It's plausible that a person might have personal backups of their music collection (or *shock* music they purchased on iTunes) and accidentally have those files on a public web server.
I can't imagine how somebody would accidentally upload their music collection to a public web server.
Great post. About that last point however - the download/upload speed inequality only matters at initial release time. Once enough clients download the files released by the seed, they can serve the content potentially faster than the seed did. Imagine that initially the torrent is served to 500 clients at 2mbps each. For a 650MB file, the download will complete fully in about 45 minutes. Now imagine that the seed goes offline, even though their seeds will probably stay online and serve many more files. With each new client that receives the file from a peer/seed, the possible speed of the network increases, as any client could potentially create a connection to each and every other client in order to achieve maximum bandwidth. Ie, the possible bandwith to a new client is equal to the sum of all current clients' upload speeds. Once enough clients are sharing a file, any downloader should theoretically be able to max out their download speed.
I think you're kind of missing the point of the article. The doctors are saying that while the very high-voltage lightning can sometimes simply pass just around the surface of a person without actually conducting a significant current through one's tissues, having a cell phone or other metal object near one's body can upset the resistive balance that causes this effect, essentially encouraging the lightning to pass through one's tissues. Obviously even a small amount of current could upset the heart's rhythm, but any significant amount of current at such high voltage would sear (or even vaporize) flesh almost instantly.
Basically, there have been cases where people survive a direct lightning strike because the current has a less resistive path just around the epidermis. Having a metal object near the skin fscks up your chances.
I'm not surprised that they refused samples he brought in. What if he was getting drug-tested and he brought in a urine sample? Of course they'd refuse it. There's no way to know that the sample is a actually from him. I do think that it would be just as easy for them to take a cheek swab though... I can't imagine he'd be religiously opposed to brushing his teeth.
For your concept to work, the "wires" would have to have some sort of reasonable spring constant that would allow you to set up a constant tension of your choice in them. To wind these tightly enough to make them have relatively constant length under a certain level of stress, a system would need a motor/gear system capable of producing high torque. Unfortunately, the system would have limitations. It could never apply a constant force, as the force it produces is related to the displacement (extension) of the "wire", and as it shortens, the force becomes less (assuming it behaves as a fairly ideal spring). It would also be difficult to control the velocity of the spring without using the opposing motor or some other active damper (which require more energy). Basically, the idea you have is what the medeival engineers called a catapult - you wind it up with some sort of crank and then let it go and see what happens. It could be useful for some things (like throwing objects), but might be difficult to control, and offers relatively few advantages over conventional systems.
Exactly. I believe most service providers are required to sign non-disclosure agreements of some kind restricting their use of the materials. Therefore their use does not fall under normal copyright law, but contract law, and Apple should have the right to rectify situations in which that material was disclosed.
I'm confused. If the technology exists to produce streams of photons with predictable characteristics at the source and to observe those predictable characteristics with high accuracy at the detector, how is this system immune to man-in-the-middle attacks?
For example, if I knew the system would be off for an hour, why couldn't I splice in my own detector/emitter/recorder setup to simply receive, record, and then reproduce each photon that arrived, aside from technological difficulty?
Let me tell you a story. When I first installed Ubuntu on my laptop, I was thrilled... everything worked so well! Of course, then I found out that the switch to turn my wireless card on or off was controlled by firmware that would be erased upon hard restart, and that I needed to download and compile the acerhk driver setup to control it from linux. No problem, I thought. I downloaded the files, opened up a terminal, and typed "make". "Command not found" etc. What?!?! That makes no sense. I understand that maybe the whole GNU compiling system makes some extra bloat on the install, but I can't imagine never having to compile anything, especially on a system that is updated so often. Worse for me, I could not connect to the internet to download the build-essentials package that I needed to get the wireless working because, well, that was the entire problem: the wireless wasn't working.
The average home user may not need to compile their own custom-written software or kernel mods, but they'll probably need to build a software package using make at some point to keep things working. Keeping an updated compiler system would not significantly hurt the average home user, and could prove a lifesaver for support later on.
That argument has been used with schizophrenia as well, but further research has shown that smoking is actually a risk factor for the development of schizophrenia in those prone to it. Smokers self-medicate, but in fact their medication causes the condition that necessitates it.
