For just a moment I had some sympathy for the music industry -- it's hard to compete on a price basis with free, and all the money comes right out of profit, since anything that isn't profit isn't reduceable.
Then you mentioned The White Album being $45 and every bit of my sympathy evaporated, especially when I remembered a Stephane Pompougnac (sp?) album I want, that seems to cost about $40 as well. Let's hear it for competition.
Not only that, but also humans are fantastic at post-decision rationalization. We'll tell ourselves we decided something for good, logical reasons, and even make some up and convince ourselves that's why we chose things, but psychologists that spend a lot of time watching people, claim that most of the time even when people give reasons for their choices, it's likely those reasons don't have much to do with their choices. Another way of putting the Carnegie claim, which I base on having read books like "The Paradox Of Choice" by Barry Schwartz and the research on which Malcolm Gladwell based "Blink" is that we've probably made our decision within a tenth of a second of being offered a choice, and the rest of the time we spend choosing, is spent second-guessing and rationalizing that decision -- we're trying to decide whether an instinctive, pattern-matching, non-rational reaction was correct or not, and generally speaking, we decide it's correct.
When you say "Hardy Heron" or particularly "Feisty Fawn" the first thing that leaps into many people's minds is "Mickey Mouse" and "Donald Duck". I've tried free-association tests with people to check this: y'know, "say the first thing that comes into your head when I say $x." Not scientific, I admit: *I* know what I'm asking, and I'm asking people like my grandmother and the little old lady who lives across the street.
You're right, though: the presenter should leave codenames at home and discuss the version major/minor number. But what if the presentees are somewhat familiar with the subject? All it takes is one "oh, yeah, that's the one they call 'The GIMP', right?" and a lot of your effectiveness has just walked out the door.
I start off by apologizing for my unwarranted crabbiness: I'm in the middle of fighting exactly this fight at work and it sucks. We, by which I mean open-source advocates, are losing business and credibility because we don't have focus groups, and while it galls me more than I can say, I don't think we *can* win hearts/minds without market research.
You're entirely right, and that's what sucks: linux is by people who are doing it for fun, for people who are doing it for fun, and the only reason to be all serious and markety about it is if you want to take over the world. They don't. But it hurts everyone, by association. I'm not saying shareware developers have any obligation towards giving things serious, boring names, but boy would it make things easier trying to get them accepted by people who claim to only be interested in results, but are actually strongly influenced by appearances.
I work in engineering. Many or most of the engineers drive either home-hopped-up Japanese or German sports cars, modified jeeps, or old used Japanese cars they've rebuilt. The managers? drive big new American sedans. Engineers don't mind using something that has wires hanging out and smells like gasoline. Managers pay for things they don't mind other managers seeing them drive. Same goes with software. It sucks.
>If a "professional" IT department is going to choose software based on who has the best name, they're already fucked.
People vote for the guy with more hair. Taller men are paid more. People vote against stem cell research funding if their voting place is in a church, and vote for school funding taxes if their polling place is in a school.
Here are precisely all of your options: expect other people to be 100% rational and spend your life disappointed, or realize that people are primarily emotional and consistently make choices based on motivations they themselves don't understand and work to capitalize on that. In other words: study advertising and marketing. They're not about choosing software based on the best name. Go ask half a dozen kids "if you go into graphics advertising, which job do you think will pay more, one where you use a program called 'photoshop' or one where you use one called 'the gimp'" and you'll find out something about perception and how it affects behavior. If a person doesn't have good metrics, the person will use whatever metrics are at hand to make a judgment. It is not unreasonable to expect that even with good metrics, people will still tend to use prima facie evidence to make decisions.
Although, to be fair, you do that every time you see an old movie. I think it's creepier to see pinup shots of Marilyn Monroe hanging in old guys' garages. There's something fundamentally wrong with that.
>Raise your hand if you typed "ls -h" on your box just to make sure it still works right.
C:\Documents and Settings\user>ls -h 'ls' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file. C:\Documents and Settings\user>
The Wright Brothers patented a specific method for controlling airplane maneuvering, and then claimed that every other implementation of aircraft control fell under that patent, a litigation fight (mostly with Glenn Curtiss) that set aircraft development in the US back probably 10 years, during its most volatile period. Essentially, people have tried, in the past, to patent the automobile. This isn't a new technique, it's just a new venue.
