Now we have dogs running wild howling "Brains, Braaaaaaains" to the moon. Haven't the scientists' done their homework and watched B class movies when they were in college? Zombies always turn up against their masters.
Anyway, now I have to abstain from sex before they've destroyed all the zombies. Thanks a lot, guys!
Why don't webdesigners simply use standard compliant ways to make their websites?
Because, it's far more easier to write web pages for one OS, one browser and one version. Especially, if you have bells and whistles to put to the site. Dominance of IE has lead to a situation where WWW means Windows Wide Web: Even when web designers want to write standard html they are forced to check it against IE bugs. Usually this leads to poor structure, like using tables for layout. See why using tables for layout is stupid.
For example about problems html writers encounter, I dare you to find out how to write W3 standards compliant pages that work with IE and Mozilla and have a flash plugin without googling. It's not as easy as one could think.
Finally, testing is also easier when you have only one browser -- platform specific bugs are doubled with two browsers.
1) Identify 2 sites that implement "countermeasures,"
2) Start a small DoS attach against each one while spoofing the source address of the other.
3) Sit back and laugh your ass off as they both escalate and take each other out!
AFAIK, government might have a problem with SSH: It isn't FIPS standard and they might be afraid that there's some nice booby trap that sends their connection data to 3rd parties. Code audit isn't done by trusted (by government) side.
I use SSH more than any other single program. Great way for 'screen -r' and then you have all your IM, IRC and mail program apps wherever you are. No problem with untrusted (even unencrypted) wireless networks as long as I have a laptop I can trust.
As far as I know the copyright laws in Finland and in Sweden are quite similar and sensible. Even distributing torrent links is legal in Sweden, but there's a legal action against Finreactor's admins for doing that same in Finland so the court will decide whether distributing torrent links is legal in Finland.
As a Finn, I pay for every data storage that can contain music files a little amount of money to copyright holders association. This gives me the right to legally download music and movies for personal uses. However, uploading or sharing files is not legal unless they are shared within a small group like friends or family members.
Therefore, if I downloaded infected.WMA file - and I was sharing only the records of my garage band and other stuff I hold the copyrights - there is no crime committed on my behalf, but they have intruded my computer. EULA would not (most probably) hold in court as Finnish laws require that license agreements should be accepted as a part of the original contract - that being the time I pay for the OS media and licenses to the local merchant. Any one-sided announcement of changing license policy won't hold.
It is amusing that the much maligned WinME nowadays work better and doesn't suffer from half the problems in XP - "The Most Secure Windows Ever".
I think you meant to say "they don't publish exploits for Windows ME". Microsoft doesn't have will to search for the holes, the holes will come up anyway. ME isn't that widely used anymore, so black hat hackers don't write exploits to that and effectively MS never fixes bugs for ME alone.
I believe that worms for Linux don't exist for that reason too. Unpatched Linuxes are so rare compared to unpatched windows boxes and mr. B. H. Hacker wants as many compromised systems as possible.
Every day you guys bitch and moan about how horrible and awful spam is, then Microsoft comes along with the perfect solution, and you all put it down like it's a bad infection or something.
It's not that it is from MicroSoft, not that it's patented, but that it's patented with a special license and it has unclear specification. The current license does not allow the transfer of the rights to a third party - therefore making it unimplementable on GNU Public Licensed programs. GPL requires that any modifications must be passed on for free (if ever want to pass it on), and MS license doesn't allow copying the source code and the license. Therefore, you can't implement Sender-ID for anyone else but for yourself.
Also that wiggle room around the specification is an alarming thing. MS - with many other companies - have shown that any gaps in the specification can and will be used by companies in competition. Given a chance, suppliers will make their product incompatible with other suppliers' products if they have the market share - thus increasing their market share further.
If we give them the power to choose what programs can deliver mail in the Internet, who are we going to blame but ourselves if they want to (ab)use that power? Instead, if they break an existing standard we can point our finger at them and say that their product does not meet the standard and therefore it's their fault that interoperability fails.
