esearchers say that the Storm Trojan/Peacomm worm has been tweaked to spread via IM programs and attack rival malware.
Thus begins the ecology of internet software. CPU cycles are simply too valuable (en masse) for one piece of malware to share with others.
Eventually, look for malware to get better and better and rooting out rival malware in order to take its place. As well, look for malware to be more cautious about consuming host resources, lest it get noticed by a user or antivirus package.
It's no different than Earthly biology. We think nothing of the colossal number of parasitic microorganisms currently hitching a ride on our metabolism. Some like E. coli are so useful that we even enthusiastically encourage (Yoplait anyone?). Symbiosis carries major advantages along the lines of "division of labor". How many years before real symbiosis is realized among internet-connected computers?
It would also evolve the antivirus landscape. The "OMG sterilize all machines!!!1!" mantra would change into a more relaxed problem: calculate the most efficient amount of CPU cycles to allocate among the competing tasks of:
detect malware through behavior analysis (the current cutting edge)
detect malware through recognition scanning (the tried and true way)
tolerate malware as long as it doesn't eat up too much CPU
This ruling doesn't significantly hurt Google. Alas, it only hurts everyone else -- all billion or so of Google's users. Having quick access to (at least a chunk of) a piece of content, especially when that content has expired or is temporarily unreachable, is convenient and valuable. Many times in my own searches, the piece of data I anxiously sought was available only in the cache.
Let's hope that Google does not respond to the ruling by across-the-board reducing or removing the cache feature.
The restaurant frequently serves people off the street who are linked to all manner of criminal activity.
Fine.
Tomorrow, McDonald's sets up an office in east Compton, California. They assign two employees to the new office, whose stated assignment is to set up the food supply lines for the Cryps during their coming gang war against the Bloods. The Bloods, of course, have already got a dedicated agent from Burger King overseeing their own distribution problems.
Still feel the same?
Don't you just love analogy-fights on slashdot? Can we get a tag for this?
Well some of the world thinks your a crazed bunch of war mongers, but this story, erm, never mind...
You say that like it's a bad thing.
In fact, the best conceivable arrangement of world affairs is to have:
a single uncontested superpower
that everyone believes is a crazed warmonger
but which is actually a massively productive, voraciously consumptive economic force
that rarely* ever actually resorts to violence
In this arrangement, the world will be kept at peace, and stimulated to industrialize, with a minimum of actual violence. The false perception of America's warmongeriness will tend to restrain other would-be bullies... didn't you read Sun-Tzu?
If the world thought America to be a bunch of peaceniks, it would take all of five minutes for the first invasions to start. Starting with Taiwan.
*I say 'rarely' as relative to world history. America is the first uncontested superpower in history that has not immediately invaded all its neighbors in an attempt to feed itself by military conquest.
I've got a kid. And if a little overreaction means the difference between drawing flowers with him and placing flowers on his grave, then I'm all for a little overreaction.
Having a child is the best reason to be cavalier about this. The world is full of risks, and this particular risk (terrorist litebrite bombs) is well on the "might as well worry about being hit by a meteorite" end of the risk spectrum. Yet, tour child is watching your reactions and noting your opinions in order to develop his or her own sense of reasonable.
Furthermore, your child will eventually be living under the heel of the authorities -- the same authorities who are subconsciously but quickly realizing how much control they can take due to incidents like this... and how much fun it is to control others.
So take care when you are tempted to demand a padded world for your child. That kind of safety, at that price, is not a blessing, will not make them usefully safer, and will not cause them to develop fortitude and strength of character.
Just pile some PC's onboard preloaded with WOW. This will 100% ensure that no sex will take place. Other side effects include 0 mission objectives accomplished though. They would land at their destination and never get out of the ship. =)
Yeah but, there's hella lag from Mars to the WoW servers back here on Earth. They'd certainly never survive on a PvP server.
This publicity-stu^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hexperiment is teh crap because:
They need to provide a slider or a dedicated viewer so that we can adjust the dimensions of the picture. Some patterns may only appear at certain widths and lengths. For example, if a pattern is 100 bits wide, it will not overlap itself in an obvious way if the picture frame is 140 pixels wide.
