From the perspective of cognition this is very interesting stuff, in fact. As everyone knows, four-legged animals make use of multiple gaits: walking and cantering for example. These gaits are dynamic, and there is no such thing as an intermediate gait. Halfway between walking and cantering is called falling down. So an animal has to know how to accomplish a shift between gaits in mid-stride.
So there's already lots going on cognitively here, just with ordinary gaits. Now imagine that misfortune has struck and there is one less limb. What happens, not just kinematically but cognitively? Is the pattern for a preexisting gait reconfigured, or is there some degree of latent capability that wakes up?
The JAXA press release is altogether more interesting, even if it is presented in the dry language of science.
I think that very language is part of its charm. The focus is not on the drama of space flight but on experimental measurement and the inferences made possible by measurement accuracy. Not to discount the you-only-get-one-chance-at-this engineering challenges in a project of this kind, but from a science perspective, that's the real achievement: data which shows acceleration not only taking place but also lying neatly within the predicted range. Nice.
I've been involved with Sun since early days, and intensively with Oracle for the past couple of years.
The two cultures couldn't be more different, especially where support is concerned. It's a good litmus test. Sun would stand behind its products. If something wasn't right, all you had to do was say so and someone who knew what he was talking about would go and fix it. I don't mean that the process was perfect, but there was some agility to it. Oracle seems to stand in front of its products. If something isn't right, the default response is that it must be your fault. I don't know if the support staff are trained to play dumb or gradually get worn down by the Oracle culture, but the effect is the same either way. It's a huge distraction to have to educate the people who are supposed to be providing support, especially when their efforts seem to be bent on looking everywhere but at the issue.
So here's the bottom line. Often we're stuck for one reason or another with a particular product line. The difference is that I was happy to buy millions of dollars of Sun product. I loathe the very thought of having an Oracle product on site.
To expand on the parent comments, none of the scenarios you're describing are DRM. Your first example is patently not. There DRM is neither necessary nor sufficient. You want to provide access to works on your website? Give people accounts and a password. It's done all the time.
DRM is a techology proposed for revoking access to works already in posession of other parties, and as many people have commented, it's prima facie impossible. The problem in crypographic terms is that you're trying to secure a communication between Alice and Bob while preventing eavesdropping by Eve, under the additional constraint that Bob and Eve are the same party at different points in time.
So your first example is not DRM, and your second is nonsensical. What useful purpose is served by trying to impose DRM on works which are in the public domain? You want to "protect" users from accessing the wrong version of these works? Excuse me, that's none of your business!
Now, if you want to ensure that your software will only run against certain versions of data, you can do that. Just sign the data and have the software verify the signature. But that's not DRM.
It seems that most people don't understand the difference between discrete and continuous domains. It's a form of innumeracy which I expect will disappear eventually. Meanwhile, profound misunderstandings can be expected.
Every dramatic depiction of image analysis seems to involve some hero sitting in a darkened room instructing some nameless techie person to process the grainy image from a security camera. "Okay, zoom in on his face. Now enhance. Now zoom in on the license plate number reflected in the eyeglasses. Enhance. There. We got it."
I know, it's been thoroughly parodied. And that's good. But this idiocy still goes on just the same, and people who should know better evidently still fall for it.
It's worth thinking a bit before trying to correct something that was correct in the first place.
It was correct for davebarnes to point out that the word "fewer" is to be used with discrete values such as the number of licenses. And it's correct for the Oxford dictionary to point out that "less" is to be used with continuous values such as mass, time, and distance.
But it's not correct to ignore the distinction between the discrete and continuous domains. Not only is it deeply wrong in a mathematical sense, the distinction is even important in plain old street English.
Back in the days when Bill Gates answered his own emails, I sent him a note asking why Microsoft persistently failed to implement industry norms for secure system design (privilege containment for example.)
His answer? "Customers aren't asking for those features."