It's not like they're ever going to court with that patent. It'd be just silly. Instead, they have other uses for the patents they've filed recently.
I guess they will use the Patenting the Obvious ad Nauseaum for keeping Linux out of the desktop. Researches have told that one of the main reasons Linux isn't adopted to the companies is the fear of patent and IP lawsuits. By adding some patents that are more ridiculous than [insert funny thing here] they can add +1 to their patent stack and say: "Hey, Linux violates more than n+1 of our patents." They never have to worry about if their patent will hold in court, it's fear that keeps people in (MS) line.
FUD just keeps on changing form. TCO is old news, now it's patents.
I'd compare that he's saying "If you break your cognac glass, you no longer can drink cognac. Go ahead and buy new glass and a bottle."
I believe I'm allowed to finish my cognac from my other (non-cognac) glasses in case I happen to break the original 500 crystal glass.
MPAA sells you a physical copy and the digital material on it. When you break one, you've bought physical copy that now has to be replaced. It's no longer the digital material you thought you bought. When you copy the digital material, it's all of sudden the digital material that you've bought and now you're stealing it. Heads - MPAA wins, tails - you lose.
I watched on my vacation all published SW movies with my girlfriend who has never watched them all. During that I thought what's different between the old episodes and the new ones. I remember I've seen episodes like 10 times each in my childhood, my (and my brother's and sister's) favorite movie was the Return of the Jedi.
Lines like that were one part that was present in the original trilogy, but not found in Episodes I and II. Short snappy comments, like Finnish couple that has been married to each other for 40 years talking to each other.
How did R2D2 and C-3PO talk to each other? Leia and Han Solo? The movie lived by their relations. There was some try with Anakin and Queen Amidala, but that was all quite expectable and straightforward.
What I'd like to see in next episode is the living characters, their snappy way of commenting each other and evolving characters in the movie. Little things that together build the feel of Star Wars movie.
What M$soft does right now is write zillions of patents, no matter if they have previous art - they sure know it exists. Their straegy appears to be to get as many patents as possible and then one has to go to court to get it revoked. They got billions of $$'s in their war chest ant they are using it in this manner - one day we'll see how this turns out.
What I think MS will use patents like this, is to fight open source. Possible patent problems is what is keeping several companies and institutions from running linux - now they got another one patent they can claim Linux is breaking. No matter if their patent is invalid itself, but it's the FUD they spread.
I believe Linux is the reason they ever brought their concern for manufacturers using patented filesystems. They are afraid of losing their most profiting business - selling operating systems. Instead of innovating new business models, they have gone into a hedgehog-like defence. All spikes out! Use patents, false claims, anything! I believe they're destined to fail. They'll eventually loose their 90% market share of OS (x86 comp).
Rule #1: Spammers lie
Rule #2: Spammers are stupid
Spammers buying spamming services must be stupid enough to believe other spammers' lies.
There have been reports of spamming attempts to newsgroup message-id's, tags, anything with @-sign in it. And how will the buyer have any way to make sure that the mail is sent to that many e-mail addresses? Or someone will actually read them? Spammers selling stuff will care about this. Spammers selling spammer services won't. They just want the easy profit. They might not even have more than a million working addresses. Maybe if someone bought the service with smaller amount of e-mail addresses will get a couple of sales and then have the courage to by "de luxe" service, which might turn to be the same as the ordinary service.
I know I should have applied to more computer technological department in the FDF, but anyway I conscripted to the Guard Jaeger Regiment (in Finnish). It was in 1999 and even then they had internet connection conscripted could use.
Later on this year I was lecturing for some conscripted from Defence Forces Education Development Centre, they all had laptops given by the FDF and while I was teaching them I saw at least some of them running irssi thru ssh, the very same method I use to get on IRC when I'm at work. Too bad I wasn't able to see their channels so I couldn't join them later.
