I bring my laptop to campus with me every day (I'm a grad student at the University of Iowa), and there are some classes where it's useful, others where it's not. For instance, one of my classes is basically a survey of game theory. When a new concept is introduced (Brouwer's Fixed-Point Theorem! Sperner's Lemma! Vickrey auctions! It's like reading the phone book.), it's nice to be able to google the topic and bookmark the results for later so that I can expand on what the prof went over during the lecture. OTOH, my automated reasoning seminar -- a much narrower field -- has been methodically building and expanding on a single model over the course of the entire semester. There's not much new stuff introduced that doesn't directly follow from the old material, so there's not much point in looking for outside explanations; thus the laptop doesn't help a lot.
OTOH, the distinction is probably less useful for undergrads, who usually don't get the kind of mindnumbing detail that we have to put up with on a daily basis.
Okay, then call it "unsubvertable" (if that wasn't a word before, it is now) if it's that important to you. The end result -- DRMed files being shared in ways the DRM implementors didn't intend -- is the same.
OTOH, going back to your earlier example, if I can find the person who does have the key and figure out some way to weasel either the key or the decrypted text out of them, it won't take nearly that long.:) Compromising the messenger is often far easier than compromising the message directly, and it's a damn shame how often this is forgotten when it comes to information security.
I actually see "un-DRM"-ing a file by porting the output stream to some DRM-free format as a case of compromising the messenger, but perhaps this is unnecessarily subtle.
Besides, the question's irrelevant. DRM via encryption to a subscriber's key? Whatever. If the subscriber can generate a listenable stream (which is, duh, kinda the point), then it's possible to turn that stream into a non-DRMed file. Anyone with legitimate access can create illegitimate access if they're so inclined and have the technical skill to do it. And, if the readership (postership) of/. is any indication, there's no shortage of people who are so inclined.
Standards are standards; the trick is getting people to adopt them.
DMP sounds like a nice idea on paper, but will the recording studios ever go for something that will allow people to share files, even if playback is (supposedly) limited to subscribers-only? How long before such playback limitations are cracked just like the DRM for iTunes?
I have yet to see the uncrackable DRM scheme, and no reason to assume one can ever exist. If humans can write it, humans can break it.
An ion is an atom with charge, ie, an atom which either has more or fewer electrons than usual. Atoms are typically .5-2.5 angstroms across; an angstrom is 10^-10 meters.
An electron is less than 10^-18 m across. We're talking EIGHT ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE SMALLER. (Yes, the wave-particle duality makes size pretty difficult to measure. But c'mon, think about the relative-size issue here: what would be the point in considering an electron part of an atom if the electron were larger than the entire atom?)
What the hell are they teaching you kids in physics these days?
Nothing in the article indicates that cable companies will only be able to offer a la carte services. I fully expect that Comcast, Warner, et al will go on offering their package-deals, and that most consumers won't have the time or inclination to pick and choose only the channels they want.
For that matter, nothing's stopping the cable companies from providing a la carte selection at some outrageous price and package-deals at the prices they've been charging all along, on the grounds that if people want a service, they'll have to pay for it at a price the market will bear.
The lament that "oh, we'll be paying $45/month for 6 channels" makes sense only if a-la-carte-only is mandated.
NLD, or Nonverbal Learning Disorder, is still another possibility. NLD is occasionally described as the "little brother" of Asperger's; its symptoms overlap strongly with and are almost a subset of those for AS (for example, almost all people with AS suffer from sensory integration dysfunction; it appears in some NLD patients but certainly not all of them).
Poor motor control skills, inability to pick up on or interpret social cues, dysgraphia (crap handwriting/spelling, among other writing problems), inability to understand facial expressions, body language or changes in inflection/intonation, difficulty with interpreting visual but non-verbal/non-numeric information -- these and a whole bunch more are par for the course with NLD.
Like AS, it's not treatable through medication, but a diagnosis may be a first step in figuring out where to start. I've always had a problem with completely misinterpreting people's motivations, for instance; after I was diagnosed NLD, my psychologist suggested, "Why not ask people to just explain to you what they meant by a gesture or facial expression, instead of assuming the worst?" It's a completely obvious answer, but it had never occurred to me, because I'd never had any reason to question what was going on. Stupid? Well, it sure seems that way now. But it wasn't obvious at the time, and since then, I've started asking other questions that have led me to be more socially capable -- i.e., to better pick up on things that most people find "obvious".
