Science doesn't have a monopoly on genius. There is plenty of genius elsewhere.
As for the conditions necessary for "genius" things to happen in science, that's called a "paradigm shift". Read Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolution".
All this article told me was someone was trying to cover some white space.
Pollardito (781263) sez: "this isn't a list of OS vulnerabilities, it's a list of application vulnerabilities sorted by OS"
From CERT: "Software vulnerabilities are categorized in the appropriate section reflecting the operating system on which the vulnerability was reported; however, this does not mean that the vulnerability only affects the operating system reported since this information is obtained from open-source information."
Meaning, of course, that the statement in the parent "According to InformationWeek.com, Linux/Unix (including Mac OS) had almost three times the number of OS-specific vulnerabilities reported last year compared to Microsoft Windows" is complete FUDcrap.
The difference between bias and ignorance is you treat one with the wide side of a clue by four, and the other with the narrow side, but it doesn't matter which is which. Corrective phrenology is not an exact science.
Dupes are common because not everyone sees everything the first time around, nor reads the archives. They happen. If the 'wasted space' is something to complain about, consider how many whiners waste space calling DUPE to every dupe, creating dupedupes. Far more than the dupes themselves.
Of course if complaining about dupes is a sort of conspicuous consumption behavior where you get to show how much time you have to keep track of what's on/. rather than doing something productive, or if it's just whining for its own sake with no constructive purpose behind it at all, I suggest you bend your fingers over backwards and super glue your fingernails to the back of your wrists. And I mean that in a nice way.
Develop an encryption table that produces shapes similar to the screen characters created by the ASCII characters you want to transmit*.
Obtain a molecular transfer device that puts a dark material on semi-permiable surfaces, such as the paper you use in your printer.
Encode your message by placing dark marks on the paper. Seal it in an opaque layer of similar material and encode the physical address of the recipient on the outside.
You can then purchase a government document (for less than the cost of a cup of cofee, or of supporting a third world waif for a day) from a government agency tasked with transfering such encrypted information, afix it to the outside of the "envelope", and trick the 3\/1L goobermint into delivering your secret message for you.
If you REALLY want to be certain of your security, you can seal the "envelope" with the semi-transparent film developed by the security firm "3-M". The adhesive on one side of the film prevents unauthorized opening.
Of course this is all for naught due to the CIA's "remote viewers" unless you remain in motion. So when you're encrypting/molecular transfering, it's important to run around in circles so they can't focus on you. A tin foil hat won't actually help, but wearing one while running in circles will prevent those around you from asking pesky questions. Remember: shiny side out, otherwise a feedback loop can occur and cause dain bramage.
* As an alternative, entirely graphical representations can be developed. Pictures created with polychromatic, wax-based molecular transfer devices are especially attactive to moms, who tend to archive them on the outside of their refrigerator.
Seasonal affective disorder and light therapy has been covered adequately. I'll only add that I don't take medication when something cheaper and safer works, and it does for me.
I believe that the more acute problems people suffer around the holidays is due to the hype (interpersonal as well as commercial). It leads to expectations far greater than the results. Anyone who's experienced that anticipates it, and so it affects them even before the holidays arrive.
In the interim I purposely don't think about whatever it is. That often results in an answer, if not the answer, popping out of my intuition with far less work than it would have taken otherwise.
I call it being constructively lazy.
90% of everything is done in 10% of the time alloted. Why not just go ahead and accept it? All that other time you spent worrying could go to something a lot more fun.
"The Marfa mystery lights are a phenomenon that occurs after dusk outside the town of Marfa,"
then
"Traffic volume decreases after dusk just as the number of observed mystery lights"
If they don't occur until after dusk, and then decrease, that means the Marfa lights appear in negative numbers. No wonder nobody knows what they are. There are less than none of them to study.
"Are there any approaches to thwarting or mitigating surveillance that will work on a mass scale?"
Poison their databases.
Plan and publicize, but don't hold, activities which fall under their "threat" category but aren't actually threatening, ie. protests at military related sites.
Call a flash mob that happens to be at such a place, but don't let that fact on when calling it.
Make sure to be at grandma's for Sunday dinner when such things do or do not occur.
