My idea would be even closer to worthless then it is if it really was novel:) . It relies on OCR, pattern recognition, pattern classification and other things that are with us for quite some time.
It is just a matter of will to evolve to put all of these to better use, to add more intelligence to IT.
Hellschreiber is neat, but when you think about it, human reader is essential part of it. That is probably the reason why (dumber) teletype device was UI device of choice for computers.
Well,... no. Quite opposite - how it looks, that's what it is. Single pixel should be thrown away as noise.
The idea is that i.e. if you write in Cyrilic alphabet: H, E, R, O, or upper case Chi, Eta, Rho, Omicron in Greek alphabet and it shows written like "XEPO" it should *be* recognized as exact equivalent to X, E, P, O "XEPO" in latin.
So, in the end, each machine would have internal inferred encoding of each graphic symbol it encounters, only not a predefined one. Of course, that would require training of UI (or "ghosting" initial configuration to new ones).
I agree. The characters are grapheme, so we should treat them that way.
Perhaps even whole idea of encoding alphabets is a relict (and biased to phonetic alphabets, as well)? Today computers have enough power to operate on pictures as UI, so why don't we switch to shape-based data processing?
That would instantly break digital divide between present and history (think digitization of ancient documents) and between various cultures.
As bonus, we get to ditch keyboard-induced RSI, that feeling of being constrained in what you can do "on computer" and plus my kids will get a motivation to learn to handwrite nice (and to speak laud and clear)!
... parallel multi-nets. I guess servers will have multiple domain names for same IP address, one for each culture they wish to address.
No matter what, english-language net will continue to be *the* Internet, a global Forum, direct connection between common people from all parts of the world ( Hey there!:) ).
All the other nets will have quite a marginal significance. Nations will try to boost them in order to keep their citizens indoctrinated with own traditional values, but things that do not fly by themselves usually have short age, lose appeal and fade away. Internet as we know it will take only a mild hit, so no worries.
All this is needed for final globalization of internet - reaching people of the world with only as much as elementary literacy in their own mother's tongue. That is something that native english speakers take for granted - "Your grandma can use Internet". Well, most grandma's of the world still can't, or have difficulties with it.
Yes, they state as largest problem how to kill off only aberrant stem cells, which generate tumor cells without killing both aberrant and normal stem cells, which would be A Bad Thing.
IANAB but... if we could send a marker with deadly but inactive payload to home on all stem cells, but somehow get activated only by newly introduced tumor cell, that might do it.
Or, better, a marker compound (1) that would bond to a stem cell AND to a tumor cell if (when) they are close enough (immediately after cell division), which would change shape when it happens to be bound on both ends, thus exposing receptive part in the middle of molecule that could receive another, special radioactive marker molecule (2), so that we can target exact location of aberrant stem cell and destroy it by whichever means are used. Along the course of recovery, procedure would be periodically repeated until a positive is found.
Only of recent stem cells, particulary non-fetal stem cells, gained the hype, so even researchers from other fields, who taught stem cells were not interesting for their work got a glance at them... and were surprised to see how closely they match description of malign, rogue cells and click into the big picture. This was expected and inevitable.
Well if asteroid falls in the forest... never mind that, I mean: before we had Earth covered with radio stations, and before we sailed high seas on regular basis, many a catastrophy could had pass unnoticed in "mainstream cultural thread". Westerners tend to dismiss other people's oral traditions as fantastic gibberish.
Now, that time frame, from Columbus and Magellan till today is less than 1000 years.
God forbid we really hurt their spamming profit while the botnet is still functioning, because then they would turn to real crime big way, mobsters-like (extortion, sabotage, spying) to make it up for losses (OTOH, that would really poke the authorities in the eye... I can see it now: "War on malware! Everyone is REQUIRED to let investigators install remote operated 'agent software' " *shudder* )!
The disinfection must be done before the spammers are dealed with.
Either you'll get malware that will only spam 9000 messages per day, or you'll get customers that are cut off regularly, get pissed, and change ISPs. If you're unlucky, you'll also get some lawsuits about it, justified or not.
Isn't similar approach used to prevent spamming message board and other online communities? Basically there are sensible natural limits for a human-generated messages to be written and sent. Even if bots adapt and start mimicking human behavior, we still get at least a little offload and spammers get to have more work to do and worse statistical odds against them.
You are right that we can never win completely, but we can make things a little more bearable.