My father had been visiting the Education Development Centre when he worked for the same company that I do and he told me that it seems to be all candy and chocolate compared to normal service in fighting units. Of course if you ask from someone who has already served his 6/8/9/12 months then the service today is no match to the time when the temperature was 20 degrees below absolute zero and Adolf Hitler was a sensitive man compared to the sergeant that one time...
Actually firefox is the faster one. It just doesn't start rendering the page when it gets it's first byte. IE does (ever seen IE activity when pictures come loooong after text? You see text place changing then). You can modify your Firefox to behave that way if you want to, but on older computers it will just take more time than to "wait and then render". Some tweaks here
A while ago, after reading a newspaper article about some hideous unsolved crime, I mentioned to a friend that we should start putting radiotags on criminals. Man, he hit the roof! Wow. He used a variety of terms to describe this idea, the one that I remember most was 'Nazi'.
Then who is a criminal? I understand if you would like to tag people under probation like in Sweden, but attaching a radio tag for every ex-con? Isn't the whole idea of sentence that it will "wash out" your criminal activity and after that you should get a fresh start, not as a second class citizen but as a normal citizen for your capability and skills?
Then think about the Big Brother aspect: They say that in a police state, only criminals have to be afraid - and in a police state, you will become a criminal. The reason we are so afraid of giving power to the government is the possibility to abuse it. Think the situation in Burma, for example. You are a criminal if you oppose the military regime. Then get your RFID, and you can't run away or hide.
Today, There is no way to reveal my identity and position automatically, and I don't have a reason why I should keep those secret. As long as I don't have a reason to keep my position and identity secret, should I worry for my right to keep my identity and position secret? You bet! The latter is much easier for government to change.
Oh come on! They consolidated 21 databases and moved to Oracle. That's why it is 1000 times faster. The move to Linux is a footnote as far as the performance issue is concerned -- as stated in the article, the move to Linux was for cost. I'm sure Solaris or god help me, Windows Server 2003 would have given similar performance results. Now if they had moved to MySQL...
Sure, consolidation is one key to this improvement. Probably they created indexes and stuff, but probably some code (or procedures) were rewritten.
I guess MySQL wouldn't be much faster - at least it doesn't handle all the ANSI-SQL standards, like inner queries or transactions. Yes, it's good for some web applications and less complicated but heavy loaded stuff. Great database there - but for stock exchange? (Yes, MySQL has improved a LOT from version 4.x. I know that already.)
Automatic updates suck better than my vacuum cleaner.
First of all, if you don't run your computer as an administrator, you can't use "download and ask user to install when ready".
Second, if you use "download and install", and you've just written 10,000 lines of code or document and go get yourself a cup of coffee and while you're away, computer fetches the downloads and installs them. Then it gives you X minutes time to come back before it reboots without allowing you to save your work. (This is the reason I turned off the autoupdate in my W2k box.)
This would be a working scheme if Windows saved your session and programs - but I guess the current architechture doesn't allow that.
Vieques Island and parts of Okinawa severely contaminated with Ur238 that has a half life of 4 plus billion years.
I'd like to point out that half life is a two-bladed sword: With a long half life, actual spontanous fission happens rarely. With shot half life, it happens often but the level decreases fast. Sea water contains lots of K-40, which is responsible for most of the natures radioactivity. One kilogram of Ur-238 has an equal activity level to one swimpool full of clean, natural ocean water. Surely the toxicity of Ur-238 is not coming from it's radioactivity.
Ur-238 is heavy metal. When inhaled or digested, it stucks in your tissue and IIRC has the same toxicity level as lead has.
No, DU is not the entire answer to Gulf War syndrome. Adrenaline and stress, the touch of nerve gases that went up from bombed chemical arsenals, the anthrax vaccine, some of the insects that bit soldiers and the parasite they vector, etc., etc., all played a factor in Gulf War Syndrome. But DU explains many many symptoms that in retrospect were not exhibited by say, non atomic WWII vets.
