And I think it is worth emphasizing, especially to purists [typically with little creative work to their credit] that slam plagerism, that it is the remix, Shakespeare's derivative work, that has been esteemed the greater work of art by 300 years of critics, teachers and audiances, not the work of Brooke. I would venture that the one moment in history when any work of literature or music is "perfected" occurs only in the mind of the artist and only at the point when he or she ceases fussing with the product. From that moment on, others may find a way to make the result more appealing or more compelling or just plain better at least to some audiance in some particular time and culture.
Stuff that should matter, like
accurate weather radar, is being drowned in spilled RF energy. If you leave things up to venture capitalists there will be no regulation at all, profits for a few investors and a lower quality of life for just about everybody once you find a reasonable way to value public saftey against the benefits to the entrepreneur and the customers for convenient wireless services. The only way [and it is far from ideal as implemented in the US] to come near the required balancing act is through regulation.
The bia$es of the author of TFA should be transparent to most readers but...
The Feb issue of Scientific American has an editorial on the history of the idea of copyrights...it begins with a terse description of how Shakespeare borrowed most of Romeo&Juliet:
If William Shakespeare were working today on
Broadway or in London's West End, he would be
spending a lot of time with lawyers. The Bard adapted
Romeo and Juliet from Arthur Brooke's poem
The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, which
Brooke, in his turn, had based on a French translation
by Pierre Boaistuau of various Italian stories.
The history of creative works, whether Romeo
and Juliet or the Beastie Boys' "Pass the Mic," is a
chronicle of "borrowing" from others. Intellectual property
lawyers might use a harsher word. But the
framers of the Constitution always intended to provide
owners of creative works with only limited monopolies,
ensuring that the public
gets the right to fashion new works
from old..
Hmmm...maybe they reset their hit counter...it claims
only 56 visits. I guess mention in a comment is not quite as potent a slashdotting as mention in an article.
bitch all you want, would a headless Dell have...
on
Apple Releases Mac Mini
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
From TFA:
Perfect for Programmers
Set a space-saving Mac mini atop your workstation PC and add a KVM switch to share keyboard, monitor and mouse. Mac OS X includes free developer tools for Mac, UNIX and Java. Test out a Mac version of your latest creation, instantly. Pretty soon you'll be using the Mac full-time, with that PC relegated to the testbed.
I have always been a sucker for the coolness factor in Apple products [but I didn't buy a Lisa!] and
this has me drooling.
For 64 bucks you can buy a kit for an RF field detector good up to 3gHz and sniff your car once every morning...more often if you have something to hide. Or am I wrong in assuming that the transmitter would be on all the time or at least periodically and emit a detectable field when powered up?
they tried to take over my windoze completely in
order make my online life more simple and secure.
Going from AOL 4 to 5 to...I got off the merry-go-round at 7, I found AOL insinuated itself
into all the functions it could, supplanted or ignored whatever windows features it could... so here comes a product that, by going it alone, succeeds completely at what AOL had attempted. And guess what? Its going to be so lame and limited even grandma is going to say "WTF!?" Besides, the usual
deal with AOL was a big box retailer selling a cheapo PC and saying "we'll knock the price down to $400 IF YOU SIGN UP TO TAKE AOL FOR 2 YEARS" How is this a better deal? That way at least I got a PC with a widely supported [and targeted] if mediocre OS. I don't think grandma is goin to use a computer until it dawns on her that there is something she really wants and it can be done on the computer. Grandma is 60 years old and long ago decided she knows what she wants...I'm not stupid, arrogant or hopeful enough to think I could change her mind. Having tried to set my aged mother up with a PC that would not help theives to her bank account, I know elderly newbies deal poorly with passwords and generally regard even the most common security steps for computer use as an impediment and an affront. Does this $400 box come with surreptitious biometric lock-outs? If not, sales will be as lame as the product.
if this is redundant, it only shows obviousness of
on
Smart Guns are Coming
·
· Score: 1
weakness of such technology: False reject on
id of user diables gun...you are confronted with
knife swinging home invader, you grab gun hastily
and not with a grip registered perfectly, or you
have just stepped out of the shower sopping wet...
the gun is a useful as a rock, trigger is locked,
it cant tell who you are. I would need shitloads of assurance that scenario could not happen before I'd buy a gun in NJ.
no, seriously, of what value is the article? what news or information in it makes it worth reading? And wherein was I complaining that the article was not dumbed down enough? I am doing my clumsy best to say its dumbed down to the point of uselessness.
