad enough to collect all items that belong in a search (false negatives)
- The search is sufficiently narrow enough to exclude items that do not belong in the set (false positives)
Some simple examples of hard-to-define-by-search collections of documents include:- All the documents for a given client (stock photos used for that client, invoices, emails) -- not ever document will have the name of the client in it.
- The set of "final" versions of files for given client (with no intermediate or working versions) -- might be doable if EVERY office file in the system were in version control system.
- "good" documents from a web search for further workflow processes (requires subjective evaluation)
- the set of spams (the imperfection of spam filters is a microcosm of the problem of the inaccuracy of search)
I have used (and created) system that do continuous/recurring searches to create collections. Its a great idea, but it can be awkward to form the right search and even the best search has exceptions (falsely excluded documents and false included documents). Direct manipulation (i.e., putting a file in a folder or removing a file from a folder) is far simpler and faster than typing metadata or refining a search.Folders are still useful.
What laptops need is a variable voltage and speed controller. A bit of calibration software would map the lower-boundary of core voltage versus speed (maybe as a function of temperature, too) and then use that calibration data in daily operations. The machine would constantly regulate both core voltage and clock speed.
As always in science, the universe mocks our simplifications.
Absolutely. This is what makes science so fascinating.
In fact the cloning end is simply the hook to get people interested in these popular aritcles. It seems to me the real interesting thing is that we can clean up a sample enough to say with some certainty that the sequence is of the specified animal. Then it gets interesting.
What bothers me is the tendency for scientists to promise vaporware. Instead of explaining the real and very interesting meat of the result, we seem to want encourage little bits of brain candy. Yes, stories of cloned cave bears may get the public interested, but it also both misinforms them and creates unrealistic (and ultimately disappointed) expectations about what science can do. I'm not sure whether I should blame scientists (who over-promise), journalists (who elicit and play-up exciting half-truths), or the public (for being bored/clueless).
As someone of both an engineering and scientific mindset, I want to understand what it will really take to do something (e.g., clone a cave bear). Understanding the systems design issues underlying some discovery or invention help make informed research and investment decisions. Breathless promises of some eye-catching idea may create short-term excitement, but they breed long-term cynicism.
Furthermore we could have a better estimate of the rate genes mutate
Yes, this would be valuable information. We already know that the mutation rate does change and is subject to evolutionary pressures -- studies on bacteria show that they can quickly evolve different efficacy levels for their DNA repair mechanisms and thus evolve to have different mutation rates (and different rates of evolution). Also, mutation rates vary between species, so it won't be a surprise if the data shows mutation rates vary in time. Understanding what makes them vary would be interesting.
Like so many things in science, we need the clone distractions to keep the average person from falling asleep, but the reality is really so much more exciting.
I agree, but am saddened by this. Living in this very technical age makes me think that people (both voters and consumers) would be better off if they were more technically literate.
Thank you for a very thoughtful reply.
If this is going to work, scientists will need copies of both the DNA in the nucleus AND mitochondria (and ways to synthesize the nucleus and mitochondria of the target organism). Implanting a neanderthal nucleus in a human (or any other) kind of egg will not necessarily create a pure neanderthal clone (we might even need to clone the cytoplasmic contents). A study of cloning fish across species boundaries showed that some very basic physical characteristics (e.g., the number of vertebra in the backbone) were controlled by the mitochondria or cytoplasm of the egg, not by the genes in the nucleus.
It's amazing that they can reconstruct the DNA of long-dead creatures but its also clear that nuclear DNA is not the only information-carrying object in biological organisms.
You can't brute-force 10,000 combinations with a good hope of succeeding if you only get three tries. Even a 25 second wait after 3 incorrect PINs would make the attack last a full day.
Actually the "brute force" is not done by communication so the victim cannot stall the attack. The brute force attack is entirely computed in software by the attacker's PC. The attacker simulates all 10,000 combinations until he/she gets a match with what was sniffed during listening to the re-pairing processes. The attacker only sends two communications to the victim's device: 1) a "I've lost the PIN, lets re-pair please" message. and 2) a successful here's the valid 128-bit key. Thus, the victim cannot make the attacker wait 25 seconds between tries because the cracking attempts are all done inside the attacker's PC.