That's a strange line of assumption. Here's what I see you saying: Nicotine is a stimulant; ADHD drugs are stimulants; therefore, people who take nicotine have ADHD.
With that line of reasoning, everyone who drinks coffee or soda to stay awake has ADHD. Stimulants are used to treat numerous disorders, and are also present in every-day items like foods or drinks. I would find it hard to believe that a majority of people who continuously use stimulants in one form or another have ADHD.
On the point about ADHD medication making it easier to quit: possibly. This is not because the smoker necessarily has ADHD, but because the stimulants in ADHD medicine could help offset the cravings from the cigarettes by stimulating and pacifying the mind.
Also, just to quickly address this, smokers generally are calmed down by nicotine because it soothes the anxiety they feel when they are not smoking. This anxiety is actually a byproduct of their addiction to nicotine. Their brains become accomodated to the nicotine in cigarettes to the extent that when they are not dosing themselves, they do not produce enough dopamine, and thereby become anxious and unhappy. As for feeling more focused, this is partially an effect of the aforementioned reduction of anxiety, but is also likely related to the stimulant effects of nicotine. Nicotine does increase attention and memory, just as many other stimulants do.
As for carcinogenicity, nicotine does downregulate apoptosis, a process which helps kill cells that could become cancerous. Cigarettes are also a host to myriad other more strongly carcinogenic chemicals, however, and the amount of nicotine that is required to produce an effect similar to smoking is actually very little compared to the amount of other carcinogenic chemicals that enter the lungs while smoking. For this reason, people are encouraged to use the patch or gum when quitting.
Well, actually, Hz is cycles per second, so assuming our time period of measurement is one second and we have zero cycles, we get 0/1 = 0.
On a more serious note, I was very excited to see this article. I have a feeling that asynchronous computing will be the wave of the future. So many problems are asynchronous in nature that it seems ludicrous to try to solve them all with only synchronous hardware. Especially in situations where high-speed communication is necessary between physically disparate devices (with a resulting variable time lag), asynch systems make so much more sense. Why waste valuable power/efficiency trying to precisely synchronize clocks when you can just send out a value from one and wait for a handshake from the other?
I guess I'm a little biased as a BME-in-training, but I think asynch design is just really friggin cool.
Hence the great success of woot.com. The writing that accompanies each product they sell is entertaining and enlightening, and it adds to the site's draw, which in turn of course adds to its objective measure of worth - revenue.
Any strain of anything could become poisonous with or without genetic engineering. That's why companies test their products before sending them to market.
As for RoundUp-Ready plants, think about what you're saying... what is RoundUp? It is an herbicide. Therefore, genetically modified RoundUp-Ready plants are modified to be resistant to the herbicides used in RoundUp. Thus, a farmer can spray the same amount of RoundUp as he might normally, but will only kill the unwanted plants. What is the effect of this? The plants that do live, ie the crops, have more nutrients and more root space available to them in the soil, and thus the GM crops can naturally grow larger, just as they would in a field without weeds. You don't have to modify them to grow faster than they can support. You just enable a farmer to select for only the crops he wants.
Also, if you will not provide others with hard statistics, don't demand that they do so. That's hypocrisy, and the reason I will not ask you for hard statistics on your poison risk. However, if you really are interested in the issues surrounding GM crop development and implementation in modern agricultural communities, I'd suggest you check out this PDF publication from an agricultural department of the UK government.
So there you have it. Evidence at your fingertips. They describe the advantages of GM crops in more detail than I have here, and they analyze the implications for agricultural communities of different sizes and socioeconomic status. You would likely learn a lot from this document, if that is indeed your goal. But if you're just posting to draw attention to yourself like a bully on a playground, grow up.
In a Wired article circa 2000, a patient with a set of electrodes on his visual cortex accomplished two of those goals. The scary part is that he skipped directly from obstacle avoidance to taking the viper out for a spin in the parking lot.
I worked in a lab a summer ago whose focus was doing something similar to this, though in baby steps. They built VLSI models in silicon using mixed-mode circuits to simulate a large array of interconnected neurons. Each "neuron" was actually a small circuit that was designed to approximate some type of real neuron. When the "neuron" fired, it actually sent what they called an AER event, an event with an address (column, row, and chip) attached to it. By routing these events around they could interconnect various chips to simulate the combination of various functions.