Yup, guilty of laziness as charged. thanks for link...interesting co. but their description of their hydrogen generation product said nothing of where the energy comes from...so I will assume electricity by geothermal steam turbine. Their product here may not have any great technical novelty but it does take reponsibility for all the system integration for a packaged solution...just supply energy.
Twisted shit = an overweight 30-something guy dropping his drawers in a very public place [caught on surveilance cameras too BTW] in front of a girl who was about the age of my kid in highschool...what on earth was this guy thinking? what might he do next? The ten oclock news interviewed the girl, she was just grossed out. Tone of my comment = over reaction to humor....like you said "wait, this is slashdot..." I saw too much sickness in the situation to skate over it with humor but we aren't working with the same set of experiences... no big deal.
And thanks for the links. I always check the Glob but maybe I should bump the harold's bookmark up a notch. One thing is odd though: The harold describes a middle aged woman but that would be the store manager, not the girl who was working the counter and who was interviewed on the tv news.
What I don't buy is CNET's assertion that the trucking application of GPS is uncontroversial...it was a huge stink, with driver protests at the state house and all two years ago when they planned it. The ostensible reason was that a few of the plow operators were being paid by the hour but were actually plowing the local bar and claiming they had been at work. I had the details in my post but the/. eds had to leave it out for some reason.
Try this link:
http://search.boston.com/index.jsp?title=c&summary =c&byline=c&body=c&source=All&collection=week&quer yStr=truck%20driver%20gps
the globe wants to charge for that but it was on every local tv station last night....in the globe story, the controversy was spelled out and that might have made my comment a bit clearer.
and the "woman" in the coffee shop didn't look much older than a highschool senior...can you always laugh about twisted shit like this if its not happening to some you know or someone more easily hurt than you?
/. eds had to leave off some of my submission, maybe fair use issues or my bad editing, anyway, the boston-dot-com website will charge you to read the full article and I cant find the story anywere else even though it was all over the tv last night. Here is the first paragaff and [thank gawd] no pics:
The state found another use for the global positioning satellite network now in its second year of tracking state-contracted snowplows. At 3:45 a.m. yesterday, a sanding truck stopped at a doughnut shop in West Bridgewater near Routes 24 and 106. Police said the driver ordered a coffee, walked up to the counter, and exposed himself to a female employee. The state Highway Department tracked a sander from the Bridgewater depot and police arrested Jason Wordell, 32, of Somerset, charging him with indecent exposure and disorderly conduct. By late yesterday, he was being held on $1,000 bail after pleading not guilty in Brockton District Court. In 2003, about 200 snowplow operators staged a protest on Beacon Hill when the state first offered them a contract that required them to carry satellite phones equipped with GPS technology. The drivers said the GPS phones would be used to reduce their pay. An agreement was worked out, and the drivers agreed to carry the phones.
It would not be a dumb question. Some of Jordan's work involves robot designs that are cooked up, genetic-algorithm-style, by an AI application: After it has been running for a while and killing off the weaklings, the originator of the program himself hardly knows what the final design may be. We had this problem in automatic circuit design years ago. If there are a limited number of variables to play with and a clear means of determing which of two designs works better, a program that has a way to just try stuff is going to outstrip a human engineer....giving the patent to the guy who writes the software is likely but in the context of assuming the software is "embodied" or "entitled" [the real issues in Jordan's art. IMO], then that patent assignment is
a bit like giving the patent to the slave owner when the slave came up with the idea and his owner can't even explain the idea.
Jordan is a cool guy. He teaches at Braneis U.
Questions of economic justice are just below the
surface in his article. He has done some interesting work on setting up an environement where robots evolve. For now, they evolve more and more effective locomtion...he may work in academia but he defintely knows robots will have to walk before they can run...anything. He also works on how robots can build other robots...necessary, I suppose, for the evolution thing to be implementable.
As someone sigged above: "are you scared yet?"
Hey, this really IS rocket science! And they really mean Rocket Fuel.
I was worried for second...the headline looked
like they were going to trot out another health
study telling me my coffee habit is killing me.