Although human brains are neural networks that specialize in pattern detection, so much so that we even see non-existent patterns (conspiracy theory anyone?), computers are better at this particular kind of detective work. Tell folding@home to crunch the data for a few hours and see if there are any repeats. Or just sic the LZW algorithm on it... LZW long ago mastered the art of finding patterns in large blocks of data.
No matter how good he is, however, a bad result is always a possibility (even if remote). That this woman ended up on the short end of the stick still doesn't affect the validity of her tail -- if only as a warning of what really can go wrong if you're unlucky.
The pictures don't show her tail, so we are unable to judge its validity. How unfortunate.
I will be happy to make myself available to her, on a part-time or full-time basis, in order to perform extended validity-checking on her tail, or her entire body for that matter.
She should immediately travel to my parents' house, and apply in-person at the basement door.
If privatizing the work of NASA works, maybe the same thing could work for the military? Imagine military missions going out to the lowest bidder!
It already implicitly works that way. The hiring of volunteer soldiers at market salary levels, as well as hardware purchases from the market of defense industries, means that the military is collectively composed of the lowest bidders.
The only way to further privatize the situation is to shift control to the private sector... but that is against the very purpose of government -- namely: the public control and restraint of physical force.
Your question should instead be voiced in some country that is still using a draft military. You could reasonably argue that their overall military quality would be improved, while also improving the military's secondary economic effects.
Actually more and more artists, muscians in this case, are turning to the Creative Commons and are uploading their music to services like this one as well as Internet Archives, GoingWare, and Magnatunes amoung others.
Wait until the revenue-sharing systems go mainstream. Then we'll see how excited the artists are to give their stuff away.
Our freedom to play, experiment, share and seek inspiration from the creative works of others is increasingly restricted so that large companies can lock our culture down for their own profit.
If there's profit to be made, then such restrictions are inevitable. And if you're a stockholder (directly or through your 401(k) plan) of these companies, or of any of their downstream companies, you are implicitly counting on it.
If there's not room in the law for such restrictions, then room will be made via the purchase of political influence. It's a numbers game: profit = revenue - (licensing fees + production costs + lobbying costs)
Artists will largely accept this turn of events, because in their view, they've already spent more than enough years starving. Just watch how popular Gootube's click-profit-sharing plan becomes among the producers of original content.
This, then, will be the ultimate cultural revolution. When popularity can instantly stick a price tag onto cultural content, watch for a tide of new artists (now that art can finally be a bread-winning career) as well as an equal tide of consumers flowing towards still-free indy culture.
- How come only your fingers and toes get prune in the shower and nothing else does?
That happens because only dead skin absorbs external water and swells up. Hands and feet tend to be callused, where many layers of dead and dying skin have built up for protection.
They also suggest that the ads may be creating problems at the doctor's office, as some people might become convinced they need a particular medication and insist on getting it, rather than leaving the decision to trained medical professionals.
I'm the ex-wife of a doctor, and I can tell you the inside story about this.
The truth value of the above quote depends very much on what is meant by 'trained'. If your doctor's training occurred thirty years ago, and if he or she doesn't keep up with the latest research, then there could be great benefit from patient knowledge... even if that knowledge is only scant or one-sided.
Very many -- perhaps even most -- senior doctors don't bother to keep abreast of the state of the art. You know how most peoples' minds congeal at around age thirty, because they've "thought enough" and now have it All Figured Out? The same phenomenon occurs with doctors too, of course, but much worse because they already have a deity complex. So, it could well be the case that new research information is flowing like this:
TV commercial -> patient -> doctor
The doctor would then be prompted to read up on some new drug which his or her patients are requesting.
Good-quality doctors are already doing their homework, and I'm sure they're tired of the deluge that washes into their office each time a new drug hits the airwaves during Wheel of Fortune. But we aren't hearing the other half of the story -- about all the doctors who (would never admit that they) hear about new drugs through their patients.
Also, slightly pedantic, but the fuel component of diesel #1 and JetA are the same damn thing, so the article (summary) is kinda mis-leading.
JetA is kerosene is diesel #1. Seeing as how the company is surely aiming at diesel's mass market (trucks), I expect they'll be making diesel #2, not #1.
Diesel #4 is much thicker, for trains and powerplants, but once they've got the production process worked out, I'll bet they could make that too.
