MS has decided to build a video player with a big, color LCD screen. This is what makes the larger size and weight necessary, while simultaneously making the device more fragile and limiting battery life.
Reviewers are unpaid, but the coordination of the review process is a logistical nightmare (in part because reviewers are unpaid), managed by a (usually) paid editor and a paid professional staff. And remember, having a staff involves not only salaries, but resourse overhead (office space, computer resources, etc.).
to disseminate knowledge and share it with the rest of the world?
Not the whole point, no. Information dissemination is one of the two major goals accomplished by the current academic publication system. The second is peer review. Journal editors and their staffs manage the peer review process: they find reviewers (often a rather arduous process), disseminate submitted papers to them, receive and evaluate the reviews, and make the final editorial decision on the inclusion of the paper. All of this takes time and money. Peer review is the gatekeeper for the scientific method: science fails without multiple, objective evaluations of the quality and merit of research. It's how we keep the S/N ratio high.
I'm not so sure about your Ancient Greek there, jkujawa. It seems the word that you're thinking of would be somethign like "homosection"; the dissection of something by something else of the same class. The "auto" in "autopsy" is self-reflective, meaning something on the order of "oneself". To perform an "autosection" would be to dissect oneself. The other half of "autopsy", "psy", is a truncation of the Greek "psia", which in another from becomes the "pti" in "optic"--it means "to see". The verb "autopsy" means "to see with one's own eyes"; as a noun, it would be "the act of seeing with one's own eyes", as in the (in)famous film by Stan Brakhage.
Try doing that with any two of the languages I just mentioned above.
Hindi and Urdu are actually very similar. They're written with different scripts, but, in their spoken forms, they're essentially just different dialects of the same language.
I read the full article about how the Chinese government in Singapore is violating people's right to privacy by placing a webcam in people's homes.
China != Singapore. Singapore is an independant state with its own (authoritarian) government. A majority of Singaporeans are ethnically Chinese, but there are also large Malay and Indian ethnic groups.
The author seems to agree with you wholeheartedly, writing:
...it's technically impossible to give someone a piece of information without also empowering them to redistribute that information. If you could, it wouldn't be information. Encryption is fine for the digital connection, but the digital connection was already the secure part of the link. Garrett's expectations of privacy were compromised between the seat and the keyboard; the same place every technically foolproof scheme fails.
As for QM itself--still strikes me as a bunch of overthinking on the researcher's part, that explains very little and is practically useful for even less.
This is a staggeringly ignorant statement. You should have attempted to educate yourself before writing something like that; it makes everything else you write that much easier to dismiss. Quantum mechanics is at the core of contemporary science. All of modern chemistry, for instance, comes into focus only when viewed through the lens of quantum mechanics: there is no understanding of the chemical bond without an understanding of the quantum behavior of electrons in the potential well of a nucleus. Without QM, there is no nuclear power, no NMR spectroscopy or MRI diagnosis, no electron microscopy, no semiconductor technology (and therefore no computers), no lasers. The practical implications of basic research into quantum mechanics have been immense, and this basic research serves as the foundation upon which our modern technological world rests. Learn to appreciate the shoulders of the giants upon which you are standing as you type away at that computer keyboard!
And if Bohr, Schroedinger, and Heisenberg were overthinking, I'd like to hear your simple, common-sense, high school solution to the problem of the quantized interaction between light and matter. 'Cause the interaction is quantized, and no amount of complaining about how difficult the math gets is going to change that simple (yes, simple!) fact.
Actually, aren't classical mechanics still accurate, if you limit "objects" to non-quantum levels of mass, and include quantum randomness as a "force"?
No. The flaws in Newtonian gravitation addressed by Einstein's theory of general relativity have nothing to do with quantum mechanics--general relativity addresses big stuff (planets, stars, galaxies). Similarly, the mechanics of special relativity are independant of quantum phenomena.