My mother - who is a doctor - is also a subscriber of British Medical Journal. In the studies between the troops and and average population no higher level of uncommon (or common) diseases were found. The level of radiation, chronic fatigue syndromes, leukemia and such system-wide diseases were within measuring accuracy and had no significant differences.
What I believe is that either all symptoms wihtin Iraqi children are coincidental, results from possible earlier toxications or US Army didn't bother to use Ur-238 but used several other, less stable radioactive isotopes in its ammo.
You can't replace all linear nets with a single neuron. A single neuron cannot perform XOR.
And linear neural network can't perform XOR. (Feel free to provide proof that it could.) http://www.cis.hut.fi/Opinnot/T-61.261/luennot2003/lect8.pdf states on page 31 that XOR problem is not linearly separable in the original input space, so you have to make a conversion into nonlinear space. (They use Gaussian in the example.
Here notation [a b] stands for vector which has elements a and b and . stands for inner product.
If there are two linear neurons (N1,N2) connected to a linear neuron (N3), so that their weights are w1, w2, w3 (=[w3_1 w3_2]), biases b1, b2 and b3 and inputs x1, x2, their output at N3 is
w3.[y1 y2] + b3 = w3.[w1x1+b1 w2x2+b2] + b3 =
w3_1*w1x1+w3_1*b1 + w3_2*w2x2+w3_2*b2 + b3 =
[w3_1*w1 w3_2*w2] . [x1 x2] + b3+[w3_1 w3_2].[b1 b2] = w4 . [x1 x2] + b4
Which proves that you can replace neurons in feedforward linear networks with fewer neurons until you reach at one neuron / output. Having more inputs doesn't affect this.
It's all about business. MS thinks it can make easy money from companies that are willing to pay to ensure their mail flow there. Spammers who don't think they can earn $20k by spamming hotmail accounts won't bother. IMO MS has right to do whatever it wants with it's mail system.
I could sell spoiled herrings if I like. If someone is willing to pay me for those, it's not of anybody else's business, as far as we are not breaking the law.
I guess this is part of MS's "pay for sending mail" program of which Bill Gates spoke months ago. Permanent fix for spam problem? No, but it's an MS solution, so we don't expect it to work.
Nonlinear - This refers to the shape of the transfer function. A linear neural net can, at best, perform linear regression. You don't need a neural net to do that well (in fact, you can do it a LOT faster with just a single matrix inversion). So calling it "nonlinear" practically counts as redundant in any modern context.
From my studies I remember that if you ever built a linear neural network you could replace all that with a single neuron. Then this neuron would calculate the inner product between input vector and weight vector, add the bias and give as output the linear transformation of that vector (y=w.x+b). Add more neurons if you want more output vectors, but basically the calculation is just what pla wrote.
Conclusion: The writer of the original article had no idea what non-linearity and neural networks have to do with each other, but non-linearity sounded cool so he put it there.
What they rely on is the percecption that "spam works", so people will hire them to do spam campaigns.
The spam works. Spammers get money by spamming people.
Why do people then buy spammers' "services"?
Have you ever seen a marketing section of a company? It's hard to measure how effective that is, and they can always tell that "our ad isn't about selling the product, it's about making our brand known." I guess Scott Adams has it right in his Dilbert-comic. There's no relation between marketing and real world. "They even believe in market research." - Scott Adams
I tend to agree with the guy, personally. Blue LEDs, because they're usually stupidly bright, get really irritating, really fast.
I guess that engineers haven't noted the simple fact that the eye is most sensible for blue light and least sensible for green light. Therefore green led next to blue led looks much weaker compared to the blue led with the same intensity (and thus the same power). Red colour is special in the sense that it doesn't make your pupil shrink (and that's one reason it's used in car taillights). I find green colour best, red is for warning, green stands for "everything OK" or "action". And maybe I'd prefer yellowish-green over true green.