If there's a value in diagnoses of NLD, AS and related autism-spectrum disorders, I think it comes in the fact that other people who've gotten these sorts of diagnoses in the past have come up with useful coping mechanisms which can be learned by someone who doesn't learn the way "normal" people do. And drawing on a resourceful community is a hell of a lot better than going it alone.
Re:Prediction about "social network software"
on
ICQ Universe
·
· Score: 1
However, I'd be suprised if they provided anything as useful as Slashdot
I have yet to see any that do.
Re:Prediction about "social network software"
on
ICQ Universe
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You mean like listservs, newsgroups and web forums?
Not at all. I don't see anything Orkut's communities do that a decent webforum doesn't already do better, presuming that the webforum allows people to link their usernames to their own webpages, as lots do.
Actually,/. is a fine example of what I mean by "really useful added value". Its primary purpose is to disseminate news that geeks will find interesting, but it also has some networking features: you can define other users as friends, foes, &c., you can get more information about people via their user pages, you can send messages internally, you can see who "friends of friends" are, and so on. LiveJournal is a pretty good example too -- primary purpose is providing a blogging tool; the ability to define profiles, interests and friends allows for networking.
Needlessly long reply to what I'm sure was sarcasm, but eh.
Re:Prediction about "social network software"
on
ICQ Universe
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I don't really get the cachet of signing on to Yet Another Social Networking Site. The proliferation of SNS's in the last twelve months reminds me of the proliferation of instant messaging services after ICQ came out -- and until clients like Trillian and services like Jabber emerged, it was a huge pain in the ass to manage IM accounts on every service out there. (Perhaps someone will develop an SNS portal so that people can manage their Orkut/Friendster/Tribe.net/LinkedIn/etc. accounts all in one place?)
If the point of a social networking site is merely Yet More Networking, then the point escapes me. That said, it would be interesting to see social-networking sites with really useful added value, perhaps in a niche-specific fashion. For example, the biotech firm I work for is developing a site where users can data-mine article databases like PubMed more deeply than existing tools allow; they'll have the option to save the document classification schemes they build, and to share their classifiers with other users if they want. Social networking (or academic networking, if you will) is a natural extension of this -- if it helps people find collaborators as well as information, we'll consider it a success.
One caution on the 4L: keep it clean. I got a 4L when I left for college about ten years ago, and the logic board died after about five years... likely because my cat decided the printer was a nice warm place to sleep.
Replacing the logic board would have cost about as much as the printer itself, so that was the end of that.
Just to put some perspective on the situation: I mentioned this article to my boss (I work for a company which produces oligonucleotides), and he immediately recalled (though, to be fair, he didn't cite a source) the results of a comparison between the bird flu variant that killed a few people in Southeast Asia several years back and the H5N1 bird flu virus. Apparently the viruses only differed by about 12 genes. He speculated that the researchers in this case might just be trying to find out which of those 12 produce the human-infectious variation.
Needless to say, this knowledge would be incredibly valuable. And, yes, dangerous in the wrong hands -- but the genes which allow human infection in bird flu may not be, and in fact are probably not, the same genes which allow human infection in other viruses.
Robert Heinlein had an interesting, if cynical, remark about how long it takes to conquer a nation. Three generations, he said, because by that time, all the people who were born under the old regime are dead.
If you look at the songwriters' attempt to shut down radio stations back in the first half of the twentieth century, there's a great deal of similarity with the current file-sharing situation. BMI, ASCAP and other licensing schemes grew out of this (and the EFF has just proposed a similar licensing scenario which would place a great deal of the (fairly light) burden on broadband ISPs, who could then offset that by raising costs slightly. Not a bad idea -- but at the same time, it's one of a very small number of times that something like this has been proposed in the last century. The old model is still perceived as viable simply because so many people see it as viable; sadly, the only thing that will finally put it to rest is time and boring effort.