I knew "More" was available but rare. Everyone knows The Wall, but it has, in the past, been really hard to find copies of La Vallee and Zabritsky Point. (Plus I was in a hurry since I had a time-critical project brewing in the lab, so I didn't have time to include more links.)
If you can find it, "la carrera panamerica" is *beautiful*, if a little bit egotistical. When they stop talking and just leave the camera sitting there, filming a hard turn with all these classic old 1950's cars shrieking their way through it, wallowing, while "Run Like Hell" wails away in the background -- those are some good moments.
Absolutely. The reason I find it so interesting is that the precise characteristic that, to me, defines good science, is what makes people irritated and untrusting of it. The process of science is unsettling, by which I mean it unseats what has been there before. As such, it's continually changing, and that's not what people want so they're pissed at it. In Greek theater, the concept of a tragedy, and a tragic hero, wasn't just that something sad happened, but that a person had a characteristic that made the person strong, and that very same characteristic ended up destroying the character. That was (and is) the definition of true tragedy. I think science embodies this: it is a tragic hero of our age.
I know you're being funny, but PF *did* do several movie soundtracks: a forgettable hippie movie called More but also "Tonite Let's All Make Love in London", "Zabriskie Point", obviously "The Wall", "La Vallee" (same director/feel as "More"), and the documentaries "Live at Pompeii" and "La Carrera Panamerica".
While I agree with your analysis, I think cognitive dissonance is something more complicated than simple laziness. The examples I was given when the idea was explained in psych and philosophy classes were of the form of self-delusion, specifically deluding yourself that a bad experience, job, relationship, or purchase was in fact a good one, so you don't have to deal with the emotions of having done something bad. Case in point: boot camp. Although it's designed to be hell, people look back on it as a great experience. A psychologist would say that's cognitive dissonance: in order to cope with having gone through a bad situation, people just tell themselves "well, it must've been good" and that way they can proceed with their lives without having to think about the reality of the situation.
I think it was Steven J Gould who said that science is never right, but it is always our closest approach to right, based on our understanding at the time. That's why science is remarkable: it relies on people arguing, being not right, and figuring out what's more right based on the previous mistakes. People who have trouble admitting that something they previously supported is, in fact, wrong, are going to have a tough time in science. The problem with that is that most people don't work that way, and this aspect of science makes them deeply suspicious of it. We constantly hear people complaining about how every ten years all the facts about medicine/health/nutrition/what-have-you change, and they don't know what to believe. That's the *strength* of science, that it learns and accommodates -- dare I say evolves -- but it's perceived as a weakness by people who want to learn something once and never have to relearn it.
A: I'm pretty sure it's Bowdlerize, not Bowlderize -- there are a lot more references to the first term, and it's the one I've seen in print. B: Bowdlerization is a subset of censorship. They both apply to this situation. C: I entirely agree with you: it's an under-represented idea that anyone can censor anyone else, that it's not just governments. My community HOA, were I unlucky enough to have such a thing, would try their best to prohibit me from painting the outside of my house with enormous images of naked women riding giraffes. That's censorship. Now, if I bought a house that already had those painted outside, and then the HOA made me remove them, I believe that would be both bowdlerization and censorship.
Maybe the CPU business is different than what I do (design analog power chips.) But I see clear reasons to believe, not in conspiracy, but in profit.
1. You spend, let's say, $10-100M to design a chip and its test systems, get it through quality and reliability testing, and into production. That's a one-time investment. From then on, every chip you make costs a few pennies of silicon, and a few dollars of testing, offsetting that enormous initial investment. You'd really like to, y'know, profit. The more chips you sell, the more you amortize that initial investment. Here's a strategy to put you out of business: make an incredibly fast new chip, costing $10M in R&D and fab, sell 10,000, then the next week make another chip, even faster, such that everyone buys it instead of the previous one. In order to make back what you've spent you have to charge a stupid amount of money. A successful strategy is to forecast how many you think you'll sell, design to see if you can meet that forecast, start selling them for a little more than you need to make your profit margin if you sell the amount you want to, then slowly cut prices down so that the product goes end-of-life at some point after it's paid itself back.
2. You're right. Intel isn't in the business of humiliating AMD, they're in the business of making a profit. There's some profit to be made in reputation, but given that computer buyers mostly fall into two camps, those who don't know what a CPU is and those who buy the highest-performing chip, regardless of who made it, I doubt humiliation is a good return on investment.