That is what makes this attack so evil. The victim only sees one message (if that) and probably thinks "Oh, one of my Bluetooth devices has glitched/crashed and I need to re-enter the PIN." Given the general unreliability of most computing devices these days I bet the victim is not even that surprised/suspicious of the message.
Reading between the lines, it seems that the short nature of the PIN code is a key to the exploit. The attacker forces a re-pairing, listens to the re-pairing exchange, and then tries all possible PIN codes to determine which one is the right one. Because a 4-digit PIN has only 10,000 possibilities, it's easy to brute force it.
A longer alphanumeric PIN might be a first step to making this exploit much less practical -- increasing the PIN search time from a fraction of a second to hours or days.
This looks like another classic example of the fundemental tradeoff between usability and security.
Wait - are you suggesting that every time we "stick it to the evil megalocorps" with higher taxes those tax dollars actually come from me, passed along in the cost of goods?
... stick it to the Man!
:)
Shhhh... Don't let the secret out or everyone will vote Republican.
That would imply that if a state like Maryland forced WalMart to provide health insurance to its workers their health insurance would be paid for by the Walmart shoppers - the segment of Maryland's population probably least able to absorb additional costs of living. It would further suggest that given administrative overhead and corporate taxation, it would be cheaper for the State of Maryland to just provide the healthcare costs directly and that they're really putting a regressive tax in place.
Tricky! I've never understood what employers have to do with healthcare in the first place (except as an accident of history). Employer provided healthcare only makes sense in an ideal world of 0% unemployment, life-time jobs at one company, and one-earner traditional families. In the real world, people need health insurance even when unemployed, some people switch jobs, some people work part-time, some people leave the workforce to care for families, families that need insurance and some families have one or two-earners. It all creates a big disconnect between the employer and the need for insurance.
Whether the state (e.g., Maryland) should take care of health insurance depends on how much of a nanny-world you want to live in or whether people should be personally responsible for their own insurance needs (as with car insurance, home insurtance, life insurance, etc.).
No way
Phew! "We now return to our regularly scheduled liberal views."
Until they can make circuits with traces that are only a few hundred or few thousand atoms long, I doubt this molecular switch will be of much use. The capacitance of long interconnecting traces will mean that it will take too long for a switched signal to propagate to the next gate.
Making a small switch is a great first step. The trick will be to make an entire circuit on this atomic scale so that the switch is matched to the load it must drive.
It may not solve the disposal problem, but services such as FreeCycle helps old, but usable, items find new homes. The longer people can use an item, the fewer items per year that need to be disposed.
- If the buyer/consumer is legally required "properly dispose" of a the computer, then the consumer pays directly.
- If the seller (computer maker/dealer) is required to do it, then the consumer will still pay for it in the form of a higher price on the computer
- If the government offers "free" disposal then the taxpayer (= the consumer) pays for it. (Admittedly it may be non-computer-using taxpayers that shoulder some of the burden)
- If we let old computers be dumped and create toxic waste then some future consumer will bear the burden for either disease or cleanup. (Again, it may be non-computer-using taxpayers that shoulder some of the burden)
Business and government never "pay" for anything, they only provide convenient (and sometimes efficient) mechanisms for collecting costs from consumers/taxpayers to achieve some collective goal.Designing DNA to create a given protein is no big deal. The hardest problem is figuring out how the new gene/protein will act inside the organism. Biological systems don't have a nice layered OSI model for what connects to what -- its like nearly everything is a global-accessible variable so side-effects are a real problem. New drugs require huge amounts of R&D in the testing phase, not the synthesis phase.
I'd be more impressed if someone created an accurate in silico system for testing new drugs, rather than just designing new DNA sequences that MIGHT make useful new proteins that MIGHT make a useful new drug.
Fixed price retail was invented because retailers did not have the skilled staff or the IT to offer dynamic/negotiated pricing. It is really only a temporary phase in the evolution of retailing.