Social progress, much like scientific progress, often moves forward one funeral at a time.
Text-to-speech has come a long way in the last 20 years, but the main thing we're still missing is an effective way of modeling voice inflection -- where the stress goes, basically, so that the entire thing doesn't come out in one dull monotone.
There have been a number of recent advances in concept-to-speech synthesis, which incorporates a sort of map (I'm being very general here) of the semantic concepts in a text and uses that to determine where emphasis should go to make speech sound more natural.
I think there's a lot of promise in fusing this approach with the discourse-representation work of people like Daniel Marcu -- automatically extract the discourse representation, then use that to assign prosody.
Sorry if this is a bit technical -- I do something very similar to it for a living, so it's easy to geek over.
Get a tape-to-headphone-jack adapter, the kind people used to use with portable CD players before everyone just got in-dash CD players. (If you can't find one in a store, surely someone you know will have one they're not using.) I use one with my Creative Nomad MuVo all the time, and the sound quality is excellent.
From an article in the Natural Agricultural Library - admittedly this one's on goat mastitis, but it mentions similarities to cow mastitis: "Clinical mastitis is characterized by signs of inflammation: swelling, pain, fever temperature and abnormal milk secretion." It cites Staphylococcus epidermitis, S. galactiae and S. aureus -- that would be the one that causes staph in humans, FYI -- as common infectious agents.
Additionally, it mentions that "infection is usually spread from infected to non-infected susceptible animals during the milking process" -- not at all surprising, since most animals are milked by machine, and sanitary conditions in farming aren't exactly what I'd want to think my food's been around.
I don't know how often mastitis occurs in untreated cows either (the Guardian article you linked mentioned a rate of >30% in England, but didn't say whether that included rbST-treated cattle), but it doesn't surprise me that the increase in milk production was only nominal -- if you're increasing gross milk production but losing a lot of what you produce due to infection, the net isn't going to change much. That said, however, the root cause of the problem is still physical, not chemical, in nature -- the way the cows' udders are handled promotes inflammation, cracking, &c., which promotes infection (especially in unsanitary conditions), and so on.
Is there a good way, a safe way, to extract large amounts of milk from cows? Hell if I know; I'm a bioinformaticist, not a farmer. Find that, though and we'll have found a solution to the problems you've cited.
-abh, who actually remembered to format this time. and is also lactose intolerant. go figure.
The lactation process is a very strenuous activity for the cattle, therefore requiring careful monitoring and high quality of herd management at all stages. If the use of rbST is administered by farmers, then extra precautions are necessary to ensure the safety of humans and the cattle. Increased bST production can cause a condition called mastitis or udder infections that produces puss-laden milk.
The article you've linked has some good information, but it's missing an important causal link. "Mastitis" = literally, irritation of the breast. Humans who breastfeed their offspring get mastitis all the time; it's a completely understandable side effect of having something yanking on your nipple all the damn time. Factory-farmed cows are in just this condition -- ever seen a milking machine? -- and if they're lactating more, then they'll spend more time being milked, which means more physical irritation, which does indeed increase the chances of mastitis and thus the chance of pus getting into milk.
Which is, of course, a Bad Thing. I'm not disagreeing with you at all on that one. Deceptive marketing and suppression of the press? Bad and bad. Right there with ya.
But I take issue with the implication that rbST itself is somehow magically creating pussy milk, because it just ain't so. Mastitis occurs in cows who haven't had their bST levels artificially increased as well, because of farming practices that encourage it. You can look at rbST as a factor in the increase of mastitis, but not as the root cause of it. The root cause is something that could stand to be changed anyway, and it's deceptive to obscure that.
It is awareness and influence that are starkly lacking in the modern America.
Damn skippy.
You've missed the point.
on
Space Burial
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Which is: is it worse to kill 250,000 in an instant to prevent the possibility of millions more being slaughtered over the course of months, or to save those 250,000 at the cost of a long, slow, brutal war?
I don't have a good answer for that, myself. I don't have any answer.
Slashdot Mirror
I should think libexif should work just as well under PHP. Cf. the 07-Feb-2004 comment.