3. Companies spend a lot of money on research on where they're going, so they won't be surprised when they get there, but it's a much better idea to figure out the problems in small-scale, and then go to full production. The longer you can run on your old, already-paid-off fab equipment, the longer you can delay buying new equipment. There's a huge financial upside to not buying new equipment, and you know already that whatever you do, whatever equipment you use is going to have 70-80% utilization, so why not put all that hurt on old equipment, for as long as possible?
It's not being held back for dramatic effect. It's being held back because if you can sell the same thing tomorrow that you sold yesterday, you save money on developing the processes to bring the new stuff into full production.
I don't understand what you're arguing. You said "As long as it cannot be tracked to an individual buyer, pirates won't care" and I replied showing why it might be able to be tracked to an individual buyer, so now you're saying "stop breaking the law". That's an entirely different subject. Watermarking is effective because you can't know if you actually removed all of them or not. As such, people who don't want their file usage tracked are probably going to be opposed to it. That's all *I* am saying.
It's a first step to localization. Now imagine the music industry doing exactly the same thing governments are -- indeed, probably with those governments' help -- and building databases that show where music was purchased, when it was purchased, and when it showed up on p2p networks, and associating those with customer purchases at those places, then bringing lawsuits against the people who fit the criteria. How would an individual with limited funds for lawyerin' defend against that, when there's a whole chain of evidence indicating that this person went to these four stores and bought/downloaded these four songs, that all showed up on p2p networks?
>Mathematicians and evelotionary biologists have some similar friction.
So there's this big conference on population biology the next city over, and State U sends a bunch of statisticians and a bunch of population biologists to it. To save money, they go by train. The two groups go down to the train station, and the population biologists all buy tickets, but the statisticians get together and make one of their grad students go buy a single ticket. The biologists watch this, look at each other, then they go over and say "what's up with the one ticket? You all need tickets to ride the train." The statisticians turn around and speaking in unison say "we are mathematical statisticians. We have rigorous methods for dealing with situations like this." The biologists say "uh, yeah, sure..." and everyone gets on the train. The conductor comes along, asking for tickets, and all the statisticians get up and crowd into the bathroom together and the conductor comes along, knocks on the door, and the grad student sticks the ticket out from under the door. Conductor goes away, the statisticians all come back out, sit down, and enjoy the ride. On the way *back* from the conference, the biologists are all jazzed that they can save money so they send a grad student over to buy a single ticket. The statisticians, however, don't bother to buy *any* tickets. The biologists watch this, look at each other, then they go over and say "Okay, the one ticket was cute, but how can you get by with NO tickets?" The statisticians turn around and speaking in unison say "we are mathematical statisticians. We have rigorous methods for dealing with situations like this." The biologists, again, say "uh, yeah, sure..." and everyone gets on the train. Conductor heads down the train, collecting tickets, and all the biologists, snickering, crowd into one bathroom and close the door, and all the statisticians crowd into *another* bathroom, except for one grad student, who runs over to the bathroom where all the biologists are and knocks on the door, saying, "tickets, please!"...
If you have a watermark pattern and alter the file by, let's say as an example, swapping 1/0 in 1% of the bits, the pattern will still be there, just 50% as strongly. This is the same general process as recovering overwritten information on a hard drive: no matter how much random information you write over it, the pattern will still be there. This is especially the case if you know what the pattern is that you're looking for. (It's easier than recovering overwritten info because only a small portion of your pattern is getting overwritten.)
However, if you used a majority-voting merge of several files -- say, five -- with any discrepancies being resolved by using the larger group as the accepted value, then you probably have a good way of removing marks if you only have a single mark. But, as other people have said, what if there are multiple marks? What if all your files come from one region or one release, and all have a single common watermark, with subsequent, differing watermarks? You'll never know you've found them all.
I was an undeclared major throughout college. I ended up graduating with a degree in microbiology and a minor in english composition. Now I'm working as an electrical engineer, after a long stint as a silversmith, and, because of the classes I took, I could get a job as a geologist or a biochemist any time I wanted, although I think I'll probably go back to school and get a doctorate in chemical engineering.
I hope your pigeonhole is comfortable. Your son, on the other hand, will have a lot more options available to him. When it's unclear that there will be a viable market for CS or engineering people in the States in ten years, and it's quite possible there will be whole industries that don't currently exist, I tell anyone I know that's about to go off to college to take as many courses as they can, in as many subjects as they can stand, as insurance against an uncertain future.