Thats interesting. I just assumed JPG were some kind of cosine transform. shows how little I know. Since compressed information looks pseudo random [not much in the way of patterns repeated and therefor not much for codebook compressions like Lev-Zimpel or Huffman to work with], why can't I get much improvemenet when I ZIP a jpg if its got 30% fluff in it?
I hope google fixes this poor buffer hygiene soon But since we now have a published exploit, I will
be damn careful what I send for a while except for the messages my script sends to me;-)
Since [as GBS pointed out] "GH" can be pronounced
"F" and in "enough" I chriten this technique for
dredging buffer junk for other people's goodies as
GHISHING Which you would pronounce the same as PHISHING. And the GH might stand for Google Hack
From the art.:...At the same time, agents received disturbing news from a prized snitch embedded in the identity theft and credit card fraud underground. Unnamed in court documents, the informant was an administrator and moderator on the Shadowcrew site who'd been secretly cooperating with the government since August 2003 in exchange for leniency. By all accounts he was a key government asset in Operation Firewall.... If you can read about it in the news, that may be more compelling if less flowing than reading the book. The full text of Bluejay Books edition including illustrations of this
very prescient piece of SF is on line where you will not find any illustrations of Demi Moore or Paris "overexposed" Hilton. Sorry.
The filtering that takes place before these stories come to our attention is perhaps understandable but far from helpful...The Swedish study is cited in TFA as finding that heavy cell phone use doubles one's chances of getting a Acoustic Neuroma. DOUBLE! That sounds pretty damn significant whether you are trained in statistics or not. But I suppose they would lose readers if they pointed out the limitations of the study as do somewhat less sales&readership-driven sources. An even scarrier way to exerpt the study results:
Both of these sources also point out broader contexts which render the study far from conclusive:
general rise in cell phone use should have corresponding rise in these neuromas but that is not observed.
Only analog phone use was studied but most cell phone use now is digital
The neuroma in question is typically so slow growing that many people carry them around undiagnosed for years. [i.e. if they had done the expensive MRI scan on the 600 "healthy" control subjects, they might have to adjust their numbers]
A well identified genetic defect is known to cause the neuromas spontaneously
It is annoying that the most widely available news sources are the ones we can trust the least, requiring us to dig up the context and filter out their tendency to sensationalize. IMHO there is some smoke but we are by no means all on fire.
...however from the archival and theoretical-lossless-compression perspectives what they've allegedly achieved is pretty damn interesting....
Yes interesting but also kinda mysterious and a little hard to believe [The test results in TFA were important in overcoming my skepticism]...I saw no hint of what math or technique they came up with, just claims of effectiveness. Or did I miss something in the white paper?
OMG...your right! I interviewed at Aware Inc a few
years back...they were trying to hawk wavlet technology to DOD and the FBI [for fingerprint storage and recognition its pretty good] but when I
went back to their website, I find that "intellectual property" has become the subtitle to their company name...Sheesh! I bet they laid off all the programmers and just have sales people now. No wonder I never heard of wavlets outside the laboratory since then. And just maybe RMS is onto something.
yeah, vague fear molts into anger and then quickly in to vague threats...I doubt any parties to this,
even the victims, are going to be advertising their
part in it...but a bit of poking around on the net
may help me burn off the anger and reduce the fear.
And I really do feel that companies who have better records of preserving privacy and more robust business processes around data security/integrity should be rewarded with my business.
Slashdot Mirror
And I think it is worth emphasizing, especially to purists [typically with little creative work to their credit] that slam plagerism, that it is the remix, Shakespeare's derivative work, that has been esteemed the greater work of art by 300 years of critics, teachers and audiances, not the work of Brooke. I would venture that the one moment in history when any work of literature or music is "perfected" occurs only in the mind of the artist and only at the point when he or she ceases fussing with the product. From that moment on, others may find a way to make the result more appealing or more compelling or just plain better at least to some audiance in some particular time and culture.
Stuff that should matter, like accurate weather radar, is being drowned in spilled RF energy. If you leave things up to venture capitalists there will be no regulation at all, profits for a few investors and a lower quality of life for just about everybody once you find a reasonable way to value public saftey against the benefits to the entrepreneur and the customers for convenient wireless services. The only way [and it is far from ideal as implemented in the US] to come near the required balancing act is through regulation.
The bia$es of the author of TFA should be transparent to most readers but...