I agree with you. I am well aware that Bush's proclamation referred only to the conquering of Iraq's standing army. And I know what a historically unprecedented success it was. There is still room to crack jokes. So go pick your fights somewhere else.
Try telling that to the Commander-in-Chief. Apparently, being only partially done with something is enough for him to declare success,...;-)
Bush must've been a software developer at some point in his career, then.
My boss: "Is the new move-node functionality finished?"
Me: "Well, it's basically working..."
My boss: "It's 'basically working'?"
Me: "Yeah, it can actually move a node now!"
My boss: "So what's left?"
Me: "Oh, just optimization, UI, documentation, test-cases, UMTs, QA, stress-testing, beta..."
That's probably i still go from time to time even when i know i pay more than what its worth.
Assuming that you attach meaning to your words, what you've described is impossible.
And that's the reason why Ebay can justify their inaction against shill-bidding: bidders on Ebay never pay more than they consent to. Shills merely exist to prevent bidders from getting a better price.
You know that the bidders are all hoping to rope that rare item in for $1. While I find the concept of shills to be offensive, and deceptive, it doesn't quite justify going out and finding the nearest tree.
Moron's who try to fight Supply and Demand by messing with supply get no pity from me. Where there is enough demand, and supply is not flat impossible, there will be supply. The only way to prevent the sale of in-game artifacts is to make them non-transferable, and that's never going to happen.
Well said.
In fact, you've said it so well, there's someone here that I want you to talk to. He's not particularly insightful -- indeed, there are a frightening number of things that he simply hasn't thought about -- but he means well. May I introduce John P. Walters, the current US "drug czar". You two will have so much to talk about!
Google bombs don't have much to do with PageRank. They're about link text being abused.
I'm with you on this one, but it also makes me wonder...
The purpose of link text is to impose additional, personal meaning on a link, like this: "Today in the news we learned about Windows monoculture". The "Windows monoculture" link text is my own meaning imposed on the link. Google is, or at least was, putting some trust in that imposition: Google would elevate that slashdot page's ranking under the category of "Windows monoculture", on the assumption that I'm probably not misrepresenting its content.
A google-bombing can therefore occur without any conspiracy: if lots of people imagine themselves witty for jokingly linking the phrase "miserable failure" in their blog to www.whitehouse.gov, the result is an unintiontional google-bombing. And as other posters in this thread have pointed out, there is some truth value to that.
Now we hear that Google is changing this, which means paying less attention to my link text, and instead devoting more computation towards analyzing what the target page is actually saying. I suppose Google is going to read the slashdot page I linked, and decide for itself what it's about rather than taking my word that it's about Windows monoculture. That's got to be computationally expensive.
It's the same general problem as we see in academia with scholarly references. Let's say some guy writes a thesis and uses some other paper as a reference, claiming it lends support to the new theory. We can trust his citation (i.e. Google can trust the link text), or else we can mistrust him and go and dig up the reference text and read it ourself.
Obviously that kind of mistrust is expensive (but isn't all mistrust?)... but after a certain amount of abuse, it's a price we have to pay in order to maintain the same degree of certainty.
As for rethinking, they're doing this all the time at Google. They're constantly updating their ranking algorithms.
Slashdot Mirror
Thus begins the ecology of internet software. CPU cycles are simply too valuable (en masse) for one piece of malware to share with others.
Eventually, look for malware to get better and better and rooting out rival malware in order to take its place. As well, look for malware to be more cautious about consuming host resources, lest it get noticed by a user or antivirus package.
It's no different than Earthly biology. We think nothing of the colossal number of parasitic microorganisms currently hitching a ride on our metabolism. Some like E. coli are so useful that we even enthusiastically encourage (Yoplait anyone?). Symbiosis carries major advantages along the lines of "division of labor". How many years before real symbiosis is realized among internet-connected computers?
It would also evolve the antivirus landscape. The "OMG sterilize all machines!!!1!" mantra would change into a more relaxed problem: calculate the most efficient amount of CPU cycles to allocate among the competing tasks of:
That's how our bodies do it, anyway.
Good answer.
This ruling doesn't significantly hurt Google. Alas, it only hurts everyone else -- all billion or so of Google's users. Having quick access to (at least a chunk of) a piece of content, especially when that content has expired or is temporarily unreachable, is convenient and valuable. Many times in my own searches, the piece of data I anxiously sought was available only in the cache.