Frankly, how could I know what would be in 95 years? I am mortal, so I anticipate I won't be (able to care about anything) then. But it doesn't mean the problem will be gone it will just be gone from me (or v-v).
Just because new code today is always better then old code, it doesn't mean there is a natural law that keeps it that way. Yes, "There is always one more bug", but in fact the state space of code is finite. It is possible to reach the state where no further improvement is attainable. Some works of art and science have value that haven't diminished through the ages, but they were new once (say, in their first hundred years). Some code snippets are perhaps the optimal solution to a problem. However, if there was nothing to be improved when it went into public domain, I guess there would be no damage possible, or that it would be quite well amortized by then.
Grant the inventor a monopoly for a limited time and then release it for public use. And I applaud their choice of the GPL over, say, the BSD license, strictly due to the fact that the GPL will keep the source open.
Me too. GPL has "You can't touch this!" (Break it down...) written all over it and if you really want to preserve your work effort for later use no matter what, it is the way. Strap a GPL on it and leave it in the front lawn. None can steal it away, you can always get back later and pick it back up, perhaps even with some more bells and whistles on it (or bloat, which you are of course free to cut out of your next v.) other people may have added for their own purpose.
But... doesn't it go both ways and only so far: after that same certain limited time, copyleft expires too, just as copyright does. Then, it turns back into "toothless" public domain and all the unwanted things it was used to prevent are again possible to happen. OTOH, I wasn't checking what is current copyright protection time...
Actually, the sun has already done its part - the air above the sea surface and on the shore is humid because of evaporation. Now, all you have to do is to cool a surface which is not reachable neither by sunlight, nor by seawater and to collect condensed water. A simple long, vertical, floating, white or reflective-colored metal flask could do that (as long as the sea is cooler then the air above - otherwise, a metal panel up in the air would do the trick).
The problem is getting the concentration up from 380 ppm to something useful and doing it economically.
We get nitrogen used for obtaining nitric acid, to make nitrates for soil fertilization, by fractional distillation of liquefied air. World food production relies on it, so there are many such factories all over the world. CO2 is "just" another, heavier fraction (although quite tiny, granted). Perhaps we could modify the industrial process to separate CO2 too?
'"Copyright owners often use street-value estimates to calculate losses, but this assumes that every person who bought pirated goods would otherwise have paid for a legitimate item, the report notes."'
Baloney! The only reason for piracy is to get somthing you're not willing to pay for. If they were willing to pay for it then they would have paid for it, BUT THEY DIDN'T because THEY WERENT!
Hmm... let's see... a thief gets into the shop and steels a bottle of luxury liquor (something desirable but not essential for living). What will salesman calculate as loss: The price at which he was selling it, or the price at which he got it? Thief is supposedly a poor guy who would never had that kind of money to buy it even if he wanted to.
If an object, merchandise, is too pricey and is not sold in months, can we argue that, if it was stolen, there was no loss?
Someone may argue that those were tangible goods, we will have no dispute over that - let's subtract out the price salesman payed as "real loss", but the key point is the selling price, or price difference, salesman's (hypothetic) profit... should it be accounted for or not, and why?
I don't think that farming was ever CO2 budgeted. It is an interesting problem. Biomass production, which means mostly tying up atmospheric CO2, (supposedly) rises because of human interference, but more CO2 is emitted in process.
Now, is more CO2 emitted by machines and artificial fertilizer factories or is more CO2 absorbed by plants?
Let's focus only on "small picture" for the moment, we know for sure that "big picture" is net CO2 emission (fossil fuels are used, all of biomass eventually degrades and almost all of CO2 is returned to atmosphere) but if we could find out that we could actually pull out of air more CO2 then we emit, then using biofuels in agriculture (re-engineering the machines, if necessary) would be a a bit more sound choice.
I.e. what if the harvesters could run (well,... walk) on hay dust particles (look up solid-fuel diesel engines)?
Now, IMHO this sheds light on the cancer itself: perhaps the cancer is existing natural tissue repair system gone wrong.
Random mutations and "shotgun" damage to genetic material is not enaugh to explain the incidence of cancer and especially elevated incidence of cancer in organisms and tissues that does not have fast growth any more.
On the contrary, if you are not growing, your cells are not multiplying at high rate. Now, the older you are, more maintanence your tissues require and more repairing you use - more stem cells are produced in your organism. Consequently, there is more chance that something may go wrong.