For possible solution they should use less power for those blue leds (if they have to use them for "coolness" factor). I remember I once read from a physics book that 5 simultaneous photons are enough for a nerve cell in retina to react for blue wavelength.
IIRC there's a law in the United States which they used to capture drug kings in the South America (late 90's?). The law says that US authorities have a right to arrest persons of other nationalities outside US. I wonder if they'll try that out now.
It was widely discussed in Finland if US authorites could arrest Finnish person in Finland. Officials considered that it would count as a military action.
And I wonder what people in US would think if Germany would start arresting people in US for selling swastika flags to Germany...
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, now I have to abstain from sex before they've destroyed all the zombies. Thanks a lot, guys!
Some zombie survival tips
Because, it's far more easier to write web pages for one OS, one browser and one version. Especially, if you have bells and whistles to put to the site. Dominance of IE has lead to a situation where WWW means Windows Wide Web: Even when web designers want to write standard html they are forced to check it against IE bugs. Usually this leads to poor structure, like using tables for layout. See why using tables for layout is stupid.
For example about problems html writers encounter, I dare you to find out how to write W3 standards compliant pages that work with IE and Mozilla and have a flash plugin without googling. It's not as easy as one could think.
Finally, testing is also easier when you have only one browser -- platform specific bugs are doubled with two browsers.
n) ???
n+1) Profit!
part?
It looks like your plan is flawed.
AFAIK, government might have a problem with SSH: It isn't FIPS standard and they might be afraid that there's some nice booby trap that sends their connection data to 3rd parties. Code audit isn't done by trusted (by government) side. I use SSH more than any other single program. Great way for 'screen -r' and then you have all your IM, IRC and mail program apps wherever you are. No problem with untrusted (even unencrypted) wireless networks as long as I have a laptop I can trust.
As a Finn, I pay for every data storage that can contain music files a little amount of money to copyright holders association. This gives me the right to legally download music and movies for personal uses. However, uploading or sharing files is not legal unless they are shared within a small group like friends or family members.
Therefore, if I downloaded infected .WMA file - and I was sharing only the records of my garage band and other stuff I hold the copyrights - there is no crime committed on my behalf, but they have intruded my computer. EULA would not (most probably) hold in court as Finnish laws require that license agreements should be accepted as a part of the original contract - that being the time I pay for the OS media and licenses to the local merchant. Any one-sided announcement of changing license policy won't hold.
I think you meant to say "they don't publish exploits for Windows ME". Microsoft doesn't have will to search for the holes, the holes will come up anyway. ME isn't that widely used anymore, so black hat hackers don't write exploits to that and effectively MS never fixes bugs for ME alone.
I believe that worms for Linux don't exist for that reason too. Unpatched Linuxes are so rare compared to unpatched windows boxes and mr. B. H. Hacker wants as many compromised systems as possible.
It's not that it is from MicroSoft, not that it's patented, but that it's patented with a special license and it has unclear specification. The current license does not allow the transfer of the rights to a third party - therefore making it unimplementable on GNU Public Licensed programs. GPL requires that any modifications must be passed on for free (if ever want to pass it on), and MS license doesn't allow copying the source code and the license. Therefore, you can't implement Sender-ID for anyone else but for yourself.
Also that wiggle room around the specification is an alarming thing. MS - with many other companies - have shown that any gaps in the specification can and will be used by companies in competition. Given a chance, suppliers will make their product incompatible with other suppliers' products if they have the market share - thus increasing their market share further.
If we give them the power to choose what programs can deliver mail in the Internet, who are we going to blame but ourselves if they want to (ab)use that power? Instead, if they break an existing standard we can point our finger at them and say that their product does not meet the standard and therefore it's their fault that interoperability fails.
It's not like they're ever going to court with that patent. It'd be just silly. Instead, they have other uses for the patents they've filed recently.