Customers may hate paying different prices, but it is the only way to both maximize the number of customers that can buy a given product and fairly allocate profit (difference between the value received and price paid) across both the sellers and the buyers. In a fixed-price system some extremely wealthy buyers get a great deal (i.e., they would have been willing to pay far more) and extremely poor customers get nothing (i.e., they cannot afford the fixed price). If you work out the math for the system, you can show that different customers paying different prices maximizes the total number of customers that can afford the product and maximizes profit for the seller. In a competitive marketplace, maximizing profit is actually lets companies offer goods at lower prices because a profit-maximizing strategy lets a company undercut the competition.
Dynamic pricing also lets a company change prices to reflect the fact that some customers are more expensive than others.
The High Pressure Fuel Turbopump on the space shuttle has this power-to-weight ratio beat by a mile. The two-stage, eleven-inch diameter by 3 foot long turbine delivers 75,000 horsepower and weighs about 775 pounds. That works out to 100 hp per pound.
Of course, you need a supply of liquid hydrogen and oxygen to run the beastie, but if your really need the power, this is the way to get it.
If LH2 and LOX are too exotic, then try a helicopter gas-turbine. A 600 pound gas turbine can easily provide 5,000 hp.
The counter-argument is that a gas turbine needs a serious transmission, which adds to the weight of the unit. The counter-counter-argument is that these electric motors need batteries or a motor-gen set which also adds (arguably more) weight to the vehicle.
What you're saying is "any game more advanced than tetris is bloatware, and who wants to watch movies on the move anyway, read a book."
I can't decide if you're a troll or just a luddite.
I did not intend to be either a troll or a luddite. I'm saying that 1) a very large number of CPU cycles are wasted 2) smarter game design means more fun while using less of the limited battery power.
The bigger issue is vast gulf in the relative performance improvements for various technologies. The price-performance curve for batteries is far flatter than the price-performance curve for either silicon or clever programming. Chip performance advances more in one month than battery performance changes in a year. If one wants to watch movies on the move, then a silicon decoder would probably be far more efficient than a general purpose CPU running a bloated OS. At some point, adding another few million transistors becomes much cheaper than adding a bigger battery.
My Psion 5mx PDA gets more than 30 hours battery life (on store-bought alkaline batteries) and its 5 year-old technology. I'm sure that a few carefully designed chips and software would enable a high level of functionality and low level of power consumption.
The same people that insist they need a 100 watt, multi-GHz processor are the same people that insist they need a hulking V8 SUV for their around-town driving.
To the people that claim that games can't work without the utmost in computer power, I say get a chess set because a good toy doesn't necessarily need electricity
If we want to avoid "obvious" patents, then we need to educate the patent examiners so they understand the state of the art. Obvious ideas and ones clearly found in other's prior art should not get patents, but it is up to the examiner to decide that. Perhaps someone will create a database of prior art and historical innovations that patent examiners can use to weed out the bad patents.
If an idea is not in the prior art and a couple of geeks can't quickly imagine/document the idea for the database, then perhaps it is worthy of a patent.
I would think that a spring-loaded double-screw drive would be better than legs. The front half of the probe would have a right-handed screw and the back-half of the unit woud have a left-handed screw. A motor would drive the front half relative to the back-half -- screwing the front half to pull the unit forward and unscrewing the back half to also push the unit forward. A set of spring arms on the front half would gently rub against the intestinal wall and use a mutli-spectral scanner to do a quick check/map of the tissue as it moves through the gut. The unit could also have an ultrasonic transponder to signal its location in the body.
It will be interesting to see if Earthlink/Xandros keeps selling this unit (or ones like it) in perpetuity. If Earthlink can make money on a low-dollar, low monthly subscription Linux desktop, then it proves that Linux is ready for the masses. With the high cost of tech support calls, any technology that is not drop-dead simple becomes a money-losing nightmare for the provider.
I'm going to watch this experiment carefully because, if it succeeds, then Linux desktop share should climb significantly.