I wish the people designing CSS would listen to you. When I tried to convert one of my sites over to using CSS2 I practcally had to give up because the standard 3 column + footer implementation was so difficult. All the solutions I could find were just out and out hacks that relied on either java script or knowing one column was going to be longer than the others etc etc.
I have often wondered why we haven't seen the emergence of worms with truly spectacular levels of sophistication. Nearly every worm / virus is small presumably so that it can spread quickly in limited bandwidth situations. The limited size means limited sophistication and sometimes flaws in the design or operation.
To the best of my knowledge no one has developed a worm with fully pluggable attack verctors and pay loads and automatic updating. An attack from such a worm would be all but unstoppable because there would always be a huge user base from which to start an attack. The attack would go like this:
Author writes the first version of the virus and deliberately infects machines. This version doesn't spread on it's own. This version doesn't need to be terribly good it just needs to infect 1000 machines or so, be upgradeable and form the initial core of the virus P2P system (maybe that should be V2V?).
Author refines virus and releases a new version. Some of the 1000 initial infections are still infected and upgrade themselves. They go on to infect other boxes automatically. Each box will try and upgrade and infect new boxes.
Hole exploited by the stage two virus is closed. Many are lost.
Author writes new exploit module and uploads it to virus network which them re-infects lost boxes and new boxes.
Virus scanners get to understand core virus and destroy numerous infections.
Author releases new version into the virus network which upgrades currect installs. And so it goes on.
???
Profit!
Perhaps someone is already doing this, I don't know. It seems like a natural evolution for viruses though. A sort of virus P2P system so that the virus network can respond to attacks. You could even build viruses that knew the network was under attack and hid or destroyed themselves.
There are two interesting points in the quote you presented that I think you missed. First, that the content is deemed inappropriate. That's a hard one to judge because the Internet is still very new and we are still hashing out exactly where it fits in our lives. Puting porn mags in with childrens comics in a news agent is inappropriate. I don't think the analogy holds for the Internet which is mostly aimed at adults (porn, shopping, news etc). Therefore it's difficult to argue that there is a social norm that is being broken making adult material on the web inappropriate.
Secondly, the idea of opting in at the ISP level being the same as opting in to other media is a fundamentally flawed analogy. Most (but I admit not all) porn sites require registration which is the equivalent to opting in to other media. Opting in at the ISP level is like opting in to walk down some streets in the local town. Best keept that last bit quiet - before we know it someone will try and implement the idea.
I wonder how much this has to actually do with protecting the children. It feels more like a ploy to get a list of everyone that views "inappropriate" content. Pound to a penny the law will be formulated such that the ISP has to surrender records of subscribers that requested the block be removed for practically any reason.
The problem with AJAX is not with the technology it is, as is often the case, with the people using it. It's the current big new "thing" and some people will insist on using it everywhere they can. Look how many sites appeared that were pure flash when flash was the big new thing. There aren't as many now and those that are almost always offer a html version.
I am sure that there are some really nice things that can be done with AJAX. We just need to find out what it's good at and what it isn't so good at.
Personally, I won't be using AJAX for a long while yet. As a lone developer I feel that client side scripting is too expensive to develop in terms of time. It's much easier to just use plain old (X)HTML and CSS on the client side even if that means a slight increase in complexity server side. Well that's my 0.02 anyway.
...sombody added the virus to their buddy list. It would start chating with itself. Download itself and then infect itself thus commiting suiside. A cunning ploy, I think, to rid the world of this problem.
This looks like a fairly high quality guide to building a projector which is pretty amazing because most I have seen are next to and will result in nothing more than a pile of broken parts.
Ok so you call your dog and do what exactly? Give it directions home? I've yet to meet a dog that understands "left and then the second right after the kebab shop". Perhaps this inventor has a particularly clever dog.
Erm that was my point. Men are XY women are XX - Y is like an X with a missing leg. That leg contains all the genes that encode for intelligence. Perhaps I screwed it up the first time. I'll go and have a look....