OTOH, the distinction is probably less useful for undergrads, who usually don't get the kind of mindnumbing detail that we have to put up with on a daily basis.
Yet Another God Damned Standard.
Okay, then call it "unsubvertable" (if that wasn't a word before, it is now) if it's that important to you. The end result -- DRMed files being shared in ways the DRM implementors didn't intend -- is the same.
I actually see "un-DRM"-ing a file by porting the output stream to some DRM-free format as a case of compromising the messenger, but perhaps this is unnecessarily subtle.
Besides, the question's irrelevant. DRM via encryption to a subscriber's key? Whatever. If the subscriber can generate a listenable stream (which is, duh, kinda the point), then it's possible to turn that stream into a non-DRMed file. Anyone with legitimate access can create illegitimate access if they're so inclined and have the technical skill to do it. And, if the readership (postership) of /. is any indication, there's no shortage of people who are so inclined.
DMP sounds like a nice idea on paper, but will the recording studios ever go for something that will allow people to share files, even if playback is (supposedly) limited to subscribers-only? How long before such playback limitations are cracked just like the DRM for iTunes?
I have yet to see the uncrackable DRM scheme, and no reason to assume one can ever exist. If humans can write it, humans can break it.
Your point, again?
An electron is less than 10^-18 m across. We're talking EIGHT ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE SMALLER. (Yes, the wave-particle duality makes size pretty difficult to measure. But c'mon, think about the relative-size issue here: what would be the point in considering an electron part of an atom if the electron were larger than the entire atom?)
What the hell are they teaching you kids in physics these days?
For that matter, nothing's stopping the cable companies from providing a la carte selection at some outrageous price and package-deals at the prices they've been charging all along, on the grounds that if people want a service, they'll have to pay for it at a price the market will bear.
The lament that "oh, we'll be paying $45/month for 6 channels" makes sense only if a-la-carte-only is mandated.
Poor motor control skills, inability to pick up on or interpret social cues, dysgraphia (crap handwriting/spelling, among other writing problems), inability to understand facial expressions, body language or changes in inflection/intonation, difficulty with interpreting visual but non-verbal/non-numeric information -- these and a whole bunch more are par for the course with NLD.
Like AS, it's not treatable through medication, but a diagnosis may be a first step in figuring out where to start. I've always had a problem with completely misinterpreting people's motivations, for instance; after I was diagnosed NLD, my psychologist suggested, "Why not ask people to just explain to you what they meant by a gesture or facial expression, instead of assuming the worst?" It's a completely obvious answer, but it had never occurred to me, because I'd never had any reason to question what was going on. Stupid? Well, it sure seems that way now. But it wasn't obvious at the time, and since then, I've started asking other questions that have led me to be more socially capable -- i.e., to better pick up on things that most people find "obvious".
If there's a value in diagnoses of NLD, AS and related autism-spectrum disorders, I think it comes in the fact that other people who've gotten these sorts of diagnoses in the past have come up with useful coping mechanisms which can be learned by someone who doesn't learn the way "normal" people do. And drawing on a resourceful community is a hell of a lot better than going it alone.
I have yet to see any that do.
Not at all. I don't see anything Orkut's communities do that a decent webforum doesn't already do better, presuming that the webforum allows people to link their usernames to their own webpages, as lots do.
Actually, /. is a fine example of what I mean by "really useful added value". Its primary purpose is to disseminate news that geeks will find interesting, but it also has some networking features: you can define other users as friends, foes, &c., you can get more information about people via their user pages, you can send messages internally, you can see who "friends of friends" are, and so on. LiveJournal is a pretty good example too -- primary purpose is providing a blogging tool; the ability to define profiles, interests and friends allows for networking.
Needlessly long reply to what I'm sure was sarcasm, but eh.
If the point of a social networking site is merely Yet More Networking, then the point escapes me. That said, it would be interesting to see social-networking sites with really useful added value, perhaps in a niche-specific fashion. For example, the biotech firm I work for is developing a site where users can data-mine article databases like PubMed more deeply than existing tools allow; they'll have the option to save the document classification schemes they build, and to share their classifiers with other users if they want. Social networking (or academic networking, if you will) is a natural extension of this -- if it helps people find collaborators as well as information, we'll consider it a success.