I guess they will use the Patenting the Obvious ad Nauseaum for keeping Linux out of the desktop. Researches have told that one of the main reasons Linux isn't adopted to the companies is the fear of patent and IP lawsuits. By adding some patents that are more ridiculous than [insert funny thing here] they can add +1 to their patent stack and say: "Hey, Linux violates more than n+1 of our patents." They never have to worry about if their patent will hold in court, it's fear that keeps people in (MS) line.
FUD just keeps on changing form. TCO is old news, now it's patents.
I'd compare that he's saying "If you break your cognac glass, you no longer can drink cognac. Go ahead and buy new glass and a bottle."
I believe I'm allowed to finish my cognac from my other (non-cognac) glasses in case I happen to break the original 500 crystal glass.
MPAA sells you a physical copy and the digital material on it. When you break one, you've bought physical copy that now has to be replaced. It's no longer the digital material you thought you bought. When you copy the digital material, it's all of sudden the digital material that you've bought and now you're stealing it. Heads - MPAA wins, tails - you lose.
I watched on my vacation all published SW movies with my girlfriend who has never watched them all. During that I thought what's different between the old episodes and the new ones. I remember I've seen episodes like 10 times each in my childhood, my (and my brother's and sister's) favorite movie was the Return of the Jedi.
Lines like that were one part that was present in the original trilogy, but not found in Episodes I and II. Short snappy comments, like Finnish couple that has been married to each other for 40 years talking to each other.
How did R2D2 and C-3PO talk to each other? Leia and Han Solo? The movie lived by their relations. There was some try with Anakin and Queen Amidala, but that was all quite expectable and straightforward.
What I'd like to see in next episode is the living characters, their snappy way of commenting each other and evolving characters in the movie. Little things that together build the feel of Star Wars movie.
What I think MS will use patents like this, is to fight open source. Possible patent problems is what is keeping several companies and institutions from running linux - now they got another one patent they can claim Linux is breaking. No matter if their patent is invalid itself, but it's the FUD they spread.
I believe Linux is the reason they ever brought their concern for manufacturers using patented filesystems. They are afraid of losing their most profiting business - selling operating systems. Instead of innovating new business models, they have gone into a hedgehog-like defence. All spikes out! Use patents, false claims, anything! I believe they're destined to fail. They'll eventually loose their 90% market share of OS (x86 comp).
I don't understand why several people have missed this: It's a good thing to get it known in the public that something possibly is breakable.
Microsoft relies in security by obscurity: If they don't tell about a flaw, there is no flaw, even if there's an existing exploit for that.
However, I'm not sure if glad is the word they should use there...
They claim that they have that many e-mails.
Rule #1: Spammers lie
Rule #2: Spammers are stupid
Spammers buying spamming services must be stupid enough to believe other spammers' lies.
There have been reports of spamming attempts to newsgroup message-id's, tags, anything with @-sign in it. And how will the buyer have any way to make sure that the mail is sent to that many e-mail addresses? Or someone will actually read them? Spammers selling stuff will care about this. Spammers selling spammer services won't. They just want the easy profit. They might not even have more than a million working addresses. Maybe if someone bought the service with smaller amount of e-mail addresses will get a couple of sales and then have the courage to by "de luxe" service, which might turn to be the same as the ordinary service.
I know I should have applied to more computer technological department in the FDF, but anyway I conscripted to the Guard Jaeger Regiment (in Finnish). It was in 1999 and even then they had internet connection conscripted could use.
Later on this year I was lecturing for some conscripted from Defence Forces Education Development Centre, they all had laptops given by the FDF and while I was teaching them I saw at least some of them running irssi thru ssh, the very same method I use to get on IRC when I'm at work. Too bad I wasn't able to see their channels so I couldn't join them later.
My father had been visiting the Education Development Centre when he worked for the same company that I do and he told me that it seems to be all candy and chocolate compared to normal service in fighting units. Of course if you ask from someone who has already served his 6/8/9/12 months then the service today is no match to the time when the temperature was 20 degrees below absolute zero and Adolf Hitler was a sensitive man compared to the sergeant that one time...