Let's hope that Google does not respond to the ruling by across-the-board reducing or removing the cache feature.
Fine.
Tomorrow, McDonald's sets up an office in east Compton, California. They assign two employees to the new office, whose stated assignment is to set up the food supply lines for the Cryps during their coming gang war against the Bloods. The Bloods, of course, have already got a dedicated agent from Burger King overseeing their own distribution problems.
Still feel the same?
Don't you just love analogy-fights on slashdot? Can we get a tag for this?
You say that like it's a bad thing.
In fact, the best conceivable arrangement of world affairs is to have:
In this arrangement, the world will be kept at peace, and stimulated to industrialize, with a minimum of actual violence. The false perception of America's warmongeriness will tend to restrain other would-be bullies... didn't you read Sun-Tzu?
If the world thought America to be a bunch of peaceniks, it would take all of five minutes for the first invasions to start. Starting with Taiwan.
*I say 'rarely' as relative to world history. America is the first uncontested superpower in history that has not immediately invaded all its neighbors in an attempt to feed itself by military conquest.
Having a child is the best reason to be cavalier about this. The world is full of risks, and this particular risk (terrorist litebrite bombs) is well on the "might as well worry about being hit by a meteorite" end of the risk spectrum. Yet, tour child is watching your reactions and noting your opinions in order to develop his or her own sense of reasonable.
Furthermore, your child will eventually be living under the heel of the authorities -- the same authorities who are subconsciously but quickly realizing how much control they can take due to incidents like this... and how much fun it is to control others.
So take care when you are tempted to demand a padded world for your child. That kind of safety, at that price, is not a blessing, will not make them usefully safer, and will not cause them to develop fortitude and strength of character.
Yeah but, there's hella lag from Mars to the WoW servers back here on Earth. They'd certainly never survive on a PvP server.
This publicity-stu^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hexperiment is teh crap because:
The pictures don't show her tail, so we are unable to judge its validity. How unfortunate.
I will be happy to make myself available to her, on a part-time or full-time basis, in order to perform extended validity-checking on her tail, or her entire body for that matter.
She should immediately travel to my parents' house, and apply in-person at the basement door.
It already implicitly works that way. The hiring of volunteer soldiers at market salary levels, as well as hardware purchases from the market of defense industries, means that the military is collectively composed of the lowest bidders.
The only way to further privatize the situation is to shift control to the private sector... but that is against the very purpose of government -- namely: the public control and restraint of physical force.
Your question should instead be voiced in some country that is still using a draft military. You could reasonably argue that their overall military quality would be improved, while also improving the military's secondary economic effects.
Wait until the revenue-sharing systems go mainstream. Then we'll see how excited the artists are to give their stuff away.
Are you sure about that?
They do now.
If there's profit to be made, then such restrictions are inevitable. And if you're a stockholder (directly or through your 401(k) plan) of these companies, or of any of their downstream companies, you are implicitly counting on it.
If there's not room in the law for such restrictions, then room will be made via the purchase of political influence. It's a numbers game: profit = revenue - (licensing fees + production costs + lobbying costs)
Artists will largely accept this turn of events, because in their view, they've already spent more than enough years starving. Just watch how popular Gootube's click-profit-sharing plan becomes among the producers of original content.
This, then, will be the ultimate cultural revolution. When popularity can instantly stick a price tag onto cultural content, watch for a tide of new artists (now that art can finally be a bread-winning career) as well as an equal tide of consumers flowing towards still-free indy culture.
After landing here on Rhene 01-3 (called 'Earth' by the local dominant species), my investigation into this issue led me to the following conclusions:
If the founder of an ideology is still alive, then it's a cult.
If the founder is dead, then it's a religion.
Since the founder L. Ron Hubbard is dead, Scientology is therefore a religion.
:golf clap:
Damnit, where are my mod points when I need them?
That happens because only dead skin absorbs external water and swells up. Hands and feet tend to be callused, where many layers of dead and dying skin have built up for protection.
Ummmm... perform it with an erection? ;)
I'm the ex-wife of a doctor, and I can tell you the inside story about this.