Come back and say that again when you have studied MO theory. You will find that extended bond formation as found in things like proteins is simply not possible with any atom other than carbon due to the way the molecular orbitals are arranged*. I'll grant you that under extreme pressure it is possible to make some very short chains of silcon and they have, IIRC, been observed (spectroscopically) in space.
As far as we can tell life requires complex molecules. Complex molecules can only be formed by carbon. I'm not saying that our data isn't biased towards carbon - it is - but you would be mistaken to think that we don't know enough chemistry know what atoms can form chains.
I agree that we don't understand the inside of Jupiter very well but that doesn't mean that life has any chance of existing there. It would be a sure bet that the inside of Jupiter is far to hot for anything but the most basic of molecule to survive even under the crushing pressure. Above about 500 deg C complex molecules basically don't exist.
I'm sure that at some point we will find some forms of life that are very exotic, living off all manner of energy sources. I am 100% convinced, however, that they will be living in environments that a broadly similar to our own in terms of pressure and temperature. For instance, I could envisage us finding primative life in the upper layers of the Venucian atmosphere and under the surface of Mars. Both places are very hostile to us but they aren't fundamentally hostile to complex (carbon) molecules.
* carbon is unique because it is small enough to be able to form sp3 hybridized orbitals. Silicon can hybribize its orbitals under extreme pressure but the pressure required grows with each extra bond.
According to my SO intelligence is found only in that bit of chromosome that women have that men don't. I suppose you don't need to be all that bright to hit dinosaurs over the head with a club and make babies. We are proving the latter on a daily basis.
To some extent yes we do already have a per mile charging system but it is complicated by the radically differing efficiencies of vehicles. I would say that fuel tax is more of an incentive to drive an efficient car than it is to drive fewer miles. A per mile tax directly charges you for the miles you drive and nothing else.
I think it would be very naive to assume that if this is brought in tax will be cut anywhere else. The economies of most western worlds are slowly failing and needed to be proped up by increasing taxes. Higher taxes are only a short term solution though and will cause the eventual final collapse to be much worse. IMVHO the reason the economies are failing is simply because the west has stopped producing things. I certainly can't think of any real manufacturing industires in the UK and those places that do still make things are barely surviving.
Any day now someone is going to figure out that the current rules let you patent the circle. Wheels prices (and everything else based on circles) will cost a fortune and be out of most peoples reach. We will praise this guy with his square wheels for saving us from the evil corporation (unless of course he patents the square - triangular wheels anyone?).
You have some really good points there about one way systems and such. The problem is that I don't really see any solution to the problem. The one way system is basically required to keep the traffic flowing even though the path is longer. It's not ideal but I can't see any way to move the buildings back to create space for more cars. One problem that should be addressed is parking. I read somewhere that 75%+ of people driving around in London are looking for somewhere to park. If we created huge amounts of cheap parking everywhere we could get all those people off the roads quickly.
The problem is that our government doesn't want any more cars (and I can somewhat agree) but won't offer a good alternative. I suppose that it pretty must the case all over the world though. Public transport just doesn't work for 80%+ of journeys.
I like the idea of mileage based road taxing. It means that that people who use the roads pay for them. I very strongly disagree that GPS tracking it the right way to solve this particular problem. It's just far to open to abuse and a high tech solution to a very low tech problem. Every car has a odometer why not just read that once a year to get the milage. This is a complete no brainer. I don't know what it's like in the US but over here in the UK (the government have mooted the use of a similar system here) all cars have to pass an MOT once a year (new cars are exempt for 3 years). Why not just make reporting the mileage part of that? The first three years could be estimated or self reporting or some such. Yes you would get people that "clock" the car but you'll also get people that cover up the GPS reciever. Clocking is already an offence so just up the punishment a bit to provide a bit more of a disincentive. I'm sure you could also convince a few people to have GPS trackers fitted so that you could profile the population and spot people that are fiddling the system.
Correct. There have been a few extremeophiles that have been found living around ocean vents that are capable if living in water over 100 deg C. IIRC some were also found deep down geysers. Bring them to the surface and they die.