From this I concluded that he, and likewise Microsoft, had no interest in taking responsibility for product security, except when it could be monetized around a pain point.
I don't see evidence that Microsoft has significantly changed since then. To my mind, its position is ethically the same as selling heroin to children, while defending the practice by saying that the children "aren't asking not to become addicted."
Now, if someone wants to come along and put up posters explaining exactly how heroin is addictive, I can see how the dealers might object. Why, it could interfere with their business! They might ask for time to make their product less addictive, but it's an open question as to whether their intentions are sincere or just a stalling tactic. (Remember the tobacco industry?)
Meanwhile, I can see no ethical reason why society has any obligation to wait for them. That goes equally for heroin, tobacco, and Microsoft.
From a research perspective, the optimal program is the one with the smallest gap between what you say you're going to do with the funding and what you have to actually do in order to advance science in some rigorous and meaningful way.
This perspective doesn't breed cynicism, it's simply realistic. Much as everyone would like to narrow the gap, criteria for a successful grant proposal are not quite the same as for doing actual science.
This is what I was thinking also. The scenario of twins adds to the set of options that are enumerated, and therefore seems to shift the probability.
But the whole "who was born first" enumeration is a red herring to begin with. It artificially classifies the solution space into a small number of elements in which we're told that one element must be excluded because of the constraint that at least one child is a boy.
It's important to notice that, somewhat like Zeno's Paradox, this subdivision into particular elements is not implied by the problem statement. Who said anything about older and younger? It would be just as valid to consider every possible time delta between the birth of one child and another. This goes to eldavojohn's question about what to do when N is unbounded or unenumerable. In the limit, the excluded element has no weight, and the probability converges to 1/2 as intuition suggests.
Agreed, at least provisionally. A telescope is an instrument which "sees" objects at a "distance". Whether the mechanism is optical or otherwise is not the point, it's how effectively the device can give us information about specific distant objects.
This array is more like a scintillation counter. It measures local phenomena. Perhaps, opportunistically, it could be used to infer something about distant objects, but in that sense it's still no more a telescope than a light bulb is a power meter.
Nah. Microsoft seems pathologically unable to acknowledge the possibility of an objective standard.
A few browsers which more or less by accident behave similarly, now that's a vision that Microsoft can get behind! That situation can be manipulated. Objective standards, on the other hand, are the enemy of relativism.
Yeah, there's just this tiny little gap between basic science research and a complete industry based around the technology which may ultimately result.
Sheesh, kids, the world isn't like in comic books.
I don't think anyone would suppose that two solar cycles would both be an exact multiple of the Earth's orbital period.
Follow the Wikipedia link I supplied and you'll see that these cycles are in fact quite variable. Oh, and in fact it's just once cycle. Solar flares don't care about the sign of the magenetic flux, just the magnitude.
Anyway, the point is that the article quite badly misrepresents the magnitude of this big event as being due to a momentary synchronization between the two cycles, whereas the synchronization is constant. What would cause an especially large heliomagnetic storm in 2013? We're not told.
Every 22 years the Sun’s magnetic energy cycle peaks while the number of sun spots – or flares – hits a maximum level every 11 years.
If you read the article, you may have noticed that the quality of writing leaves much to be desired. For example, "The flares change the magnetic field on the earth that is rapid and like a lightning bolt. That is the solar affect.”
The article goes on to claim that these two cycles will "combine in 2013 to produce huge levels of radiation." This claim implies that the two cycles are independent.
My understanding is that these are simply different manifestations of the same cycle. So I agree with you, there's no credible explanation here.
Firefox can't prevent a process with elevated privileges from making configuration changes to an existing Firefox installation, that's true.
It could, however, provide an option which requires the user to sign every extension and plugin that the user wants to install or update.
The only way a rogue process could imitate this effect would be to capture keystrokes. And subverting that sort of security would be no "accident". It's the sort of thing that would lead to lawsuits.
The article says "here's the math" and then proceeds to offer an example involving not math but arithmetic.