I agree with your take on this, with one caveat. Clearly, there's a difference between "percent by time" and "percent by volume" (It would actually be better to just call that second one "percent by data" or "percent by bandwidth", since "volume" means something else altogether). It's like the distinctions between mole percent, weight percent, and volume percent in chemistry. What's completely unnecessary, however, is stating the unit. Percent by bandwidth in gigabytes would be the same as percent by bandwidth in petabytes or percent by bandwidth in bytes--the unit doesn't matter. That's why this little turn of phrase comes out sounding ignorant.
Me, I'd never own a car if I lived in Seattle itself, but that's just me.
Well, it might be practical to go without a car if you lived downtown or on Capital Hill, but given the current state of affairs with mass transit in the city, living in any other neighborhood would suck. Unless you were a very avid bicyclist who didn't mind the rain, that is. You be stuck with either long bus rides at rush hour or infrequent stops on off hours. And forget staying out late, 'cause most bus routes stop running. Plus, parking isn't really much of an issue outside of the more crowded areas of the city.
Maybe you're right; but I still don't think it would be that easy. After all, even if you give your insurance company a separate garage address, you still have to give them a home address at which the car is registered, don't you? I'm thinking they wouldn't be so happy about getting a fake home address. Insurance is relevant to tax fraud simply because avoiding the tax would involve lying about your address on your vehicle registration, which would amount to giving the insurance company a fraudulent home address. Maybe it's easier than I think, but it seems to me that the added complication of dealing with the insurance company makes avoiding the tax pretty difficult. Plus, it seems that if you ever got into an accident and had to collect, there would be a chance of this all coming out, which would be a shitstorm, potentially. I'm pretty risk-adverse though, so maybe I'm just being paranoid.
I guess these eight neighborhoods somehow deserve more than the rest.
Well, since it's pretty much impossible to build a massive rapid transit system that serves the whole city at once, it makes since to start with the most dense areas. Would you suggest that the first lines be built in places where nobody lives? How would this be sensible policy?
It's not too hard to list any address in the world on a car purchase.
See my responses elsewhere. It would be insurance fraud, which the insurance companies take an active role in preventing. It would be damn difficult.
And it's not charged to "all residents" it's charged to those who aren't rich enough to buy a new car every year.
Yeah, that 0.001% of the population is going to put a huge dent in the revenue stream.
There's no solution except for the people rich enough to live in the highest priced housing in the Puget Sound.
Ballard and West Seattle each contain a good amount of moderately-priced housing. There's been a recent push to build up density downtown with low-income housing. The highest priced housing in the Puget Sound area is on Mercer Island, isn't it? Plus, plans are to expand the monorail to provide service to the whole city. You have to start somewhere, though.
A couple dozen at most. The thing is, there's already a check on that kind of fraud--insurance companies. Since rates are based on the home address of the owner of the vehicle, insurance companies take a pretty serious interest in making sure that cars are registered at the proper address. Yeah, I'm sure people try to trick the insurance companies, but I doubt it's an epidemic. After all, you need a credit report to get insurance, so you'd have to create an entire fake identity at the alternate address in order to make it work. Plus the checks or credit card you use to pay for the insurance would have to have the right (fake) address. It would be a massive pain in the ass, and break all sorts of laws.
Registering it to you at the address of your friend in Auburn isn't, however.
Yeah, well that's also fraud. If you ever had to collect on your insurance, you'd be in pretty deep shit. Plus you'd be an asshole, pulling in a friend as a conspirator in an insurance/tax fraud scam.
First, you still haven't shown that the monorail doesn't service anything more than the two areas as stated before.
There will be stops in West Seattle, SoDo, Pioneer Square, downtown, Belltown, the Seattle Center, Queen Anne, and Ballard. In what universe is this "two areas"? I count at least eight neighborhoods served, including the most densely populated neighborhoods in the city.
Fourth, those who want to save money buying a relatively new used $40,000 car aren't going to be willing to lose money on a local tax. They'll just drive where the prices are cheaper. I mean this has to be the most silly tax I've ever heard of. People who buy used cars want to save money. For them, it's worth it to go elsewhere.
Huh? Do you think it's a sales tax? It's not a sales tax: it's an 1.4% annual motor vehicle excise tax charged to all residents of the city. Are you suggesting people will move to avoid it? Moving is damn expensive, you know.