It can be a problem. More bacteria means you have to keep more warm and fed. If 50% of the CO you are putting in is being used simply for bacterial growth you had better have a very cheap supply of CO and very cheap way of looking after the bacterial culture. My guess is that it would be to expensive to run the hydrogen plant simply due to running costs. Things like this have been tried before (I was taught by one of the lead researches). They got close to making it economical but had to give up as they couldn't squeeze the last few percent out of the organism. The problem is nature is designed to replicate itself not produce hydrogen. It's not a factory so it, generally, isn't as efficient as a factory.
Well the great thing about a catalyst is that it's not consumed in the reaction so it shouldn't cost that much. IIRC it is now possible to use iron oxide as the catalyst which is, I think you would agree, pretty cheap. The high temperature is a problem but it's possible to get 85% efficiency. I would be supprised if the microbe can manage 10%. The heat may not be that much of a problem either. I have seen test steam reformers that run off mirrors (presumably they could also be made to perform the shift reaction). It's a difficult problem but one that can be solved.
It might live near a volcano. It doesn't live in it! Even the most extreme extremophile is only able to withstand aroudn 120 degC. Nothing like the 700+ found in the heart of volcanos. The environment might be hard to replicate but not because of the temperature. More likely it will be hard to replicate because we probably don't properly understand the chemistry of the bacterias natural environment.
Also, you are *speculating* that the bacteria are carbon-based? I'm pretty sure that all life on earth is carbon based. Isn't that the current theory of evolution as well?
I think it is unlikely we will find squishy life that isn't carbon based simply because carbon is the only atom that can form highly complex molecules (well under extreme pressue silicon can form some fancy stuff but that's really academic). It's not that we haven't looked hard enough it's just plain impossible to form molecules as complex as DNA and proteins using anything other than carbon.
Notice above that I said squishy life. I think it is entirely possible that we may develop or find machines that appear to us to be alive. If they were based around processors then I can believe we would have silicon based "life". It would be fundamentally different to us though. A lot of people, IMHO, fall into the trap of thinking that they will find life that is essentailly like us but made of silicon or some other element - that just isn't going to happen.
This is just a bacterial version of the water-gas shift reaction. What makes people think that a microbe is going to be any more efficient that a big hunk of specially designed plant (sorry for the pun).
The bacteria might be cheap but it comes with a huge amount of overhead in terms of having to maintain all its cellular functions. I bet half it's energy is wated multiplying.
Surely this is fairly trivial for the company to overcome. Just use the barcode to denote the item rather than the price (I thought it did that anyway) and look up the correct price in a table. People could attach the barcode of something (lets say a frying pan) to an iPod in an attempt to get a lower price but the person at the checkout should be able to tell the difference. If it's that hard show the person on the till a picture of what it's expected to be. It increases the cognative load of the person on the till a little but not by an unacceptable amount I would have thought.
... for why copyright terms should be dramatically cut. Far from increasing the productivity of gifted artists the current copyright laws seem to cause them to give up work after they have had one success. I'm not saying that artists shouldn't be compensated but 20 years, to me, feels like about the right amount of time to protect the work. It's long enough that no business will just wait 20 years for the copyright on a work to expire before publishing and it's not so short that the artists would struggle to reap their just rewards.
I remember playing Risk as a kid and it wasn't a new game then (my parents bought the set). How can it be right that it is still protected by copyright?. If copyrights were shorter Hasbro would no doubt have pumped money into developing new more exciting games.
Having said that I suppose there is no problem with producing a very similar game with a different name to get around the copyright problem. I suppose we should be thankful they didn't patent it:o). The parting thought is this though - there is a reason they call them board games and it's not because they are played on a board.
Yeah right. Oh is that a flock of flying pig I see. We are miles and miles from creating true AI. Using current techniques we might get a machine that can reliably pass a (limited) Turing test but we aren't going to have true AI any time soon.