>wasting money on programs like sex education (sorry that is the job of the parents)
True story: my ex-girlfriend's mother grew up in rural Wyoming. When she was 18 she got a physical from her doctor. She didn't know what exactly the doctor was doing, because her parents hadn't ever said a word to her about sex education, but she knew it wasn't very comfortable. The doctor in question had sex with almost every attractive unmarried female patient he had, over a period of fifteen years, until he screwed up and tried it with a married woman, who told her husband, who showed up the next day and beat the hell out of the doctor, who later confessed to having had sex with over 400 women in his office.
Yeah, parents should teach their kids about sex. And Santa Claus should give me a pony.
Atul Gawande wrote about this in his book "Better": the first couple of chapters talk specifically about risk of infection transmission in hospitals via health care workers. He talked about how numerous studies have shown that the rate of nosocomial infection rises directly with lack of hand washing. Then he went on to talk about all the ways hospital administrators and epidemiologists have tried to make hand washing as quick and painless as possible, so that doctors and nurses would find it convenient to wash after every physical contact with patients, no matter how fleeting.
Yeah, spending literally 1/8 of your day washing your hands is inconvenient. So's a MRSA infection in half your patients, passed along by doctors and nurses who think they're too busy to wash up.
I spend a lot of time lighting alcohol on fire, but obviously not in large-enough areas -- I'll give the vodka-on-water a shot this weekend when I'm up at high altitude fooling around by fishing lakes. I wonder if they're just being *very* quick lighting it on fire coz I'd expect it to mix with water basically as fast as you can pour it in. Interesting.
The worst mosquito breeding place I ever saw was a tire disposal area called Tire Mountain that had, it was rumored, over a million tires in it. Many had picked up water, and it was the perfect place for mosquito breeding. There were zillions. Likewise, when I was living near a feedlot, there were mosquitoes everywhere, and we assumed it was because there was lots of standing water from where cattle were digging up the ground by the water troughs. But I'll have to go do some reading on it.
Slashdot Mirror
For just a moment I had some sympathy for the music industry -- it's hard to compete on a price basis with free, and all the money comes right out of profit, since anything that isn't profit isn't reduceable.
Then you mentioned The White Album being $45 and every bit of my sympathy evaporated, especially when I remembered a Stephane Pompougnac (sp?) album I want, that seems to cost about $40 as well. Let's hear it for competition.
Not only that, but also humans are fantastic at post-decision rationalization. We'll tell ourselves we decided something for good, logical reasons, and even make some up and convince ourselves that's why we chose things, but psychologists that spend a lot of time watching people, claim that most of the time even when people give reasons for their choices, it's likely those reasons don't have much to do with their choices.
Another way of putting the Carnegie claim, which I base on having read books like "The Paradox Of Choice" by Barry Schwartz and the research on which Malcolm Gladwell based "Blink" is that we've probably made our decision within a tenth of a second of being offered a choice, and the rest of the time we spend choosing, is spent second-guessing and rationalizing that decision -- we're trying to decide whether an instinctive, pattern-matching, non-rational reaction was correct or not, and generally speaking, we decide it's correct.
When you say "Hardy Heron" or particularly "Feisty Fawn" the first thing that leaps into many people's minds is "Mickey Mouse" and "Donald Duck". I've tried free-association tests with people to check this: y'know, "say the first thing that comes into your head when I say $x." Not scientific, I admit: *I* know what I'm asking, and I'm asking people like my grandmother and the little old lady who lives across the street.
You're right, though: the presenter should leave codenames at home and discuss the version major/minor number. But what if the presentees are somewhat familiar with the subject? All it takes is one "oh, yeah, that's the one they call 'The GIMP', right?" and a lot of your effectiveness has just walked out the door.
I start off by apologizing for my unwarranted crabbiness: I'm in the middle of fighting exactly this fight at work and it sucks. We, by which I mean open-source advocates, are losing business and credibility because we don't have focus groups, and while it galls me more than I can say, I don't think we *can* win hearts/minds without market research.
You're entirely right, and that's what sucks: linux is by people who are doing it for fun, for people who are doing it for fun, and the only reason to be all serious and markety about it is if you want to take over the world. They don't. But it hurts everyone, by association. I'm not saying shareware developers have any obligation towards giving things serious, boring names, but boy would it make things easier trying to get them accepted by people who claim to only be interested in results, but are actually strongly influenced by appearances.