The truth value of the above quote depends very much on what is meant by 'trained'. If your doctor's training occurred thirty years ago, and if he or she doesn't keep up with the latest research, then there could be great benefit from patient knowledge... even if that knowledge is only scant or one-sided.
Very many -- perhaps even most -- senior doctors don't bother to keep abreast of the state of the art. You know how most peoples' minds congeal at around age thirty, because they've "thought enough" and now have it All Figured Out? The same phenomenon occurs with doctors too, of course, but much worse because they already have a deity complex. So, it could well be the case that new research information is flowing like this:
TV commercial -> patient -> doctor
The doctor would then be prompted to read up on some new drug which his or her patients are requesting.
Good-quality doctors are already doing their homework, and I'm sure they're tired of the deluge that washes into their office each time a new drug hits the airwaves during Wheel of Fortune. But we aren't hearing the other half of the story -- about all the doctors who (would never admit that they) hear about new drugs through their patients.
JetA is kerosene is diesel #1. Seeing as how the company is surely aiming at diesel's mass market (trucks), I expect they'll be making diesel #2, not #1.
Diesel #4 is much thicker, for trains and powerplants, but once they've got the production process worked out, I'll bet they could make that too.
I agree with you. I am well aware that Bush's proclamation referred only to the conquering of Iraq's standing army. And I know what a historically unprecedented success it was. There is still room to crack jokes. So go pick your fights somewhere else.
Bush must've been a software developer at some point in his career, then.
My boss: "Is the new move-node functionality finished?"
Me: "Well, it's basically working..."
My boss: "It's 'basically working'?"
Me: "Yeah, it can actually move a node now!"
My boss: "So what's left?"
Me: "Oh, just optimization, UI, documentation, test-cases, UMTs, QA, stress-testing, beta..."
That sounds like a clever way of:
But hey, maybe I'm just being cynical.
Assuming that you attach meaning to your words, what you've described is impossible.
And that's the reason why Ebay can justify their inaction against shill-bidding: bidders on Ebay never pay more than they consent to. Shills merely exist to prevent bidders from getting a better price.
You know that the bidders are all hoping to rope that rare item in for $1. While I find the concept of shills to be offensive, and deceptive, it doesn't quite justify going out and finding the nearest tree.
Your post is sober, cynical, and well thought out. I wish I could mod you "Score:5 Omniscient".
And I wish the world wasn't so horribly complex, such that the social patterns lead to loopholes that are large enough to squeeze a murder through.
Lord knows how I ever got hooked up with this godforsaken species. But hey, when the mothership comes back for me, I'll ask them to take you too.
Well said.
In fact, you've said it so well, there's someone here that I want you to talk to. He's not particularly insightful -- indeed, there are a frightening number of things that he simply hasn't thought about -- but he means well. May I introduce John P. Walters, the current US "drug czar". You two will have so much to talk about!
I'm with you on this one, but it also makes me wonder...
The purpose of link text is to impose additional, personal meaning on a link, like this: "Today in the news we learned about Windows monoculture". The "Windows monoculture" link text is my own meaning imposed on the link. Google is, or at least was, putting some trust in that imposition: Google would elevate that slashdot page's ranking under the category of "Windows monoculture", on the assumption that I'm probably not misrepresenting its content.
A google-bombing can therefore occur without any conspiracy: if lots of people imagine themselves witty for jokingly linking the phrase "miserable failure" in their blog to www.whitehouse.gov, the result is an unintiontional google-bombing. And as other posters in this thread have pointed out, there is some truth value to that.
Now we hear that Google is changing this, which means paying less attention to my link text, and instead devoting more computation towards analyzing what the target page is actually saying. I suppose Google is going to read the slashdot page I linked, and decide for itself what it's about rather than taking my word that it's about Windows monoculture. That's got to be computationally expensive.
It's the same general problem as we see in academia with scholarly references. Let's say some guy writes a thesis and uses some other paper as a reference, claiming it lends support to the new theory. We can trust his citation (i.e. Google can trust the link text), or else we can mistrust him and go and dig up the reference text and read it ourself.
Obviously that kind of mistrust is expensive (but isn't all mistrust?)... but after a certain amount of abuse, it's a price we have to pay in order to maintain the same degree of certainty. As for rethinking, they're doing this all the time at Google. They're constantly updating their ranking algorithms.