Put up a web site for a bogus anti-something organization and encrypt the hell out of the pages, those being fair use snippets out of "Cryptonomicon" or some such.
I put an old rainbow Apple sticker and and equally old Elephant Memory Systems sticker on one of my high power rockets, and sent them past Mach 1. The (vinyl) Apple sticker came back on the rocket. The (paper) EMS sticker is still up there for all I know.
"Possible development" "could eventually allow" "computer algorithms"
A computer connot possible process information the way the brain does. Any DNI is a transducer and traanslator because the two things operate very differently. Why the hell try to copy how the brain does it on a machine that can't? Try to improve on the process by making the computer do what it does best instead.
Object recognition via similarlity calculation has been available in holographic storage devices. It is inherent in their operation (see SciAm Dec 94(?) article on holographic storage devices), and the operation they perform is far more similar to the way the brain works ("Brain and Perception", K. Pribram, particularly the application of Gabor's mathematical description of holography to the electrical field of the brain). This calculation operates at the speed of light. The device best suited to detecting the output is the eye.
Bypassing the best suited system with a less suited system sounds an awful lot like Minsky's comment about whether a submarine can swim.
Some were developed over 30 years ago. More have been since. Two clinical trials were completed 12 years ago. By now we should have a vaccine available for life long prevention of dental caries.
If this were for boners or baldness, it'd have gone through all clinical trail phases, been patented, marketed, genericized and an OTC version been made available by now.
...then it behooves them to offer alternative explanations for their results. "In experimental philosophy we are to look upon propositions iffered by general induction from the phenomena as accurately as or very nearly true, notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses that may be imagined, till such time as other phenomena occur, by which they may either be made more accurate or liable to exception." -- Isaac Newton, Rule IV of "Rules of Hypothesizing", in Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687).
The experimental design is that of the Michealson-Morley experiments. That hypothesis still stands (ie. they failed to reject the null hypothesis, a very different thing than supporting the alternative hypothesis, and the beast of proving the null hypothesis is imaginary). If they get results, it'll be on them to show the effect is due to something other than that which has so far been unable to be detected but previously theorized and hypothesized as causing the same effect they expect to find.
Still awaiting the technology capable of testing it is the hypothesis that ether flows along the lines of a gravitational field, and so must be tested simultaneously parallel and perpendicular to gravity. Getting a vertical structure big enough but stable enough to do this is far harder than getting two perpendiculars.
Keep in mind that in science "out of favor" and "disproven" are not the same, but in peoples minds they are taken as such. Read "The Golem" by Collins & Pinch for many entertaining examples, including the M/M experiments.
... though apparently not so obvious to NASA, is to send people who are mature adults and don't have hang ups that make them confuse relationship with ownership.
Of course then the majority of the US population which does have that hang up will try to claim that NASA is "condoning" "immoral" behavior and the mass media would reap a billion dollar windfall winding up the sheeple by feeding their frenzy.
So many problems would be alleviated if people would just elevate "mind your own fucking business" to the level of a moral imperative like beneficence and nonmalfeasance.
Drag their feet, show some badly done code and claim they're just goofing around trying to figure out stuff.
Then go home and write it in generic terms, copyright it, and make it available on their own terms to whoever they wish. That wish may be measured by monetary offers should they so choose. Anyone making such a monetary offer does not need to know how many or few others are making such an offer (or if others even exist), what those offers might be, whether the authors will settle for a lower offer from a prefered customer, or whether they'll accept multiple offers despite the fact they differ.
So it has been predicted since the Cabal (There Is No Cabal) fought the creation of the alt.* usenet hierarchy. We're still here.
It can withstand a nuclear attack, but not a bunch of beaurocreeps and adminimonsters? OK, fine, we can go back to Fidonet. At least it had no spam problem.
The dark matter hypothesis was always circular. First it was hypothesized, then that untested hypothesis was used to explain, and then supporting evidence was found for the explanation, and it was always a house of cards. It might have been right, but still so far most of what there was was a string of flaws in logic tying together non-parsimonious conjecture.
Newton's therey never was a theory and he said so. He merely described, and people used that description as though it were a law. Einstein explained. It's about time someone took the explanation and used it instead.