Replacing the logic board would have cost about as much as the printer itself, so that was the end of that.
Needless to say, this knowledge would be incredibly valuable. And, yes, dangerous in the wrong hands -- but the genes which allow human infection in bird flu may not be, and in fact are probably not, the same genes which allow human infection in other viruses.
If you look at the songwriters' attempt to shut down radio stations back in the first half of the twentieth century, there's a great deal of similarity with the current file-sharing situation. BMI, ASCAP and other licensing schemes grew out of this (and the EFF has just proposed a similar licensing scenario which would place a great deal of the (fairly light) burden on broadband ISPs, who could then offset that by raising costs slightly. Not a bad idea -- but at the same time, it's one of a very small number of times that something like this has been proposed in the last century. The old model is still perceived as viable simply because so many people see it as viable; sadly, the only thing that will finally put it to rest is time and boring effort.
Social progress, much like scientific progress, often moves forward one funeral at a time.
There have been a number of recent advances in concept-to-speech synthesis, which incorporates a sort of map (I'm being very general here) of the semantic concepts in a text and uses that to determine where emphasis should go to make speech sound more natural.
I think there's a lot of promise in fusing this approach with the discourse-representation work of people like Daniel Marcu -- automatically extract the discourse representation, then use that to assign prosody.
Sorry if this is a bit technical -- I do something very similar to it for a living, so it's easy to geek over.
Get a tape-to-headphone-jack adapter, the kind people used to use with portable CD players before everyone just got in-dash CD players. (If you can't find one in a store, surely someone you know will have one they're not using.) I use one with my Creative Nomad MuVo all the time, and the sound quality is excellent.
Additionally, it mentions that "infection is usually spread from infected to non-infected susceptible animals during the milking process" -- not at all surprising, since most animals are milked by machine, and sanitary conditions in farming aren't exactly what I'd want to think my food's been around.
I don't know how often mastitis occurs in untreated cows either (the Guardian article you linked mentioned a rate of >30% in England, but didn't say whether that included rbST-treated cattle), but it doesn't surprise me that the increase in milk production was only nominal -- if you're increasing gross milk production but losing a lot of what you produce due to infection, the net isn't going to change much. That said, however, the root cause of the problem is still physical, not chemical, in nature -- the way the cows' udders are handled promotes inflammation, cracking, &c., which promotes infection (especially in unsanitary conditions), and so on.
Is there a good way, a safe way, to extract large amounts of milk from cows? Hell if I know; I'm a bioinformaticist, not a farmer. Find that, though and we'll have found a solution to the problems you've cited.
-abh, who actually remembered to format this time. and is also lactose intolerant. go figure.
The lactation process is a very strenuous activity for the cattle, therefore requiring careful monitoring and high quality of herd management at all stages. If the use of rbST is administered by farmers, then extra precautions are necessary to ensure the safety of humans and the cattle. Increased bST production can cause a condition called mastitis or udder infections that produces puss-laden milk. The article you've linked has some good information, but it's missing an important causal link. "Mastitis" = literally, irritation of the breast. Humans who breastfeed their offspring get mastitis all the time; it's a completely understandable side effect of having something yanking on your nipple all the damn time. Factory-farmed cows are in just this condition -- ever seen a milking machine? -- and if they're lactating more, then they'll spend more time being milked, which means more physical irritation, which does indeed increase the chances of mastitis and thus the chance of pus getting into milk. Which is, of course, a Bad Thing. I'm not disagreeing with you at all on that one. Deceptive marketing and suppression of the press? Bad and bad. Right there with ya. But I take issue with the implication that rbST itself is somehow magically creating pussy milk, because it just ain't so. Mastitis occurs in cows who haven't had their bST levels artificially increased as well, because of farming practices that encourage it. You can look at rbST as a factor in the increase of mastitis, but not as the root cause of it. The root cause is something that could stand to be changed anyway, and it's deceptive to obscure that. It is awareness and influence that are starkly lacking in the modern America. Damn skippy.
I don't have a good answer for that, myself. I don't have any answer.