I work in engineering. Many or most of the engineers drive either home-hopped-up Japanese or German sports cars, modified jeeps, or old used Japanese cars they've rebuilt. The managers? drive big new American sedans. Engineers don't mind using something that has wires hanging out and smells like gasoline. Managers pay for things they don't mind other managers seeing them drive. Same goes with software. It sucks.
>If a "professional" IT department is going to choose software based on who has the best name, they're already fucked.
People vote for the guy with more hair. Taller men are paid more. People vote against stem cell research funding if their voting place is in a church, and vote for school funding taxes if their polling place is in a school.
Here are precisely all of your options: expect other people to be 100% rational and spend your life disappointed, or realize that people are primarily emotional and consistently make choices based on motivations they themselves don't understand and work to capitalize on that.
In other words: study advertising and marketing. They're not about choosing software based on the best name. Go ask half a dozen kids "if you go into graphics advertising, which job do you think will pay more, one where you use a program called 'photoshop' or one where you use one called 'the gimp'" and you'll find out something about perception and how it affects behavior. If a person doesn't have good metrics, the person will use whatever metrics are at hand to make a judgment. It is not unreasonable to expect that even with good metrics, people will still tend to use prima facie evidence to make decisions.
Although, to be fair, you do that every time you see an old movie. I think it's creepier to see pinup shots of Marilyn Monroe hanging in old guys' garages. There's something fundamentally wrong with that.
I was hoping someone would reply that I was indeed screwed, but it wasn't because of the intruder software -- you're close enough to get the prize.
>Raise your hand if you typed "ls -h" on your box just to make sure it still works right.
C:\Documents and Settings\user>ls -h
'ls' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.
C:\Documents and Settings\user>
Crap! I'm screwed! Someone hacked my system!
The Wright Brothers patented a specific method for controlling airplane maneuvering, and then claimed that every other implementation of aircraft control fell under that patent, a litigation fight (mostly with Glenn Curtiss) that set aircraft development in the US back probably 10 years, during its most volatile period. Essentially, people have tried, in the past, to patent the automobile. This isn't a new technique, it's just a new venue.
I knew "More" was available but rare. Everyone knows The Wall, but it has, in the past, been really hard to find copies of La Vallee and Zabritsky Point. (Plus I was in a hurry since I had a time-critical project brewing in the lab, so I didn't have time to include more links.)
If you can find it, "la carrera panamerica" is *beautiful*, if a little bit egotistical. When they stop talking and just leave the camera sitting there, filming a hard turn with all these classic old 1950's cars shrieking their way through it, wallowing, while "Run Like Hell" wails away in the background -- those are some good moments.
Absolutely. The reason I find it so interesting is that the precise characteristic that, to me, defines good science, is what makes people irritated and untrusting of it. The process of science is unsettling, by which I mean it unseats what has been there before. As such, it's continually changing, and that's not what people want so they're pissed at it. In Greek theater, the concept of a tragedy, and a tragic hero, wasn't just that something sad happened, but that a person had a characteristic that made the person strong, and that very same characteristic ended up destroying the character. That was (and is) the definition of true tragedy. I think science embodies this: it is a tragic hero of our age.
I know you're being funny, but PF *did* do several movie soundtracks: a forgettable hippie movie called More but also "Tonite Let's All Make Love in London", "Zabriskie Point", obviously "The Wall", "La Vallee" (same director/feel as "More"), and the documentaries "Live at Pompeii" and "La Carrera Panamerica".
While I agree with your analysis, I think cognitive dissonance is something more complicated than simple laziness. The examples I was given when the idea was explained in psych and philosophy classes were of the form of self-delusion, specifically deluding yourself that a bad experience, job, relationship, or purchase was in fact a good one, so you don't have to deal with the emotions of having done something bad. Case in point: boot camp. Although it's designed to be hell, people look back on it as a great experience. A psychologist would say that's cognitive dissonance: in order to cope with having gone through a bad situation, people just tell themselves "well, it must've been good" and that way they can proceed with their lives without having to think about the reality of the situation.