Driving from Northgate, Southcenter, the east side, or anywhere else to down town takes on the order of 40 minutes to an hour. Taking the bus from either of these locations will take at least an hour and a half.
Which is exactly why we need a viable rapid transit option that runs above grade, where traffic isn't an issue.
I'm sorry Lewis, but I'm having a very difficult time trying to understand you. When you say "There is a big difference between open and closed source for an OS.", do you mean that one is significantly more secure than the other? If so, why?
My interpretation of your original argument is as follows: since code is available for open source operating systems, hackers can modify this code and install the modified code in systems they've accessed (physically or remotely) to gain information about the system and network. This is a classic trojan attack, and it's been implemented against a wide array of operating systems, closed and open source. Closed source utilities are typically modified via standard reverse engineering techniques. It is more tricky to modify a utility that you don't have the source to, but not significantly more tricky. Remember, modifications to an open source utility have to keep that utility working and compatible, which can be a nontrivial engineering problem. Plus, there are plenty of ready-to-install trojans out there for all sorts of operating systems. A good sysadmin will guard against trojan attacks by running an intrusion detector.
Also, are you arguing that open source has an advantage because a sysadmin deploying an open OS can gain some obscurity advantage by altering the system code and recompiling? This might be possible, but it would be stupid. The slight advantage gained in having a slightly different OS would be overweighed by the loss of the support of developers on the main code branch. Bugs that you introduce in modifying the OS don't get fixed, and fixes for existing bugs are no longer compatible with your modified OS.
I would argue that from a security point of view, the main difference in open and closed source comes from the development process. Many eyes, shallow bugs, and all that.
Slashdot Mirror
Same thing just happened to me. I wonder...
MS has decided to build a video player with a big, color LCD screen. This is what makes the larger size and weight necessary, while simultaneously making the device more fragile and limiting battery life.
Reviewers are unpaid, but the coordination of the review process is a logistical nightmare (in part because reviewers are unpaid), managed by a (usually) paid editor and a paid professional staff. And remember, having a staff involves not only salaries, but resourse overhead (office space, computer resources, etc.).
to disseminate knowledge and share it with the rest of the world?
Not the whole point, no. Information dissemination is one of the two major goals accomplished by the current academic publication system. The second is peer review. Journal editors and their staffs manage the peer review process: they find reviewers (often a rather arduous process), disseminate submitted papers to them, receive and evaluate the reviews, and make the final editorial decision on the inclusion of the paper. All of this takes time and money. Peer review is the gatekeeper for the scientific method: science fails without multiple, objective evaluations of the quality and merit of research. It's how we keep the S/N ratio high.
I'm not so sure about your Ancient Greek there, jkujawa. It seems the word that you're thinking of would be somethign like "homosection"; the dissection of something by something else of the same class. The "auto" in "autopsy" is self-reflective, meaning something on the order of "oneself". To perform an "autosection" would be to dissect oneself. The other half of "autopsy", "psy", is a truncation of the Greek "psia", which in another from becomes the "pti" in "optic"--it means "to see". The verb "autopsy" means "to see with one's own eyes"; as a noun, it would be "the act of seeing with one's own eyes", as in the (in)famous film by Stan Brakhage.
Isn't the $600 million a government estimate of cost as well?
Try doing that with any two of the languages I just mentioned above.
Hindi and Urdu are actually very similar. They're written with different scripts, but, in their spoken forms, they're essentially just different dialects of the same language.
Isn't SCO (the Santa Cruz Operation) based in California?
This paper appears to have been published on the ETC group's own imprint, and not subjected to peer review. Take it with a grain of salt.
I read the full article about how the Chinese government in Singapore is violating people's right to privacy by placing a webcam in people's homes.
China != Singapore. Singapore is an independant state with its own (authoritarian) government. A majority of Singaporeans are ethnically Chinese, but there are also large Malay and Indian ethnic groups.
The author seems to agree with you wholeheartedly, writing:
...it's technically impossible to give someone a piece of information without also empowering them to redistribute that information. If you could, it wouldn't be information. Encryption is fine for the digital connection, but the digital connection was already the secure part of the link. Garrett's expectations of privacy were compromised between the seat and the keyboard; the same place every technically foolproof scheme fails.