Of course they were nowhere near their goal of simulating an entire human brain. When I left, they had models of a section of the hippocampus, the retina, and a few other small areas.
The concept is good, however. By "computing" using analog circuits in a massively parallel format, we can drastically reduce the computational and energetic overhead involved in these simulations. After all, real neurons are essentially a very complicated charge pump with a certain firing threshold. With appropriate circuitry, researchers can come fairly close to the real thing without supercomputers.
What do you think about people who donate blood? And what of people who wish their organs to be donated upon untimely death? In these procedures, living cells are transfered from one body to another without causing significant harm to the donator. A single stem cell can be removed from a living human embryo without significantly affecting development. No death of the embryo is necessary. In parallel, if an embryo does die, however, wouldn't it seem ethical and even morally approvable to salvage some of the cells to help those still alive?
You don't have to be a part of that brave new world, but then perhaps you should be the one to tell the dying and incapacitated that they will simply have to suffer. Stem cell research can be completed without devaluing or destroying human life, and has the potential to bring improved quality of life to millions of people with debilitating diseases.
Off topic a little, I suppose perhaps you've read about our 'war on terror', or really any other war in human history. If you think stem cell research involves destroying life to build and enhance ours, you should check out what soldiers really do. And for a touch of historical guilt, think about the beginnings of America. We killed ourselves and the British so we could be independent. We dehumanized and massacred the indigenous people so we could take their land. We have a history of destroying life to enhance ours. So let's break with that history and use our new-found knowledge of biology to respect life and enhance it.
It would make a panspermia a nice sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, though. And just imagine... in a few billion years when those bacteria have evolved into intelligent life, those kooks who think that they were originally planted there by ETs will be right!
Slashdot Mirror
It's plausible that a person might have personal backups of their music collection (or *shock* music they purchased on iTunes) and accidentally have those files on a public web server.
I can't imagine how somebody would accidentally upload their music collection to a public web server.
Great post. About that last point however - the download/upload speed inequality only matters at initial release time. Once enough clients download the files released by the seed, they can serve the content potentially faster than the seed did. Imagine that initially the torrent is served to 500 clients at 2mbps each. For a 650MB file, the download will complete fully in about 45 minutes. Now imagine that the seed goes offline, even though their seeds will probably stay online and serve many more files. With each new client that receives the file from a peer/seed, the possible speed of the network increases, as any client could potentially create a connection to each and every other client in order to achieve maximum bandwidth. Ie, the possible bandwith to a new client is equal to the sum of all current clients' upload speeds. Once enough clients are sharing a file, any downloader should theoretically be able to max out their download speed.
I think you're kind of missing the point of the article. The doctors are saying that while the very high-voltage lightning can sometimes simply pass just around the surface of a person without actually conducting a significant current through one's tissues, having a cell phone or other metal object near one's body can upset the resistive balance that causes this effect, essentially encouraging the lightning to pass through one's tissues. Obviously even a small amount of current could upset the heart's rhythm, but any significant amount of current at such high voltage would sear (or even vaporize) flesh almost instantly.
Basically, there have been cases where people survive a direct lightning strike because the current has a less resistive path just around the epidermis. Having a metal object near the skin fscks up your chances.
I'm not surprised that they refused samples he brought in. What if he was getting drug-tested and he brought in a urine sample? Of course they'd refuse it. There's no way to know that the sample is a actually from him. I do think that it would be just as easy for them to take a cheek swab though... I can't imagine he'd be religiously opposed to brushing his teeth.
For your concept to work, the "wires" would have to have some sort of reasonable spring constant that would allow you to set up a constant tension of your choice in them. To wind these tightly enough to make them have relatively constant length under a certain level of stress, a system would need a motor/gear system capable of producing high torque. Unfortunately, the system would have limitations. It could never apply a constant force, as the force it produces is related to the displacement (extension) of the "wire", and as it shortens, the force becomes less (assuming it behaves as a fairly ideal spring). It would also be difficult to control the velocity of the spring without using the opposing motor or some other active damper (which require more energy). Basically, the idea you have is what the medeival engineers called a catapult - you wind it up with some sort of crank and then let it go and see what happens. It could be useful for some things (like throwing objects), but might be difficult to control, and offers relatively few advantages over conventional systems.