I think it was Steven J Gould who said that science is never right, but it is always our closest approach to right, based on our understanding at the time. That's why science is remarkable: it relies on people arguing, being not right, and figuring out what's more right based on the previous mistakes. People who have trouble admitting that something they previously supported is, in fact, wrong, are going to have a tough time in science. The problem with that is that most people don't work that way, and this aspect of science makes them deeply suspicious of it. We constantly hear people complaining about how every ten years all the facts about medicine/health/nutrition/what-have-you change, and they don't know what to believe. That's the *strength* of science, that it learns and accommodates -- dare I say evolves -- but it's perceived as a weakness by people who want to learn something once and never have to relearn it.
A: I'm pretty sure it's Bowdlerize, not Bowlderize -- there are a lot more references to the first term, and it's the one I've seen in print.
B: Bowdlerization is a subset of censorship. They both apply to this situation.
C: I entirely agree with you: it's an under-represented idea that anyone can censor anyone else, that it's not just governments. My community HOA, were I unlucky enough to have such a thing, would try their best to prohibit me from painting the outside of my house with enormous images of naked women riding giraffes. That's censorship. Now, if I bought a house that already had those painted outside, and then the HOA made me remove them, I believe that would be both bowdlerization and censorship.
Maybe the CPU business is different than what I do (design analog power chips.) But I see clear reasons to believe, not in conspiracy, but in profit.
1. You spend, let's say, $10-100M to design a chip and its test systems, get it through quality and reliability testing, and into production. That's a one-time investment. From then on, every chip you make costs a few pennies of silicon, and a few dollars of testing, offsetting that enormous initial investment. You'd really like to, y'know, profit. The more chips you sell, the more you amortize that initial investment. Here's a strategy to put you out of business: make an incredibly fast new chip, costing $10M in R&D and fab, sell 10,000, then the next week make another chip, even faster, such that everyone buys it instead of the previous one. In order to make back what you've spent you have to charge a stupid amount of money. A successful strategy is to forecast how many you think you'll sell, design to see if you can meet that forecast, start selling them for a little more than you need to make your profit margin if you sell the amount you want to, then slowly cut prices down so that the product goes end-of-life at some point after it's paid itself back.
2. You're right. Intel isn't in the business of humiliating AMD, they're in the business of making a profit. There's some profit to be made in reputation, but given that computer buyers mostly fall into two camps, those who don't know what a CPU is and those who buy the highest-performing chip, regardless of who made it, I doubt humiliation is a good return on investment.
3. Companies spend a lot of money on research on where they're going, so they won't be surprised when they get there, but it's a much better idea to figure out the problems in small-scale, and then go to full production. The longer you can run on your old, already-paid-off fab equipment, the longer you can delay buying new equipment. There's a huge financial upside to not buying new equipment, and you know already that whatever you do, whatever equipment you use is going to have 70-80% utilization, so why not put all that hurt on old equipment, for as long as possible?
It's not being held back for dramatic effect. It's being held back because if you can sell the same thing tomorrow that you sold yesterday, you save money on developing the processes to bring the new stuff into full production.
I don't understand what you're arguing. You said "As long as it cannot be tracked to an individual buyer, pirates won't care" and I replied showing why it might be able to be tracked to an individual buyer, so now you're saying "stop breaking the law". That's an entirely different subject. Watermarking is effective because you can't know if you actually removed all of them or not. As such, people who don't want their file usage tracked are probably going to be opposed to it. That's all *I* am saying.
It's a first step to localization. Now imagine the music industry doing exactly the same thing governments are -- indeed, probably with those governments' help -- and building databases that show where music was purchased, when it was purchased, and when it showed up on p2p networks, and associating those with customer purchases at those places, then bringing lawsuits against the people who fit the criteria. How would an individual with limited funds for lawyerin' defend against that, when there's a whole chain of evidence indicating that this person went to these four stores and bought/downloaded these four songs, that all showed up on p2p networks?
>The Association has no product per se,
Lawsuits. Lots and lots and lots of lawsuits.
>Mathematicians and evelotionary biologists have some similar friction.
So there's this big conference on population biology the next city over, and State U sends a bunch of statisticians and a bunch of population biologists to it. To save money, they go by train. The two groups go down to the train station, and the population biologists all buy tickets, but the statisticians get together and make one of their grad students go buy a single ticket. The biologists watch this, look at each other, then they go over and say "what's up with the one ticket? You all need tickets to ride the train." The statisticians turn around and speaking in unison say "we are mathematical statisticians. We have rigorous methods for dealing with situations like this." The biologists say "uh, yeah, sure..." and everyone gets on the train. The conductor comes along, asking for tickets, and all the statisticians get up and crowd into the bathroom together and the conductor comes along, knocks on the door, and the grad student sticks the ticket out from under the door. Conductor goes away, the statisticians all come back out, sit down, and enjoy the ride.