If the drive is dead (i.e. it won't spin up), you're not going to be able to write anything to it, not even random bits.
As for QM itself--still strikes me as a bunch of overthinking on the researcher's part, that explains very little and is practically useful for even less.
This is a staggeringly ignorant statement. You should have attempted to educate yourself before writing something like that; it makes everything else you write that much easier to dismiss. Quantum mechanics is at the core of contemporary science. All of modern chemistry, for instance, comes into focus only when viewed through the lens of quantum mechanics: there is no understanding of the chemical bond without an understanding of the quantum behavior of electrons in the potential well of a nucleus. Without QM, there is no nuclear power, no NMR spectroscopy or MRI diagnosis, no electron microscopy, no semiconductor technology (and therefore no computers), no lasers. The practical implications of basic research into quantum mechanics have been immense, and this basic research serves as the foundation upon which our modern technological world rests. Learn to appreciate the shoulders of the giants upon which you are standing as you type away at that computer keyboard!
And if Bohr, Schroedinger, and Heisenberg were overthinking, I'd like to hear your simple, common-sense, high school solution to the problem of the quantized interaction between light and matter. 'Cause the interaction is quantized, and no amount of complaining about how difficult the math gets is going to change that simple (yes, simple!) fact.
Actually, aren't classical mechanics still accurate, if you limit "objects" to non-quantum levels of mass, and include quantum randomness as a "force"?
No. The flaws in Newtonian gravitation addressed by Einstein's theory of general relativity have nothing to do with quantum mechanics--general relativity addresses big stuff (planets, stars, galaxies). Similarly, the mechanics of special relativity are independant of quantum phenomena.
I agree with your take on this, with one caveat. Clearly, there's a difference between "percent by time" and "percent by volume" (It would actually be better to just call that second one "percent by data" or "percent by bandwidth", since "volume" means something else altogether). It's like the distinctions between mole percent, weight percent, and volume percent in chemistry. What's completely unnecessary, however, is stating the unit. Percent by bandwidth in gigabytes would be the same as percent by bandwidth in petabytes or percent by bandwidth in bytes--the unit doesn't matter. That's why this little turn of phrase comes out sounding ignorant.
Me, I'd never own a car if I lived in Seattle itself, but that's just me.
Well, it might be practical to go without a car if you lived downtown or on Capital Hill, but given the current state of affairs with mass transit in the city, living in any other neighborhood would suck. Unless you were a very avid bicyclist who didn't mind the rain, that is. You be stuck with either long bus rides at rush hour or infrequent stops on off hours. And forget staying out late, 'cause most bus routes stop running. Plus, parking isn't really much of an issue outside of the more crowded areas of the city.
Maybe you're right; but I still don't think it would be that easy. After all, even if you give your insurance company a separate garage address, you still have to give them a home address at which the car is registered, don't you? I'm thinking they wouldn't be so happy about getting a fake home address. Insurance is relevant to tax fraud simply because avoiding the tax would involve lying about your address on your vehicle registration, which would amount to giving the insurance company a fraudulent home address. Maybe it's easier than I think, but it seems to me that the added complication of dealing with the insurance company makes avoiding the tax pretty difficult. Plus, it seems that if you ever got into an accident and had to collect, there would be a chance of this all coming out, which would be a shitstorm, potentially. I'm pretty risk-adverse though, so maybe I'm just being paranoid.
I guess these eight neighborhoods somehow deserve more than the rest.
Well, since it's pretty much impossible to build a massive rapid transit system that serves the whole city at once, it makes since to start with the most dense areas. Would you suggest that the first lines be built in places where nobody lives? How would this be sensible policy?
It's not too hard to list any address in the world on a car purchase.
See my responses elsewhere. It would be insurance fraud, which the insurance companies take an active role in preventing. It would be damn difficult.
And it's not charged to "all residents" it's charged to those who aren't rich enough to buy a new car every year.
Yeah, that 0.001% of the population is going to put a huge dent in the revenue stream.