" 'It raises a serious question over how the US is going to demonstrate its compliance with obligations under the Biological Weapons Convention if it brings these tanks online,'"
In the usual way:
"That would be against the treaties we have with out friends and allies. The US is committed to a world of peaceful democracy. We will stay the course until the objective is acheived, using whatever means necessary.
Weapons of mass destruction. Saddam Hussein. Iraq. Terrorism. Afghanistan. Al Qieda. September 11. Stay the course."
I suspect this is not a legal/governmental snafu at all, but rather a behavioral experiment to see how stupid an excuse the government can manage to get away with foisting off on people while essentially conducting crimes that they'd never let the people get away with.
Maybe that's a little far fetched. OK, so it's really just people in government offices fucking with people and laughing about it. There, that makes more sense.
They have to get a waiver to operate outside the limits set by FAR 101. It's a fairly automatic process. Most rocketry clubs do it regularly. By doing this they get clearance and (somewhat) priority for the airspace, and a NOTAM (Notice To Airmen) is posted at air traffic control centers so anyone heading that way will be informed.
According to the LiftPort blog, they've seen you coming:
September 18th, 2005 Welcome Slashdot readers.
You're welcome to rummage around and see what we're up to.
While you are here, sign up for our monthly announcement list. Toss barbed questions at space elevator enthusiasts at the Liftport Forums. Read our out-dated FAQ. Read Dr. Edwards NIAC study and free yourself from/. generated assumptions in the Phase II Study.
Slashdot Mirror
What a foul little waste of blurb space that was.
Science doesn't have a monopoly on genius. There is plenty of genius elsewhere.
As for the conditions necessary for "genius" things to happen in science, that's called a "paradigm shift". Read Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolution".
All this article told me was someone was trying to cover some white space.
Leisure Suit Larry
But you have to act it out with her. She gets her fix, you get yours.
Pollardito (781263) sez: "this isn't a list of OS vulnerabilities, it's a list of application vulnerabilities sorted by OS"
From CERT: "Software vulnerabilities are categorized in the appropriate section reflecting the operating system on which the vulnerability was reported; however, this does not mean that the vulnerability only affects the operating system reported since this information is obtained from open-source information."
Meaning, of course, that the statement in the parent "According to InformationWeek.com, Linux/Unix (including Mac OS) had almost three times the number of OS-specific vulnerabilities reported last year compared to Microsoft Windows" is complete FUDcrap.
The difference between bias and ignorance is you treat one with the wide side of a clue by four, and the other with the narrow side, but it doesn't matter which is which. Corrective phrenology is not an exact science.
Dupes are common because not everyone sees everything the first time around, nor reads the archives. They happen. If the 'wasted space' is something to complain about, consider how many whiners waste space calling DUPE to every dupe, creating dupedupes. Far more than the dupes themselves.
/. rather than doing something productive, or if it's just whining for its own sake with no constructive purpose behind it at all, I suggest you bend your fingers over backwards and super glue your fingernails to the back of your wrists. And I mean that in a nice way.
Of course if complaining about dupes is a sort of conspicuous consumption behavior where you get to show how much time you have to keep track of what's on
Develop an encryption table that produces shapes similar to the screen characters created by the ASCII characters you want to transmit*.
Obtain a molecular transfer device that puts a dark material on semi-permiable surfaces, such as the paper you use in your printer.
Encode your message by placing dark marks on the paper. Seal it in an opaque layer of similar material and encode the physical address of the recipient on the outside.
You can then purchase a government document (for less than the cost of a cup of cofee, or of supporting a third world waif for a day) from a government agency tasked with transfering such encrypted information, afix it to the outside of the "envelope", and trick the 3\/1L goobermint into delivering your secret message for you.
If you REALLY want to be certain of your security, you can seal the "envelope" with the semi-transparent film developed by the security firm "3-M". The adhesive on one side of the film prevents unauthorized opening.
Of course this is all for naught due to the CIA's "remote viewers" unless you remain in motion. So when you're encrypting/molecular transfering, it's important to run around in circles so they can't focus on you. A tin foil hat won't actually help, but wearing one while running in circles will prevent those around you from asking pesky questions. Remember: shiny side out, otherwise a feedback loop can occur and cause dain bramage.