On the way *back* from the conference, the biologists are all jazzed that they can save money so they send a grad student over to buy a single ticket. The statisticians, however, don't bother to buy *any* tickets. The biologists watch this, look at each other, then they go over and say "Okay, the one ticket was cute, but how can you get by with NO tickets?" The statisticians turn around and speaking in unison say "we are mathematical statisticians. We have rigorous methods for dealing with situations like this." The biologists, again, say "uh, yeah, sure..." and everyone gets on the train. Conductor heads down the train, collecting tickets, and all the biologists, snickering, crowd into one bathroom and close the door, and all the statisticians crowd into *another* bathroom, except for one grad student, who runs over to the bathroom where all the biologists are and knocks on the door, saying, "tickets, please!"...
If you have a watermark pattern and alter the file by, let's say as an example, swapping 1/0 in 1% of the bits, the pattern will still be there, just 50% as strongly. This is the same general process as recovering overwritten information on a hard drive: no matter how much random information you write over it, the pattern will still be there. This is especially the case if you know what the pattern is that you're looking for. (It's easier than recovering overwritten info because only a small portion of your pattern is getting overwritten.)
However, if you used a majority-voting merge of several files -- say, five -- with any discrepancies being resolved by using the larger group as the accepted value, then you probably have a good way of removing marks if you only have a single mark. But, as other people have said, what if there are multiple marks? What if all your files come from one region or one release, and all have a single common watermark, with subsequent, differing watermarks? You'll never know you've found them all.
I was an undeclared major throughout college. I ended up graduating with a degree in microbiology and a minor in english composition. Now I'm working as an electrical engineer, after a long stint as a silversmith, and, because of the classes I took, I could get a job as a geologist or a biochemist any time I wanted, although I think I'll probably go back to school and get a doctorate in chemical engineering.
I hope your pigeonhole is comfortable. Your son, on the other hand, will have a lot more options available to him. When it's unclear that there will be a viable market for CS or engineering people in the States in ten years, and it's quite possible there will be whole industries that don't currently exist, I tell anyone I know that's about to go off to college to take as many courses as they can, in as many subjects as they can stand, as insurance against an uncertain future.
>wasting money on programs like sex education (sorry that is the job of the parents)
True story: my ex-girlfriend's mother grew up in rural Wyoming. When she was 18 she got a physical from her doctor. She didn't know what exactly the doctor was doing, because her parents hadn't ever said a word to her about sex education, but she knew it wasn't very comfortable. The doctor in question had sex with almost every attractive unmarried female patient he had, over a period of fifteen years, until he screwed up and tried it with a married woman, who told her husband, who showed up the next day and beat the hell out of the doctor, who later confessed to having had sex with over 400 women in his office.
Yeah, parents should teach their kids about sex. And Santa Claus should give me a pony.
Atul Gawande wrote about this in his book "Better": the first couple of chapters talk specifically about risk of infection transmission in hospitals via health care workers. He talked about how numerous studies have shown that the rate of nosocomial infection rises directly with lack of hand washing. Then he went on to talk about all the ways hospital administrators and epidemiologists have tried to make hand washing as quick and painless as possible, so that doctors and nurses would find it convenient to wash after every physical contact with patients, no matter how fleeting.
Yeah, spending literally 1/8 of your day washing your hands is inconvenient. So's a MRSA infection in half your patients, passed along by doctors and nurses who think they're too busy to wash up.
I spend a lot of time lighting alcohol on fire, but obviously not in large-enough areas -- I'll give the vodka-on-water a shot this weekend when I'm up at high altitude fooling around by fishing lakes. I wonder if they're just being *very* quick lighting it on fire coz I'd expect it to mix with water basically as fast as you can pour it in. Interesting.
The worst mosquito breeding place I ever saw was a tire disposal area called Tire Mountain that had, it was rumored, over a million tires in it. Many had picked up water, and it was the perfect place for mosquito breeding. There were zillions. Likewise, when I was living near a feedlot, there were mosquitoes everywhere, and we assumed it was because there was lots of standing water from where cattle were digging up the ground by the water troughs. But I'll have to go do some reading on it.