Whether the fuel consumption ratio is expressed in distance per volume or its inverse is not as important as the simple recognition that it's a ratio. But when people blithely speak in terms such as "five times less" there is bound to be a fundamental confusion between ratios and differences.
They probably also don't do tests when the patient has not been clearly identified on the requisition.
In other words, this is just another among many procedural details that professionals understand have to be followed. They may or not personally agree with the value of some of those details, but they comply anyway. It goes with the job.
Writing "please" is considerably less of a hardship than filling out a justification of why a given procedure has to be done on the weekend, when administrators know that it creates an increased risk of displacing some other procedure that might be more vital.
It's marginally more of a hardship than ticking a checkbox that says "high priority". But I think I could handle it. And it stands to reason that not everything can be a high priority.
Right. That's why there's no longer any market for third-party virus checking on the Windows platform.
And all those idiotic corporate restrictions on email attachments can go, too. That'll be a great relief, because right now I can't even attach a zipfile without Outlook complaining about it.
And those flashes of screen content that appear when I reconnect to a locked Remote Terminal session, those are just in my imagination. No information exposure there, any more. Good, cause that was really stupid. Wait, I'd better check. Nope, still there.
And those irritating and needless messages requesting permission after I've launched an Active Directory management window, those are gone too, right? Because now the system has finally caught up to the X Window System technology available back in 1993?
Oh, no. Actually, I just checked, and it hasn't.
Wow, Microsoft. I am impressed. You actually drank the kool-aid to prove that it was harmless. Except that it's not.
Slashdot Mirror
Come on, you have to admit that's a pretty clever design element.
Imagine if the entire sail surface could be selectively modulated in this way.
From the perspective of cognition this is very interesting stuff, in fact. As everyone knows, four-legged animals make use of multiple gaits: walking and cantering for example. These gaits are dynamic, and there is no such thing as an intermediate gait. Halfway between walking and cantering is called falling down. So an animal has to know how to accomplish a shift between gaits in mid-stride.
So there's already lots going on cognitively here, just with ordinary gaits. Now imagine that misfortune has struck and there is one less limb. What happens, not just kinematically but cognitively? Is the pattern for a preexisting gait reconfigured, or is there some degree of latent capability that wakes up?
The JAXA press release is altogether more interesting, even if it is presented in the dry language of science.
I think that very language is part of its charm. The focus is not on the drama of space flight but on experimental measurement and the inferences made possible by measurement accuracy. Not to discount the you-only-get-one-chance-at-this engineering challenges in a project of this kind, but from a science perspective, that's the real achievement: data which shows acceleration not only taking place but also lying neatly within the predicted range. Nice.
Ew. Now that you put it that way...
Why does Microsoft not get that stuff like this is seriously cheesy?
I've been involved with Sun since early days, and intensively with Oracle for the past couple of years.
The two cultures couldn't be more different, especially where support is concerned. It's a good litmus test. Sun would stand behind its products. If something wasn't right, all you had to do was say so and someone who knew what he was talking about would go and fix it. I don't mean that the process was perfect, but there was some agility to it. Oracle seems to stand in front of its products. If something isn't right, the default response is that it must be your fault. I don't know if the support staff are trained to play dumb or gradually get worn down by the Oracle culture, but the effect is the same either way. It's a huge distraction to have to educate the people who are supposed to be providing support, especially when their efforts seem to be bent on looking everywhere but at the issue.
So here's the bottom line. Often we're stuck for one reason or another with a particular product line. The difference is that I was happy to buy millions of dollars of Sun product. I loathe the very thought of having an Oracle product on site.
To expand on the parent comments, none of the scenarios you're describing are DRM. Your first example is patently not. There DRM is neither necessary nor sufficient. You want to provide access to works on your website? Give people accounts and a password. It's done all the time.