There's no solution except for the people rich enough to live in the highest priced housing in the Puget Sound.
Ballard and West Seattle each contain a good amount of moderately-priced housing. There's been a recent push to build up density downtown with low-income housing. The highest priced housing in the Puget Sound area is on Mercer Island, isn't it? Plus, plans are to expand the monorail to provide service to the whole city. You have to start somewhere, though.
A couple dozen at most. The thing is, there's already a check on that kind of fraud--insurance companies. Since rates are based on the home address of the owner of the vehicle, insurance companies take a pretty serious interest in making sure that cars are registered at the proper address. Yeah, I'm sure people try to trick the insurance companies, but I doubt it's an epidemic. After all, you need a credit report to get insurance, so you'd have to create an entire fake identity at the alternate address in order to make it work. Plus the checks or credit card you use to pay for the insurance would have to have the right (fake) address. It would be a massive pain in the ass, and break all sorts of laws.
Registering it to you at the address of your friend in Auburn isn't, however.
Yeah, well that's also fraud. If you ever had to collect on your insurance, you'd be in pretty deep shit. Plus you'd be an asshole, pulling in a friend as a conspirator in an insurance/tax fraud scam.
First, you still haven't shown that the monorail doesn't service anything more than the two areas as stated before.
There will be stops in West Seattle, SoDo, Pioneer Square, downtown, Belltown, the Seattle Center, Queen Anne, and Ballard. In what universe is this "two areas"? I count at least eight neighborhoods served, including the most densely populated neighborhoods in the city.
Fourth, those who want to save money buying a relatively new used $40,000 car aren't going to be willing to lose money on a local tax. They'll just drive where the prices are cheaper. I mean this has to be the most silly tax I've ever heard of. People who buy used cars want to save money. For them, it's worth it to go elsewhere.
Huh? Do you think it's a sales tax? It's not a sales tax: it's an 1.4% annual motor vehicle excise tax charged to all residents of the city. Are you suggesting people will move to avoid it? Moving is damn expensive, you know.
Driving from Northgate, Southcenter, the east side, or anywhere else to down town takes on the order of 40 minutes to an hour. Taking the bus from either of these locations will take at least an hour and a half.
Which is exactly why we need a viable rapid transit option that runs above grade, where traffic isn't an issue.
The iPod doesn't have a solid state hard drive. (That would be cool though, wouldn't it?)
Remember, the density of the actual "black hole" is mass over area -- mass doesn't matter, because the area is zero.
mass/area is thus infinite density, which you cannot obtain with your star cluster. Sorry.
Volume, not area (at least in the three spatial dimensions of this universe!).
It's right. The quoted verses are from the King James Version. You can find an online copy of the book of Ezekiel here.
I'm sorry Lewis, but I'm having a very difficult time trying to understand you. When you say "There is a big difference between open and closed source for an OS.", do you mean that one is significantly more secure than the other? If so, why?
My interpretation of your original argument is as follows: since code is available for open source operating systems, hackers can modify this code and install the modified code in systems they've accessed (physically or remotely) to gain information about the system and network. This is a classic trojan attack, and it's been implemented against a wide array of operating systems, closed and open source. Closed source utilities are typically modified via standard reverse engineering techniques. It is more tricky to modify a utility that you don't have the source to, but not significantly more tricky. Remember, modifications to an open source utility have to keep that utility working and compatible, which can be a nontrivial engineering problem. Plus, there are plenty of ready-to-install trojans out there for all sorts of operating systems. A good sysadmin will guard against trojan attacks by running an intrusion detector.
Also, are you arguing that open source has an advantage because a sysadmin deploying an open OS can gain some obscurity advantage by altering the system code and recompiling? This might be possible, but it would be stupid. The slight advantage gained in having a slightly different OS would be overweighed by the loss of the support of developers on the main code branch. Bugs that you introduce in modifying the OS don't get fixed, and fixes for existing bugs are no longer compatible with your modified OS.
I would argue that from a security point of view, the main difference in open and closed source comes from the development process. Many eyes, shallow bugs, and all that.