Actually firefox is the faster one. It just doesn't start rendering the page when it gets it's first byte. IE does (ever seen IE activity when pictures come loooong after text? You see text place changing then). You can modify your Firefox to behave that way if you want to, but on older computers it will just take more time than to "wait and then render".
Some tweaks here
Then who is a criminal? I understand if you would like to tag people under probation like in Sweden, but attaching a radio tag for every ex-con? Isn't the whole idea of sentence that it will "wash out" your criminal activity and after that you should get a fresh start, not as a second class citizen but as a normal citizen for your capability and skills?
Then think about the Big Brother aspect: They say that in a police state, only criminals have to be afraid - and in a police state, you will become a criminal. The reason we are so afraid of giving power to the government is the possibility to abuse it. Think the situation in Burma, for example. You are a criminal if you oppose the military regime. Then get your RFID, and you can't run away or hide.
Today, There is no way to reveal my identity and position automatically, and I don't have a reason why I should keep those secret. As long as I don't have a reason to keep my position and identity secret, should I worry for my right to keep my identity and position secret? You bet! The latter is much easier for government to change.
Oh come on! They consolidated 21 databases and moved to Oracle. That's why it is 1000 times faster. The move to Linux is a footnote as far as the performance issue is concerned -- as stated in the article, the move to Linux was for cost. I'm sure Solaris or god help me, Windows Server 2003 would have given similar performance results. Now if they had moved to MySQL...
Sure, consolidation is one key to this improvement. Probably they created indexes and stuff, but probably some code (or procedures) were rewritten.
I guess MySQL wouldn't be much faster - at least it doesn't handle all the ANSI-SQL standards, like inner queries or transactions. Yes, it's good for some web applications and less complicated but heavy loaded stuff. Great database there - but for stock exchange? (Yes, MySQL has improved a LOT from version 4.x. I know that already.)
Automatic updates suck better than my vacuum cleaner. First of all, if you don't run your computer as an administrator, you can't use "download and ask user to install when ready". Second, if you use "download and install", and you've just written 10,000 lines of code or document and go get yourself a cup of coffee and while you're away, computer fetches the downloads and installs them. Then it gives you X minutes time to come back before it reboots without allowing you to save your work. (This is the reason I turned off the autoupdate in my W2k box.) This would be a working scheme if Windows saved your session and programs - but I guess the current architechture doesn't allow that.
Vieques Island and parts of Okinawa severely contaminated with Ur238 that has a half life of 4 plus billion years.
I'd like to point out that half life is a two-bladed sword: With a long half life, actual spontanous fission happens rarely. With shot half life, it happens often but the level decreases fast. Sea water contains lots of K-40, which is responsible for most of the natures radioactivity. One kilogram of Ur-238 has an equal activity level to one swimpool full of clean, natural ocean water. Surely the toxicity of Ur-238 is not coming from it's radioactivity.
Ur-238 is heavy metal. When inhaled or digested, it stucks in your tissue and IIRC has the same toxicity level as lead has.
No, DU is not the entire answer to Gulf War syndrome. Adrenaline and stress, the touch of nerve gases that went up from bombed chemical arsenals, the anthrax vaccine, some of the insects that bit soldiers and the parasite they vector, etc., etc., all played a factor in Gulf War Syndrome. But DU explains many many symptoms that in retrospect were not exhibited by say, non atomic WWII vets.
My mother - who is a doctor - is also a subscriber of British Medical Journal. In the studies between the troops and and average population no higher level of uncommon (or common) diseases were found. The level of radiation, chronic fatigue syndromes, leukemia and such system-wide diseases were within measuring accuracy and had no significant differences.
What I believe is that either all symptoms wihtin Iraqi children are coincidental, results from possible earlier toxications or US Army didn't bother to use Ur-238 but used several other, less stable radioactive isotopes in its ammo.