Hmmm...maybe they reset their hit counter...it claims only 56 visits. I guess mention in a comment is not quite as potent a slashdotting as mention in an article.
I have always been a sucker for the coolness factor in Apple products [but I didn't buy a Lisa!] and this has me drooling.
For 64 bucks you can buy a kit for an RF field detector good up to 3gHz and sniff your car once every morning...more often if you have something to hide.
Or am I wrong in assuming that the transmitter would be on all the time or at least periodically and emit a detectable field when powered up?
they tried to take over my windoze completely in order make my online life more simple and secure. Going from AOL 4 to 5 to...I got off the merry-go-round at 7, I found AOL insinuated itself into all the functions it could, supplanted or ignored whatever windows features it could...
so here comes a product that, by going it alone, succeeds completely at what AOL had attempted. And guess what? Its going to be so lame and limited even grandma is going to say "WTF!?" Besides, the usual deal with AOL was a big box retailer selling a cheapo PC and saying "we'll knock the price down to $400 IF YOU SIGN UP TO TAKE AOL FOR 2 YEARS" How is this a better deal? That way at least I got a PC with a widely supported [and targeted] if mediocre OS.
I don't think grandma is goin to use a computer until it dawns on her that there is something she really wants and it can be done on the computer. Grandma is 60 years old and long ago decided she knows what she wants...I'm not stupid, arrogant or hopeful enough to think I could change her mind.
Having tried to set my aged mother up with a PC that would not help theives to her bank account, I know elderly newbies deal poorly with passwords and generally regard even the most common security steps for computer use as an impediment and an affront. Does this $400 box come with surreptitious biometric lock-outs? If not, sales will be as lame as the product.
weakness of such technology: False reject on id of user diables gun...you are confronted with knife swinging home invader, you grab gun hastily and not with a grip registered perfectly, or you have just stepped out of the shower sopping wet... the gun is a useful as a rock, trigger is locked, it cant tell who you are.
I would need shitloads of assurance that scenario could not happen before I'd buy a gun in NJ.
no, seriously, of what value is the article? what news or information in it makes it worth reading? And wherein was I complaining that the article was not dumbed down enough? I am doing my clumsy best to say its dumbed down to the point of uselessness.
Yup, guilty of laziness as charged. thanks for link...interesting co. but their description of their hydrogen generation product said nothing of where the energy comes from...so I will assume electricity by geothermal steam turbine. Their product here may not have any great technical novelty but it does take reponsibility for all the system integration for a packaged solution...just supply energy.
-
talk of oil independence as if oil is only a fuel and not a lubricant...or are Icelanders also going to eliminate friction in some miraculous way
-
Vikings? What are they going to do, turn a boatload of berserkers loose to capture Iowa and demand tribute be paid in soybean oil?
-
zero technical content as to where they get energy from
... how is geothermal used?, what/how does Norsk Hydro do to create hydrogen?
TFA is not worthy ofTwisted shit = an overweight 30-something guy dropping his drawers in a very public place [caught on surveilance cameras too BTW] in front of a girl who was about the age of my kid in highschool...what on earth was this guy thinking? what might he do next? The ten oclock news interviewed the girl, she was just grossed out. ... no big deal.
Tone of my comment = over reaction to humor....like you said "wait, this is slashdot..." I saw too much sickness in the situation to skate over it with humor but we aren't working with the same set of experiences
And thanks for the links. I always check the Glob but maybe I should bump the harold's bookmark up a notch. One thing is odd though: The harold describes a middle aged woman but that would be the store manager, not the girl who was working the counter and who was interviewed on the tv news.
What I don't buy is CNET's assertion that the trucking application of GPS is uncontroversial...it was a huge stink, with driver protests at the state house and all two years ago when they planned it. The ostensible reason was that a few of the plow operators were being paid by the hour but were actually plowing the local bar and claiming they had been at work. I had the details in my post but the /. eds had to leave it out for some reason.y =c&byline=c&body=c&source=All&collection=week&quer yStr=truck%20driver%20gps
Try this link:
http://search.boston.com/index.jsp?title=c&summar
the globe wants to charge for that but it was on every local tv station last night....in the globe story, the controversy was spelled out and that might have made my comment a bit clearer.
and the "woman" in the coffee shop didn't look much older than a highschool senior...can you always laugh about twisted shit like this if its not happening to some you know or someone more easily hurt than you?