Exactly. I believe most service providers are required to sign non-disclosure agreements of some kind restricting their use of the materials. Therefore their use does not fall under normal copyright law, but contract law, and Apple should have the right to rectify situations in which that material was disclosed.
I'm confused. If the technology exists to produce streams of photons with predictable characteristics at the source and to observe those predictable characteristics with high accuracy at the detector, how is this system immune to man-in-the-middle attacks?
For example, if I knew the system would be off for an hour, why couldn't I splice in my own detector/emitter/recorder setup to simply receive, record, and then reproduce each photon that arrived, aside from technological difficulty?
Let me tell you a story. When I first installed Ubuntu on my laptop, I was thrilled... everything worked so well! Of course, then I found out that the switch to turn my wireless card on or off was controlled by firmware that would be erased upon hard restart, and that I needed to download and compile the acerhk driver setup to control it from linux. No problem, I thought. I downloaded the files, opened up a terminal, and typed "make". "Command not found" etc. What?!?! That makes no sense. I understand that maybe the whole GNU compiling system makes some extra bloat on the install, but I can't imagine never having to compile anything, especially on a system that is updated so often. Worse for me, I could not connect to the internet to download the build-essentials package that I needed to get the wireless working because, well, that was the entire problem: the wireless wasn't working.
The average home user may not need to compile their own custom-written software or kernel mods, but they'll probably need to build a software package using make at some point to keep things working. Keeping an updated compiler system would not significantly hurt the average home user, and could prove a lifesaver for support later on.
That argument has been used with schizophrenia as well, but further research has shown that smoking is actually a risk factor for the development of schizophrenia in those prone to it. Smokers self-medicate, but in fact their medication causes the condition that necessitates it.
That's a strange line of assumption. Here's what I see you saying: Nicotine is a stimulant; ADHD drugs are stimulants; therefore, people who take nicotine have ADHD.
With that line of reasoning, everyone who drinks coffee or soda to stay awake has ADHD. Stimulants are used to treat numerous disorders, and are also present in every-day items like foods or drinks. I would find it hard to believe that a majority of people who continuously use stimulants in one form or another have ADHD.
On the point about ADHD medication making it easier to quit: possibly. This is not because the smoker necessarily has ADHD, but because the stimulants in ADHD medicine could help offset the cravings from the cigarettes by stimulating and pacifying the mind.
Also, just to quickly address this, smokers generally are calmed down by nicotine because it soothes the anxiety they feel when they are not smoking. This anxiety is actually a byproduct of their addiction to nicotine. Their brains become accomodated to the nicotine in cigarettes to the extent that when they are not dosing themselves, they do not produce enough dopamine, and thereby become anxious and unhappy. As for feeling more focused, this is partially an effect of the aforementioned reduction of anxiety, but is also likely related to the stimulant effects of nicotine. Nicotine does increase attention and memory, just as many other stimulants do.
As for carcinogenicity, nicotine does downregulate apoptosis, a process which helps kill cells that could become cancerous. Cigarettes are also a host to myriad other more strongly carcinogenic chemicals, however, and the amount of nicotine that is required to produce an effect similar to smoking is actually very little compared to the amount of other carcinogenic chemicals that enter the lungs while smoking. For this reason, people are encouraged to use the patch or gum when quitting.
Well, actually, Hz is cycles per second, so assuming our time period of measurement is one second and we have zero cycles, we get 0/1 = 0.
On a more serious note, I was very excited to see this article. I have a feeling that asynchronous computing will be the wave of the future. So many problems are asynchronous in nature that it seems ludicrous to try to solve them all with only synchronous hardware. Especially in situations where high-speed communication is necessary between physically disparate devices (with a resulting variable time lag), asynch systems make so much more sense. Why waste valuable power/efficiency trying to precisely synchronize clocks when you can just send out a value from one and wait for a handshake from the other?
I guess I'm a little biased as a BME-in-training, but I think asynch design is just really friggin cool.
Hence the great success of woot.com. The writing that accompanies each product they sell is entertaining and enlightening, and it adds to the site's draw, which in turn of course adds to its objective measure of worth - revenue.