DRM is a techology proposed for revoking access to works already in posession of other parties, and as many people have commented, it's prima facie impossible. The problem in crypographic terms is that you're trying to secure a communication between Alice and Bob while preventing eavesdropping by Eve, under the additional constraint that Bob and Eve are the same party at different points in time.
So your first example is not DRM, and your second is nonsensical. What useful purpose is served by trying to impose DRM on works which are in the public domain? You want to "protect" users from accessing the wrong version of these works? Excuse me, that's none of your business!
Now, if you want to ensure that your software will only run against certain versions of data, you can do that. Just sign the data and have the software verify the signature. But that's not DRM.
Couldn't agree more. There is no need to engineer in favor of computer illiteracy.
It seems that most people don't understand the difference between discrete and continuous domains. It's a form of innumeracy which I expect will disappear eventually. Meanwhile, profound misunderstandings can be expected.
Every dramatic depiction of image analysis seems to involve some hero sitting in a darkened room instructing some nameless techie person to process the grainy image from a security camera. "Okay, zoom in on his face. Now enhance. Now zoom in on the license plate number reflected in the eyeglasses. Enhance. There. We got it."
I know, it's been thoroughly parodied. And that's good. But this idiocy still goes on just the same, and people who should know better evidently still fall for it.
It's worth thinking a bit before trying to correct something that was correct in the first place.
It was correct for davebarnes to point out that the word "fewer" is to be used with discrete values such as the number of licenses. And it's correct for the Oxford dictionary to point out that "less" is to be used with continuous values such as mass, time, and distance.
But it's not correct to ignore the distinction between the discrete and continuous domains. Not only is it deeply wrong in a mathematical sense, the distinction is even important in plain old street English.
I have to agree.
Back in the days when Bill Gates answered his own emails, I sent him a note asking why Microsoft persistently failed to implement industry norms for secure system design (privilege containment for example.)
His answer? "Customers aren't asking for those features."
From this I concluded that he, and likewise Microsoft, had no interest in taking responsibility for product security, except when it could be monetized around a pain point.
I don't see evidence that Microsoft has significantly changed since then. To my mind, its position is ethically the same as selling heroin to children, while defending the practice by saying that the children "aren't asking not to become addicted."
Now, if someone wants to come along and put up posters explaining exactly how heroin is addictive, I can see how the dealers might object. Why, it could interfere with their business! They might ask for time to make their product less addictive, but it's an open question as to whether their intentions are sincere or just a stalling tactic. (Remember the tobacco industry?)
Meanwhile, I can see no ethical reason why society has any obligation to wait for them. That goes equally for heroin, tobacco, and Microsoft.
I've seen a lot of what you have described.
From a research perspective, the optimal program is the one with the smallest gap between what you say you're going to do with the funding and what you have to actually do in order to advance science in some rigorous and meaningful way.
This perspective doesn't breed cynicism, it's simply realistic. Much as everyone would like to narrow the gap, criteria for a successful grant proposal are not quite the same as for doing actual science.
This is what I was thinking also. The scenario of twins adds to the set of options that are enumerated, and therefore seems to shift the probability.
But the whole "who was born first" enumeration is a red herring to begin with. It artificially classifies the solution space into a small number of elements in which we're told that one element must be excluded because of the constraint that at least one child is a boy.
It's important to notice that, somewhat like Zeno's Paradox, this subdivision into particular elements is not implied by the problem statement. Who said anything about older and younger? It would be just as valid to consider every possible time delta between the birth of one child and another. This goes to eldavojohn's question about what to do when N is unbounded or unenumerable. In the limit, the excluded element has no weight, and the probability converges to 1/2 as intuition suggests.
Agreed, at least provisionally. A telescope is an instrument which "sees" objects at a "distance". Whether the mechanism is optical or otherwise is not the point, it's how effectively the device can give us information about specific distant objects.
This array is more like a scintillation counter. It measures local phenomena. Perhaps, opportunistically, it could be used to infer something about distant objects, but in that sense it's still no more a telescope than a light bulb is a power meter.