It may yet come out that if we find a way to control stem cells, the cancer sure will be immediate byproduct. Therefore, even if stem cell research does not deliver promissed, even if it is unpractical and unsuccessful, one day it may provide tools to steer, control or emergency shutdown each person's own internal "repair service" and thus directly cure both degenerative diseases and cancers.
Slashdot Mirror
My idea would be even closer to worthless then it is if it really was novel :) . It relies on OCR, pattern recognition, pattern classification and other things that are with us for quite some time.
It is just a matter of will to evolve to put all of these to better use, to add more intelligence to IT.
Hellschreiber is neat, but when you think about it, human reader is essential part of it. That is probably the reason why (dumber) teletype device was UI device of choice for computers.
Well, ... no. Quite opposite - how it looks, that's what it is. Single pixel should be thrown away as noise.
The idea is that i.e. if you write in Cyrilic alphabet: H, E, R, O, or upper case Chi, Eta, Rho, Omicron in Greek alphabet and it shows written like "XEPO" it should *be* recognized as exact equivalent to X, E, P, O "XEPO" in latin.
So, in the end, each machine would have internal inferred encoding of each graphic symbol it encounters, only not a predefined one. Of course, that would require training of UI (or "ghosting" initial configuration to new ones).
I agree. The characters are grapheme, so we should treat them that way.
Perhaps even whole idea of encoding alphabets is a relict (and biased to phonetic alphabets, as well)? Today computers have enough power to operate on pictures as UI, so why don't we switch to shape-based data processing?
That would instantly break digital divide between present and history (think digitization of ancient documents) and between various cultures.
As bonus, we get to ditch keyboard-induced RSI, that feeling of being constrained in what you can do "on computer" and plus my kids will get a motivation to learn to handwrite nice (and to speak laud and clear)!
... parallel multi-nets. I guess servers will have multiple domain names for same IP address, one for each culture they wish to address.
:) ).
No matter what, english-language net will continue to be *the* Internet, a global Forum, direct connection between common people from all parts of the world ( Hey there!
All the other nets will have quite a marginal significance. Nations will try to boost them in order to keep their citizens indoctrinated with own traditional values, but things that do not fly by themselves usually have short age, lose appeal and fade away. Internet as we know it will take only a mild hit, so no worries.
All this is needed for final globalization of internet - reaching people of the world with only as much as elementary literacy in their own mother's tongue. That is something that native english speakers take for granted - "Your grandma can use Internet". Well, most grandma's of the world still can't, or have difficulties with it.
Yes, they state as largest problem how to kill off only aberrant stem cells, which generate tumor cells without killing both aberrant and normal stem cells, which would be A Bad Thing.
... if we could send a marker with deadly but inactive payload to home on all stem cells, but somehow get activated only by newly introduced tumor cell, that might do it.
IANAB but
Or, better, a marker compound (1) that would bond to a stem cell AND to a tumor cell if (when) they are close enough (immediately after cell division), which would change shape when it happens to be bound on both ends, thus exposing receptive part in the middle of molecule that could receive another, special radioactive marker molecule (2), so that we can target exact location of aberrant stem cell and destroy it by whichever means are used. Along the course of recovery, procedure would be periodically repeated until a positive is found.
Only of recent stem cells, particulary non-fetal stem cells, gained the hype, so even researchers from other fields, who taught stem cells were not interesting for their work got a glance at them... and were surprised to see how closely they match description of malign, rogue cells and click into the big picture. This was expected and inevitable.
Well if asteroid falls in the forest ... never mind that, I mean: before we had Earth covered with radio stations, and before we sailed high seas on regular basis, many a catastrophy could had pass unnoticed in "mainstream cultural thread". Westerners tend to dismiss other people's oral traditions as fantastic gibberish.
Now, that time frame, from Columbus and Magellan till today is less than 1000 years.
In fact, you are quite right.
God forbid we really hurt their spamming profit while the botnet is still functioning, because then they would turn to real crime big way, mobsters-like (extortion, sabotage, spying) to make it up for losses (OTOH, that would really poke the authorities in the eye... I can see it now: "War on malware! Everyone is REQUIRED to let investigators install remote operated 'agent software' " *shudder* )!
The disinfection must be done before the spammers are dealed with.
Isn't similar approach used to prevent spamming message board and other online communities? Basically there are sensible natural limits for a human-generated messages to be written and sent. Even if bots adapt and start mimicking human behavior, we still get at least a little offload and spammers get to have more work to do and worse statistical odds against them.