Any strain of anything could become poisonous with or without genetic engineering. That's why companies test their products before sending them to market.
As for RoundUp-Ready plants, think about what you're saying... what is RoundUp? It is an herbicide. Therefore, genetically modified RoundUp-Ready plants are modified to be resistant to the herbicides used in RoundUp. Thus, a farmer can spray the same amount of RoundUp as he might normally, but will only kill the unwanted plants. What is the effect of this? The plants that do live, ie the crops, have more nutrients and more root space available to them in the soil, and thus the GM crops can naturally grow larger, just as they would in a field without weeds. You don't have to modify them to grow faster than they can support. You just enable a farmer to select for only the crops he wants.
Also, if you will not provide others with hard statistics, don't demand that they do so. That's hypocrisy, and the reason I will not ask you for hard statistics on your poison risk. However, if you really are interested in the issues surrounding GM crop development and implementation in modern agricultural communities, I'd suggest you check out this PDF publication from an agricultural department of the UK government.
So there you have it. Evidence at your fingertips. They describe the advantages of GM crops in more detail than I have here, and they analyze the implications for agricultural communities of different sizes and socioeconomic status. You would likely learn a lot from this document, if that is indeed your goal. But if you're just posting to draw attention to yourself like a bully on a playground, grow up.
What. the. fuck.
Wow. That was really insightful, and very well put. What are you doing on /.?
/dev/null
In a Wired article circa 2000, a patient with a set of electrodes on his visual cortex accomplished two of those goals. The scary part is that he skipped directly from obstacle avoidance to taking the viper out for a spin in the parking lot.
My humblest apologies for this post; I've been learning particle physics by grading homework in it, and I suspect it's driven me quite mad.
Your students might be a little upset about that...
Yikes, I think the same happened with Family Guy. Everything after the third season feels so contrived.
I worked in a lab a summer ago whose focus was doing something similar to this, though in baby steps. They built VLSI models in silicon using mixed-mode circuits to simulate a large array of interconnected neurons. Each "neuron" was actually a small circuit that was designed to approximate some type of real neuron. When the "neuron" fired, it actually sent what they called an AER event, an event with an address (column, row, and chip) attached to it. By routing these events around they could interconnect various chips to simulate the combination of various functions.
Of course they were nowhere near their goal of simulating an entire human brain. When I left, they had models of a section of the hippocampus, the retina, and a few other small areas.
The concept is good, however. By "computing" using analog circuits in a massively parallel format, we can drastically reduce the computational and energetic overhead involved in these simulations. After all, real neurons are essentially a very complicated charge pump with a certain firing threshold. With appropriate circuitry, researchers can come fairly close to the real thing without supercomputers.
For those interested, check out www.neuroengineering.upenn.edu/boahen/.
So we should measure throughput in Mortal Kombat terms... KOs!
What do you think about people who donate blood? And what of people who wish their organs to be donated upon untimely death? In these procedures, living cells are transfered from one body to another without causing significant harm to the donator. A single stem cell can be removed from a living human embryo without significantly affecting development. No death of the embryo is necessary. In parallel, if an embryo does die, however, wouldn't it seem ethical and even morally approvable to salvage some of the cells to help those still alive?
You don't have to be a part of that brave new world, but then perhaps you should be the one to tell the dying and incapacitated that they will simply have to suffer. Stem cell research can be completed without devaluing or destroying human life, and has the potential to bring improved quality of life to millions of people with debilitating diseases.
Off topic a little, I suppose perhaps you've read about our 'war on terror', or really any other war in human history. If you think stem cell research involves destroying life to build and enhance ours, you should check out what soldiers really do. And for a touch of historical guilt, think about the beginnings of America. We killed ourselves and the British so we could be independent. We dehumanized and massacred the indigenous people so we could take their land. We have a history of destroying life to enhance ours. So let's break with that history and use our new-found knowledge of biology to respect life and enhance it.
It would make a panspermia a nice sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, though. And just imagine... in a few billion years when those bacteria have evolved into intelligent life, those kooks who think that they were originally planted there by ETs will be right!
And it's quirky and mis-formatted in Opera.
Has he run IR/NMR spectroscopy on the sample? Has he done GC/MS analysis? Combustion analysis? Does anyone have links to these results?