The problem, IMHO, is that we are going about it all wrong. RI (real intelligence) is less about having a huge knowledge base than it is about being able to learn. Most approaches to AI currently seem to focus on artificially adding semantics to everything and writting more and more sophisticated reasoning engines. I believe a true AI system would write it's own reasoning engine, after all, that is what humans seem to do. We are born, it would appear, with very few instructions. The instructions we have seem to be eat sleep and learn. Maybe we will get good machine intelligence with our current route but I don't think it will be anything like human intelligence.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish the people designing CSS would listen to you. When I tried to convert one of my sites over to using CSS2 I practcally had to give up because the standard 3 column + footer implementation was so difficult. All the solutions I could find were just out and out hacks that relied on either java script or knowing one column was going to be longer than the others etc etc.
I'll use CSS for layout when CSS is fixed.
I have often wondered why we haven't seen the emergence of worms with truly spectacular levels of sophistication. Nearly every worm / virus is small presumably so that it can spread quickly in limited bandwidth situations. The limited size means limited sophistication and sometimes flaws in the design or operation.
To the best of my knowledge no one has developed a worm with fully pluggable attack verctors and pay loads and automatic updating. An attack from such a worm would be all but unstoppable because there would always be a huge user base from which to start an attack. The attack would go like this:
Perhaps someone is already doing this, I don't know. It seems like a natural evolution for viruses though. A sort of virus P2P system so that the virus network can respond to attacks. You could even build viruses that knew the network was under attack and hid or destroyed themselves.
BTW I'm not a virus writter.
News for nerds. Stuff that's really really old!
Has this story been stuck in a moderation queue for 5 years or something?
There are two interesting points in the quote you presented that I think you missed. First, that the content is deemed inappropriate. That's a hard one to judge because the Internet is still very new and we are still hashing out exactly where it fits in our lives. Puting porn mags in with childrens comics in a news agent is inappropriate. I don't think the analogy holds for the Internet which is mostly aimed at adults (porn, shopping, news etc). Therefore it's difficult to argue that there is a social norm that is being broken making adult material on the web inappropriate.
Secondly, the idea of opting in at the ISP level being the same as opting in to other media is a fundamentally flawed analogy. Most (but I admit not all) porn sites require registration which is the equivalent to opting in to other media. Opting in at the ISP level is like opting in to walk down some streets in the local town. Best keept that last bit quiet - before we know it someone will try and implement the idea.
I wonder how much this has to actually do with protecting the children. It feels more like a ploy to get a list of everyone that views "inappropriate" content. Pound to a penny the law will be formulated such that the ISP has to surrender records of subscribers that requested the block be removed for practically any reason.
The problem with AJAX is not with the technology it is, as is often the case, with the people using it. It's the current big new "thing" and some people will insist on using it everywhere they can. Look how many sites appeared that were pure flash when flash was the big new thing. There aren't as many now and those that are almost always offer a html version.
I am sure that there are some really nice things that can be done with AJAX. We just need to find out what it's good at and what it isn't so good at.
Personally, I won't be using AJAX for a long while yet. As a lone developer I feel that client side scripting is too expensive to develop in terms of time. It's much easier to just use plain old (X)HTML and CSS on the client side even if that means a slight increase in complexity server side. Well that's my 0.02 anyway.
...sombody added the virus to their buddy list. It would start chating with itself. Download itself and then infect itself thus commiting suiside. A cunning ploy, I think, to rid the world of this problem.
This looks like a fairly high quality guide to building a projector which is pretty amazing because most I have seen are next to and will result in nothing more than a pile of broken parts.
Ok so you call your dog and do what exactly? Give it directions home? I've yet to meet a dog that understands "left and then the second right after the kebab shop". Perhaps this inventor has a particularly clever dog.
Erm that was my point. Men are XY women are XX - Y is like an X with a missing leg. That leg contains all the genes that encode for intelligence. Perhaps I screwed it up the first time. I'll go and have a look....
Come back and say that again when you have studied MO theory. You will find that extended bond formation as found in things like proteins is simply not possible with any atom other than carbon due to the way the molecular orbitals are arranged*. I'll grant you that under extreme pressure it is possible to make some very short chains of silcon and they have, IIRC, been observed (spectroscopically) in space.
As far as we can tell life requires complex molecules. Complex molecules can only be formed by carbon. I'm not saying that our data isn't biased towards carbon - it is - but you would be mistaken to think that we don't know enough chemistry know what atoms can form chains.