You can't replace all linear nets with a single neuron. A single neuron cannot perform XOR.
And linear neural network can't perform XOR. (Feel free to provide proof that it could.) http://www.cis.hut.fi/Opinnot/T-61.261/luennot2003 /lect8.pdf states on page 31 that XOR problem is not linearly separable in the original input space, so you have to make a conversion into nonlinear space. (They use Gaussian in the example.
Here notation [a b] stands for vector which has elements a and b and . stands for inner product.
If there are two linear neurons (N1,N2) connected to a linear neuron (N3), so that their weights are w1, w2, w3 (=[w3_1 w3_2]), biases b1, b2 and b3 and inputs x1, x2, their output at N3 is
w3.[y1 y2] + b3 = w3.[w1x1+b1 w2x2+b2] + b3 =
w3_1*w1x1+w3_1*b1 + w3_2*w2x2+w3_2*b2 + b3 =
[w3_1*w1 w3_2*w2] . [x1 x2] + b3+[w3_1 w3_2].[b1 b2] = w4 . [x1 x2] + b4
Which proves that you can replace neurons in feedforward linear networks with fewer neurons until you reach at one neuron / output. Having more inputs doesn't affect this.
It's all about business. MS thinks it can make easy money from companies that are willing to pay to ensure their mail flow there. Spammers who don't think they can earn $20k by spamming hotmail accounts won't bother. IMO MS has right to do whatever it wants with it's mail system.
I could sell spoiled herrings if I like. If someone is willing to pay me for those, it's not of anybody else's business, as far as we are not breaking the law.
I guess this is part of MS's "pay for sending mail" program of which Bill Gates spoke months ago. Permanent fix for spam problem? No, but it's an MS solution, so we don't expect it to work.
Nonlinear - This refers to the shape of the transfer function. A linear neural net can, at best, perform linear regression. You don't need a neural net to do that well (in fact, you can do it a LOT faster with just a single matrix inversion). So calling it "nonlinear" practically counts as redundant in any modern context.
From my studies I remember that if you ever built a linear neural network you could replace all that with a single neuron. Then this neuron would calculate the inner product between input vector and weight vector, add the bias and give as output the linear transformation of that vector (y=w.x+b). Add more neurons if you want more output vectors, but basically the calculation is just what pla wrote.
Conclusion: The writer of the original article had no idea what non-linearity and neural networks have to do with each other, but non-linearity sounded cool so he put it there.
What they rely on is the percecption that "spam works", so people will hire them to do spam campaigns.
The spam works. Spammers get money by spamming people.
Why do people then buy spammers' "services"?
Have you ever seen a marketing section of a company? It's hard to measure how effective that is, and they can always tell that "our ad isn't about selling the product, it's about making our brand known." I guess Scott Adams has it right in his Dilbert-comic. There's no relation between marketing and real world.
"They even believe in market research." - Scott Adams
I guess that engineers haven't noted the simple fact that the eye is most sensible for blue light and least sensible for green light. Therefore green led next to blue led looks much weaker compared to the blue led with the same intensity (and thus the same power). Red colour is special in the sense that it doesn't make your pupil shrink (and that's one reason it's used in car taillights). I find green colour best, red is for warning, green stands for "everything OK" or "action". And maybe I'd prefer yellowish-green over true green.
For possible solution they should use less power for those blue leds (if they have to use them for "coolness" factor). I remember I once read from a physics book that 5 simultaneous photons are enough for a nerve cell in retina to react for blue wavelength.
IIRC there's a law in the United States which they used to capture drug kings in the South America (late 90's?). The law says that US authorities have a right to arrest persons of other nationalities outside US. I wonder if they'll try that out now.
It was widely discussed in Finland if US authorites could arrest Finnish person in Finland. Officials considered that it would count as a military action.
And I wonder what people in US would think if Germany would start arresting people in US for selling swastika flags to Germany...