* As an alternative, entirely graphical representations can be developed. Pictures created with polychromatic, wax-based molecular transfer devices are especially attactive to moms, who tend to archive them on the outside of their refrigerator.
Seasonal affective disorder and light therapy has been covered adequately. I'll only add that I don't take medication when something cheaper and safer works, and it does for me.
I believe that the more acute problems people suffer around the holidays is due to the hype (interpersonal as well as commercial). It leads to expectations far greater than the results. Anyone who's experienced that anticipates it, and so it affects them even before the holidays arrive.
"But it means that you have wasted the 90% of the time doing nothing."
"a lot more fun" =! "nothing"
In fact, by procrastinating one thing in this manner, I have time to do another thing, plus have time to myself.
I procrastinate to develop stress. I use the stress as motivation. It's called eustress (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Selye). It's like free coffee.
In the interim I purposely don't think about whatever it is. That often results in an answer, if not the answer, popping out of my intuition with far less work than it would have taken otherwise.
I call it being constructively lazy.
90% of everything is done in 10% of the time alloted. Why not just go ahead and accept it? All that other time you spent worrying could go to something a lot more fun.
All in words, no numerals:
Challenge (example): "seven times three"
Response "twenty one"
First:
"The Marfa mystery lights are a
phenomenon that occurs after dusk
outside the town of Marfa,"
then
"Traffic volume decreases after dusk just as the
number of observed mystery lights"
If they don't occur until after dusk, and then decrease, that means the Marfa lights appear in negative numbers. No wonder nobody knows what they are. There are less than none of them to study.
"We don't quite know what is in these databases that we are spoofing"
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10454316/
Don't suppose that's the only one, either.
"Are there any approaches to thwarting or mitigating surveillance that will work on a mass scale?"
Poison their databases.
Plan and publicize, but don't hold, activities which fall under their "threat" category but aren't actually threatening, ie. protests at military related sites.
Call a flash mob that happens to be at such a place, but don't let that fact on when calling it.
Make sure to be at grandma's for Sunday dinner when such things do or do not occur.
Put up a web site for a bogus anti-something organization and encrypt the hell out of the pages, those being fair use snippets out of "Cryptonomicon" or some such.
There's far more potential spookees than spooks.
I put an old rainbow Apple sticker and and equally old Elephant Memory Systems sticker on one of my high power rockets, and sent them past Mach 1. The (vinyl) Apple sticker came back on the rocket. The (paper) EMS sticker is still up there for all I know.
"Possible development"
"could eventually allow"
"computer algorithms"
A computer connot possible process information the way the brain does.
Any DNI is a transducer and traanslator because the two things operate very differently. Why the hell try to copy how the brain does it on a machine that can't? Try to improve on the process by making the computer do what it does best instead.
Object recognition via similarlity calculation has been available in holographic storage devices. It is inherent in their operation (see SciAm Dec 94(?) article on holographic storage devices), and the operation they perform is far more similar to the way the brain works ("Brain and Perception", K. Pribram, particularly the application of Gabor's mathematical description of holography to the electrical field of the brain). This calculation operates at the speed of light. The device best suited to detecting the output is the eye.
Bypassing the best suited system with a less suited system sounds an awful lot like Minsky's comment about whether a submarine can swim.
Some were developed over 30 years ago. More have been since. Two clinical trials were completed 12 years ago. By now we should have a vaccine available for life long prevention of dental caries.
If this were for boners or baldness, it'd have gone through all clinical trail phases, been patented, marketed, genericized and an OTC version been made available by now.
More money to be made in filling teeth?
...then it behooves them to offer alternative explanations for their results. "In experimental philosophy we are to look upon propositions iffered by general induction from the phenomena as accurately as or very nearly true, notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses that may be imagined, till such time as other phenomena occur, by which they may either be made more accurate or liable to exception." -- Isaac Newton, Rule IV of "Rules of Hypothesizing", in Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687).