I agree that we don't understand the inside of Jupiter very well but that doesn't mean that life has any chance of existing there. It would be a sure bet that the inside of Jupiter is far to hot for anything but the most basic of molecule to survive even under the crushing pressure. Above about 500 deg C complex molecules basically don't exist.
I'm sure that at some point we will find some forms of life that are very exotic, living off all manner of energy sources. I am 100% convinced, however, that they will be living in environments that a broadly similar to our own in terms of pressure and temperature. For instance, I could envisage us finding primative life in the upper layers of the Venucian atmosphere and under the surface of Mars. Both places are very hostile to us but they aren't fundamentally hostile to complex (carbon) molecules.
* carbon is unique because it is small enough to be able to form sp3 hybridized orbitals. Silicon can hybribize its orbitals under extreme pressure but the pressure required grows with each extra bond.
According to my SO intelligence is found only in that bit of chromosome that women have that men don't. I suppose you don't need to be all that bright to hit dinosaurs over the head with a club and make babies. We are proving the latter on a daily basis.
To some extent yes we do already have a per mile charging system but it is complicated by the radically differing efficiencies of vehicles. I would say that fuel tax is more of an incentive to drive an efficient car than it is to drive fewer miles. A per mile tax directly charges you for the miles you drive and nothing else.
I think it would be very naive to assume that if this is brought in tax will be cut anywhere else. The economies of most western worlds are slowly failing and needed to be proped up by increasing taxes. Higher taxes are only a short term solution though and will cause the eventual final collapse to be much worse. IMVHO the reason the economies are failing is simply because the west has stopped producing things. I certainly can't think of any real manufacturing industires in the UK and those places that do still make things are barely surviving.
Any day now someone is going to figure out that the current rules let you patent the circle. Wheels prices (and everything else based on circles) will cost a fortune and be out of most peoples reach. We will praise this guy with his square wheels for saving us from the evil corporation (unless of course he patents the square - triangular wheels anyone?).
You have some really good points there about one way systems and such. The problem is that I don't really see any solution to the problem. The one way system is basically required to keep the traffic flowing even though the path is longer. It's not ideal but I can't see any way to move the buildings back to create space for more cars. One problem that should be addressed is parking. I read somewhere that 75%+ of people driving around in London are looking for somewhere to park. If we created huge amounts of cheap parking everywhere we could get all those people off the roads quickly.
The problem is that our government doesn't want any more cars (and I can somewhat agree) but won't offer a good alternative. I suppose that it pretty must the case all over the world though. Public transport just doesn't work for 80%+ of journeys.
I like the idea of mileage based road taxing. It means that that people who use the roads pay for them. I very strongly disagree that GPS tracking it the right way to solve this particular problem. It's just far to open to abuse and a high tech solution to a very low tech problem. Every car has a odometer why not just read that once a year to get the milage. This is a complete no brainer. I don't know what it's like in the US but over here in the UK (the government have mooted the use of a similar system here) all cars have to pass an MOT once a year (new cars are exempt for 3 years). Why not just make reporting the mileage part of that? The first three years could be estimated or self reporting or some such. Yes you would get people that "clock" the car but you'll also get people that cover up the GPS reciever. Clocking is already an offence so just up the punishment a bit to provide a bit more of a disincentive. I'm sure you could also convince a few people to have GPS trackers fitted so that you could profile the population and spot people that are fiddling the system.
Step 1: Bury head in sand / soil / tarmac / other ground covering.
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit.
I am starting to think "people" won't be happy until we are all clones - of course we couldn't be clones due to cloning though. Sigh.
Correct. There have been a few extremeophiles that have been found living around ocean vents that are capable if living in water over 100 deg C. IIRC some were also found deep down geysers. Bring them to the surface and they die.
It can be a problem. More bacteria means you have to keep more warm and fed. If 50% of the CO you are putting in is being used simply for bacterial growth you had better have a very cheap supply of CO and very cheap way of looking after the bacterial culture. My guess is that it would be to expensive to run the hydrogen plant simply due to running costs. Things like this have been tried before (I was taught by one of the lead researches). They got close to making it economical but had to give up as they couldn't squeeze the last few percent out of the organism. The problem is nature is designed to replicate itself not produce hydrogen. It's not a factory so it, generally, isn't as efficient as a factory.