You are right that we can never win completely, but we can make things a little more bearable.
actually, the dolphins were singing: "Nah-nah-nah-nah nah nah nah fishing. Fishing. Fishing..."
Frankly, how could I know what would be in 95 years? I am mortal, so I anticipate I won't be (able to care about anything) then. But it doesn't mean the problem will be gone it will just be gone from me (or v-v).
Just because new code today is always better then old code, it doesn't mean there is a natural law that keeps it that way. Yes, "There is always one more bug", but in fact the state space of code is finite. It is possible to reach the state where no further improvement is attainable. Some works of art and science have value that haven't diminished through the ages, but they were new once (say, in their first hundred years). Some code snippets are perhaps the optimal solution to a problem. However, if there was nothing to be improved when it went into public domain, I guess there would be no damage possible, or that it would be quite well amortized by then.
Me too. GPL has "You can't touch this!" (Break it down...) written all over it and if you really want to preserve your work effort for later use no matter what, it is the way. Strap a GPL on it and leave it in the front lawn. None can steal it away, you can always get back later and pick it back up, perhaps even with some more bells and whistles on it (or bloat, which you are of course free to cut out of your next v.) other people may have added for their own purpose.
But
The point is: by the sea, the air *is* already humid! Just do the condensation part...
Actually, the sun has already done its part - the air above the sea surface and on the shore is humid because of evaporation. Now, all you have to do is to cool a surface which is not reachable neither by sunlight, nor by seawater and to collect condensed water. A simple long, vertical, floating, white or reflective-colored metal flask could do that (as long as the sea is cooler then the air above - otherwise, a metal panel up in the air would do the trick).
True, but there is also a part that is not eaten (i.e. straw), which could be stabilized in solid form, then buried, or put down on the ocean floor.
Then, I guess, the "pulling it back from the air" part is best left to plants and photsynthesis, it is single efficient way we know about.
Hmm... let's see... a thief gets into the shop and steels a bottle of luxury liquor (something desirable but not essential for living). What will salesman calculate as loss: The price at which he was selling it, or the price at which he got it? Thief is supposedly a poor guy who would never had that kind of money to buy it even if he wanted to.
If an object, merchandise, is too pricey and is not sold in months, can we argue that, if it was stolen, there was no loss?
Someone may argue that those were tangible goods, we will have no dispute over that - let's subtract out the price salesman payed as "real loss", but the key point is the selling price, or price difference, salesman's (hypothetic) profit... should it be accounted for or not, and why?
Regarding your sig and this topic: "#6. When describing the size of a treasure, a pirate is required to exaggerate by at least 130%."
Well, if you give them the money...
I don't think that farming was ever CO2 budgeted. It is an interesting problem. Biomass production, which means mostly tying up atmospheric CO2, (supposedly) rises because of human interference, but more CO2 is emitted in process.
Now, is more CO2 emitted by machines and artificial fertilizer factories or is more CO2 absorbed by plants?
Let's focus only on "small picture" for the moment, we know for sure that "big picture" is net CO2 emission (fossil fuels are used, all of biomass eventually degrades and almost all of CO2 is returned to atmosphere) but if we could find out that we could actually pull out of air more CO2 then we emit, then using biofuels in agriculture (re-engineering the machines, if necessary) would be a a bit more sound choice.
I.e. what if the harvesters could run (well,... walk) on hay dust particles (look up solid-fuel diesel engines)?
Now, IMHO this sheds light on the cancer itself: perhaps the cancer is existing natural tissue repair system gone wrong.
Random mutations and "shotgun" damage to genetic material is not enaugh to explain the incidence of cancer and especially elevated incidence of cancer in organisms and tissues that does not have fast growth any more.
On the contrary, if you are not growing, your cells are not multiplying at high rate. Now, the older you are, more maintanence your tissues require and more repairing you use - more stem cells are produced in your organism. Consequently, there is more chance that something may go wrong.
It may yet come out that if we find a way to control stem cells, the cancer sure will be immediate byproduct. Therefore, even if stem cell research does not deliver promissed, even if it is unpractical and unsuccessful, one day it may provide tools to steer, control or emergency shutdown each person's own internal "repair service" and thus directly cure both degenerative diseases and cancers.
can it play the world's smallest violin?
Those who can, solder, those who bottle, cork!