Nah. Microsoft seems pathologically unable to acknowledge the possibility of an objective standard.
A few browsers which more or less by accident behave similarly, now that's a vision that Microsoft can get behind! That situation can be manipulated. Objective standards, on the other hand, are the enemy of relativism.
Yeah, there's just this tiny little gap between basic science research and a complete industry based around the technology which may ultimately result.
Sheesh, kids, the world isn't like in comic books.
I don't think anyone would suppose that two solar cycles would both be an exact multiple of the Earth's orbital period.
Follow the Wikipedia link I supplied and you'll see that these cycles are in fact quite variable. Oh, and in fact it's just once cycle. Solar flares don't care about the sign of the magenetic flux, just the magnitude.
Anyway, the point is that the article quite badly misrepresents the magnitude of this big event as being due to a momentary synchronization between the two cycles, whereas the synchronization is constant. What would cause an especially large heliomagnetic storm in 2013? We're not told.
My favorite has gotta be:
"The flares change the magnetic field on the earth that is rapid and like a lightning bolt. That is the solar affect."
I'm seriously surprised that the writer didn't spell that as "lightening".
From the article:
Every 22 years the Sun’s magnetic energy cycle peaks while the number of sun spots – or flares – hits a maximum level every 11 years.
If you read the article, you may have noticed that the quality of writing leaves much to be desired. For example, "The flares change the magnetic field on the earth that is rapid and like a lightning bolt. That is the solar affect.”
The article goes on to claim that these two cycles will "combine in 2013 to produce huge levels of radiation." This claim implies that the two cycles are independent.
My understanding is that these are simply different manifestations of the same cycle. So I agree with you, there's no credible explanation here.
See here for a more credible treatment.
From the business perspective, yes, sales is more important. It doesn't really matter if you make crap so long as people buy it.
I knew there must be a reason why I'm not naturally drawn to business. Thanks for reminding me!
Firefox can't prevent a process with elevated privileges from making configuration changes to an existing Firefox installation, that's true.
It could, however, provide an option which requires the user to sign every extension and plugin that the user wants to install or update.
The only way a rogue process could imitate this effect would be to capture keystrokes. And subverting that sort of security would be no "accident". It's the sort of thing that would lead to lawsuits.
They're also kinda bad at pluralization.
The article says "here's the math" and then proceeds to offer an example involving not math but arithmetic.
Whether the fuel consumption ratio is expressed in distance per volume or its inverse is not as important as the simple recognition that it's a ratio. But when people blithely speak in terms such as "five times less" there is bound to be a fundamental confusion between ratios and differences.
They probably also don't do tests when the patient has not been clearly identified on the requisition.
In other words, this is just another among many procedural details that professionals understand have to be followed. They may or not personally agree with the value of some of those details, but they comply anyway. It goes with the job.
Writing "please" is considerably less of a hardship than filling out a justification of why a given procedure has to be done on the weekend, when administrators know that it creates an increased risk of displacing some other procedure that might be more vital.
It's marginally more of a hardship than ticking a checkbox that says "high priority". But I think I could handle it. And it stands to reason that not everything can be a high priority.
Right. That's why there's no longer any market for third-party virus checking on the Windows platform.
And all those idiotic corporate restrictions on email attachments can go, too. That'll be a great relief, because right now I can't even attach a zipfile without Outlook complaining about it.
And those flashes of screen content that appear when I reconnect to a locked Remote Terminal session, those are just in my imagination. No information exposure there, any more. Good, cause that was really stupid. Wait, I'd better check. Nope, still there.
And those irritating and needless messages requesting permission after I've launched an Active Directory management window, those are gone too, right? Because now the system has finally caught up to the X Window System technology available back in 1993?
Oh, no. Actually, I just checked, and it hasn't.
Wow, Microsoft. I am impressed. You actually drank the kool-aid to prove that it was harmless. Except that it's not.