The experimental design is that of the Michealson-Morley experiments. That hypothesis still stands (ie. they failed to reject the null hypothesis, a very different thing than supporting the alternative hypothesis, and the beast of proving the null hypothesis is imaginary). If they get results, it'll be on them to show the effect is due to something other than that which has so far been unable to be detected but previously theorized and hypothesized as causing the same effect they expect to find.
Still awaiting the technology capable of testing it is the hypothesis that ether flows along the lines of a gravitational field, and so must be tested simultaneously parallel and perpendicular to gravity. Getting a vertical structure big enough but stable enough to do this is far harder than getting two perpendiculars.
Keep in mind that in science "out of favor" and "disproven" are not the same, but in peoples minds they are taken as such. Read "The Golem" by Collins & Pinch for many entertaining examples, including the M/M experiments.
... though apparently not so obvious to NASA, is to send people who are mature adults and don't have hang ups that make them confuse relationship with ownership.
Of course then the majority of the US population which does have that hang up will try to claim that NASA is "condoning" "immoral" behavior and the mass media would reap a billion dollar windfall winding up the sheeple by feeding their frenzy.
So many problems would be alleviated if people would just elevate "mind your own fucking business" to the level of a moral imperative like beneficence and nonmalfeasance.
Drag their feet, show some badly done code and claim they're just goofing around trying to figure out stuff.
Then go home and write it in generic terms, copyright it, and make it available on their own terms to whoever they wish. That wish may be measured by monetary offers should they so choose. Anyone making such a monetary offer does not need to know how many or few others are making such an offer (or if others even exist), what those offers might be, whether the authors will settle for a lower offer from a prefered customer, or whether they'll accept multiple offers despite the fact they differ.
So it has been predicted since the Cabal (There Is No Cabal) fought the creation of the alt.* usenet hierarchy. We're still here.
It can withstand a nuclear attack, but not a bunch of beaurocreeps and adminimonsters? OK, fine, we can go back to Fidonet. At least it had no spam problem.
The dark matter hypothesis was always circular. First it was hypothesized, then that untested hypothesis was used to explain, and then supporting evidence was found for the explanation, and it was always a house of cards. It might have been right, but still so far most of what there was was a string of flaws in logic tying together non-parsimonious conjecture.
Newton's therey never was a theory and he said so. He merely described, and people used that description as though it were a law. Einstein explained. It's about time someone took the explanation and used it instead.
1. Avoid fight or flight
2. Satisfy survival needs
All else is rationalization.
" 'It raises a serious question over how the US is going to demonstrate its compliance with obligations under the Biological Weapons Convention if it brings these tanks online,'"
In the usual way:
"That would be against the treaties we have with out friends and allies. The US is committed to a world of peaceful democracy. We will stay the course until the objective is acheived, using whatever means necessary.
Weapons of mass destruction. Saddam Hussein. Iraq. Terrorism. Afghanistan. Al Qieda. September 11. Stay the course."
Who could argue with that?
1. State secret.
2. Publicly posted patent.
I suspect this is not a legal/governmental snafu at all, but rather a behavioral experiment to see how stupid an excuse the government can manage to get away with foisting off on people while essentially conducting crimes that they'd never let the people get away with.
Maybe that's a little far fetched. OK, so it's really just people in government offices fucking with people and laughing about it. There, that makes more sense.
.....that when the US signed that treaty that they intended to honor it?
If you did, you don't know very many Indians.
Because they're flying a tethered balloon in US airspace above the maximum altitude allowed without having to alert air traffic in the area.
/. generated assumptions in the Phase II Study.
http://www.risingup.com/fars/info/101-index.shtml
They have to get a waiver to operate outside the limits set by FAR 101. It's a fairly automatic process. Most rocketry clubs do it regularly. By doing this they get clearance and (somewhat) priority for the airspace, and a NOTAM (Notice To Airmen) is posted at air traffic control centers so anyone heading that way will be informed.
According to the LiftPort blog, they've seen you coming:
September 18th, 2005
Welcome Slashdot readers.
You're welcome to rummage around and see what we're up to.
While you are here, sign up for our monthly announcement list. Toss barbed questions at space elevator enthusiasts at the Liftport Forums. Read our out-dated FAQ. Read Dr. Edwards NIAC study and free yourself from