It would not be a dumb question. Some of Jordan's work involves robot designs that are cooked up, genetic-algorithm-style, by an AI application: After it has been running for a while and killing off the weaklings, the originator of the program himself hardly knows what the final design may be. We had this problem in automatic circuit design years ago. If there are a limited number of variables to play with and a clear means of determing which of two designs works better, a program that has a way to just try stuff is going to outstrip a human engineer....giving the patent to the guy who writes the software is likely but in the context of assuming the software is "embodied" or "entitled" [the real issues in Jordan's art. IMO], then that patent assignment is a bit like giving the patent to the slave owner when the slave came up with the idea and his owner can't even explain the idea.
Jordan is a cool guy. He teaches at Braneis U. Questions of economic justice are just below the surface in his article. He has done some interesting work on setting up an environement where robots evolve. For now, they evolve more and more effective locomtion...he may work in academia but he defintely knows robots will have to walk before they can run...anything. He also works on how robots can build other robots...necessary, I suppose, for the evolution thing to be implementable.
As someone sigged above: "are you scared yet?"
Hey, this really IS rocket science!
And they really mean Rocket Fuel.
I was worried for second...the headline looked like they were going to trot out another health study telling me my coffee habit is killing me.
Thats interesting. I just assumed JPG were some kind of cosine transform. shows how little I know.
Since compressed information looks pseudo random [not much in the way of patterns repeated and therefor not much for codebook compressions like Lev-Zimpel or Huffman to work with], why can't I get much improvemenet when I ZIP a jpg if its got 30% fluff in it?
I hope google fixes this poor buffer hygiene soon
But since we now have a published exploit, I will be damn careful what I send for a while except for the messages my script sends to me;-)
Since [as GBS pointed out] "GH" can be pronounced "F" and in "enough" I chriten this technique for dredging buffer junk for other people's goodies as
GHISHING
Which you would pronounce the same as PHISHING. And the GH might stand for Google Hack
From the art.:...At the same time, agents received disturbing news from a prized snitch embedded in the identity theft and credit card fraud underground. Unnamed in court documents, the informant was an administrator and moderator on the Shadowcrew site who'd been secretly cooperating with the government since August 2003 in exchange for leniency. By all accounts he was a key government asset in Operation Firewall. ...
If you can read about it in the news, that may be more compelling if less flowing than reading the book. The full text of Bluejay Books edition including illustrations of this very prescient piece of SF is on line where you will not find any illustrations of Demi Moore or Paris "overexposed" Hilton. Sorry.
- general rise in cell phone use should have corresponding rise in these neuromas but that is not observed.
- Only analog phone use was studied but most cell phone use now is digital
- The neuroma in question is typically so slow growing that many people carry them around undiagnosed for years. [i.e. if they had done the expensive MRI scan on the 600 "healthy" control subjects, they might have to adjust their numbers]
- A well identified genetic defect is known to cause the neuromas spontaneously
It is annoying that the most widely available news sources are the ones we can trust the least, requiring us to dig up the context and filter out their tendency to sensationalize. IMHO there is some smoke but we are by no means all on fire....however from the archival and theoretical-lossless-compression perspectives what they've allegedly achieved is pretty damn interesting....
Yes interesting but also kinda mysterious and a little hard to believe [The test results in TFA were important in overcoming my skepticism]...I saw no hint of what math or technique they came up with, just claims of effectiveness. Or did I miss something in the white paper?
OMG...your right! I interviewed at Aware Inc a few years back...they were trying to hawk wavlet technology to DOD and the FBI [for fingerprint storage and recognition its pretty good] but when I went back to their website, I find that "intellectual property" has become the subtitle to their company name...Sheesh! I bet they laid off all the programmers and just have sales people now. No wonder I never heard of wavlets outside the laboratory since then. And just maybe RMS is onto something.
I lived in apartments for a few years before I bought a house...why would I want to practice on something I was going to have to sell later;-)
Its funny how many people don't think I'm funny.
yeah, vague fear molts into anger and then quickly in to vague threats...I doubt any parties to this, even the victims, are going to be advertising their part in it...but a bit of poking around on the net may help me burn off the anger and reduce the fear. And I really do feel that companies who have better records of preserving privacy and more robust business processes around data security/integrity should be rewarded with my business.