Well the great thing about a catalyst is that it's not consumed in the reaction so it shouldn't cost that much. IIRC it is now possible to use iron oxide as the catalyst which is, I think you would agree, pretty cheap. The high temperature is a problem but it's possible to get 85% efficiency. I would be supprised if the microbe can manage 10%. The heat may not be that much of a problem either. I have seen test steam reformers that run off mirrors (presumably they could also be made to perform the shift reaction). It's a difficult problem but one that can be solved.
It might live near a volcano. It doesn't live in it! Even the most extreme extremophile is only able to withstand aroudn 120 degC. Nothing like the 700+ found in the heart of volcanos. The environment might be hard to replicate but not because of the temperature. More likely it will be hard to replicate because we probably don't properly understand the chemistry of the bacterias natural environment.
Also, you are *speculating* that the bacteria are carbon-based? I'm pretty sure that all life on earth is carbon based. Isn't that the current theory of evolution as well?
I think it is unlikely we will find squishy life that isn't carbon based simply because carbon is the only atom that can form highly complex molecules (well under extreme pressue silicon can form some fancy stuff but that's really academic). It's not that we haven't looked hard enough it's just plain impossible to form molecules as complex as DNA and proteins using anything other than carbon.
Notice above that I said squishy life. I think it is entirely possible that we may develop or find machines that appear to us to be alive. If they were based around processors then I can believe we would have silicon based "life". It would be fundamentally different to us though. A lot of people, IMHO, fall into the trap of thinking that they will find life that is essentailly like us but made of silicon or some other element - that just isn't going to happen.
This is just a bacterial version of the water-gas shift reaction. What makes people think that a microbe is going to be any more efficient that a big hunk of specially designed plant (sorry for the pun).
The bacteria might be cheap but it comes with a huge amount of overhead in terms of having to maintain all its cellular functions. I bet half it's energy is wated multiplying.
Surely this is fairly trivial for the company to overcome. Just use the barcode to denote the item rather than the price (I thought it did that anyway) and look up the correct price in a table. People could attach the barcode of something (lets say a frying pan) to an iPod in an attempt to get a lower price but the person at the checkout should be able to tell the difference. If it's that hard show the person on the till a picture of what it's expected to be. It increases the cognative load of the person on the till a little but not by an unacceptable amount I would have thought.
... for why copyright terms should be dramatically cut. Far from increasing the productivity of gifted artists the current copyright laws seem to cause them to give up work after they have had one success. I'm not saying that artists shouldn't be compensated but 20 years, to me, feels like about the right amount of time to protect the work. It's long enough that no business will just wait 20 years for the copyright on a work to expire before publishing and it's not so short that the artists would struggle to reap their just rewards.
I remember playing Risk as a kid and it wasn't a new game then (my parents bought the set). How can it be right that it is still protected by copyright?. If copyrights were shorter Hasbro would no doubt have pumped money into developing new more exciting games.
Having said that I suppose there is no problem with producing a very similar game with a different name to get around the copyright problem. I suppose we should be thankful they didn't patent it :o). The parting thought is this though - there is a reason they call them board games and it's not because they are played on a board.
Yeah right. Oh is that a flock of flying pig I see. We are miles and miles from creating true AI. Using current techniques we might get a machine that can reliably pass a (limited) Turing test but we aren't going to have true AI any time soon.
The problem, IMHO, is that we are going about it all wrong. RI (real intelligence) is less about having a huge knowledge base than it is about being able to learn. Most approaches to AI currently seem to focus on artificially adding semantics to everything and writting more and more sophisticated reasoning engines. I believe a true AI system would write it's own reasoning engine, after all, that is what humans seem to do. We are born, it would appear, with very few instructions. The instructions we have seem to be eat sleep and learn. Maybe we will get good machine intelligence with our current route but I don't think it will be anything like human intelligence.