The trouble with the Condorcet pairwise method is that you have to assume everybody is competent enough to understand the best strategy in a Condorcet contest. Condorcet methods ask voters to rank their candidates in order of preference. Even though the election is determined only from pairwise contests between each candidate, if there are two front runners, voters will rank their first choice #1 but they might rank the other front runner in last place, thinking that this will be a good way of boosting their candidate. (Let me be clear that both of us know that ranking the other guy last or #2 doesn't change a thing in the contest between the two front runners, but I don't trust the majority of voters to understand that.)
I think a good alternative is to use approval voting, where each voter indicates whether or not she approves of each candidate. With approval voting there's no impression that voting strategically can help your favorite, and clarity might be important when dealing with a populace known to have trouble with butterfly ballots.
They might say God's special in that He can observe Himself, and bootstrap Himself into existence. You know:
I am that I am.
If you like the "Many Worlds" interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (which is that there are no special, God-like observers and thus there is no one special "real" path the universe might take), then every entity which can ask questions will exist, and will have answers to their questions consistent with their existence.
There's no way to know if the "Many Worlds" interpretation is right, but TFA sure supports it, and the metaphysical consequences are trippy.
(I'm a Physicist in Berkeley CA; I'm allowed to say that.)
You have a good point. A chip twice as thick takes twice as long for heat to diffuse through it, so even if the new chips have the same power/area of today's chips they will operate at twice the temperature increase above ambient temperature.
If they merely sandwich two processors together, you'll have twice the heat generated with half the conductivity, so these chips would run at 4 times higher than ambient temperature than today's chips.
Aside: do you think we should start asking for chips which need to be run at low temperatures? Two of the biggest heat losses on modern chips are conduction losses (which decrease with temperature) and MOSFET conduction while the gate is neither completely on or off. A fundamental switching range limit comes from thermal noise, such that for a 30 mV range (really kBT/e) thermal noise is enough to keep the gate between on and off, so electrons can get through but they dissipate a lot of heat doing it.
What if we just turned down T to the boiling point of liquid Nitrogen? Then switching losses would be drastically reduced, operating voltages could be lower and wire interconnects could be of lower resistance.
I'm just a physicist; are there any chip designers out there who know the reasons why big data center chips aren't designed at 100 K? Is it that the market share is too small to justify optimizing a new chip?
Thanks for showing the math on this. I wonder if you should also factor in the non-fuel-related costs.
I think that one of the biggest points that hasn't been covered in this/. story yet is that the car is going to cost only about $10K, and that maintenance costs are going to be really low too. Since this is unproven tech, it could be that these things won't last well; but if they work as advertised (I'm not holding my breath) they (or a second-gen model) could take a chunk out of the traditional vehicle market. Ya think?
What we need here is a new incentive program for therapy discovery. In a blog post of mine I've outlined a way we could reward researchers for discovering cures, not just for finding new patentable molecules.
Take a look and see if you can find any holes in my idea, and leave comments either here or on the blog if you have any more ideas.
At the danger of being modded O/T, I'm going to post some of the research I did regarding medical patents in general.
I'm against patents for medical technology, because the incentives to the drug companies barely match the desires of the patients. As I recently showed in my blog, only 14% of drug revenue goes towards R & D, half of this 14% is wasted by looking for new drugs which don't treat diseases better than old ones (but are patentable, hence profitable), and the remaining 7% funds research skewed towards untested, patentable treatments even if well-known drugs might do as good or better a job. We've set up incentives for drug companies to find patentable tech they can then market to us. I think we need an entirely new incentive system, and I think we can do it and still have a free-market-friendly environment for research companies.
In this blog post, I outline a way for drug companies to get rewarded based on how much good their research does for humanity, using an Mprise-like system. Companies would get rewards proportional to how much better their treatment was shown to be over the current best treatment.
I have some ideas on how to implement this system so that everybody wins (yes - everybody - don't forget the parable of the broken window), but I would love some input from/.ers to help refine the details. You're always good at spotting holes in arguments, and I'd love to find them to see if they can be plugged.
Serious question: "How many gentoo users actually DO hand pick the features they compile?" My guess is that:
1 It might be hard to know what you can safely leave out of a compile and not break anything 2 It's difficult to foresee every function you are going to want in a program at compile-time, even if you're familiar with it 3 There are so many programs on a typical Linux box that to hand-choose modules for them all would take ages.
I guess in some environments (like cash register systems) you're doing only one thing and you want many identical machines, so it's possible to trim a bit more. However, for my desktop needs, selecting exactly the features I want wouldn't work for the above 3 reasons.
I agree with you 100% about subsidies; let's try to think of a way our politicians could drop them without losing too much of the vote. Maybe they would have to be blanketly against special interests...
That being said, if you're a tech geek and not a politician, playing to your strengths and helping the OLPC project is better than trying to start an anti-subsidy lobby effort. Also, it could be that OLPC will help open source projects over here as well as the 3rd world. If you subscribe to the/. dogma, maybe the fact that someone's designing a laptop specifically for open source hardware + firmware is a good thing regardless of the effects on the 3rd world.
I'm no 'net expert, but I've heard that bandwidth costs fall by about half every year. Ad revenue per view, on the other hand, should stay roughly constant (or it might go up if companies currently underestimate how much cash they could make by targeted video ads). In any case, as long as Google can automate the video hosting to a large degree, it's just a matter of time until ads will more than pay for bandwidth costs, and then the biggest company out there is going to be in a nice position.
There's a lot of sentiment on/. which says we should make the people who had key loggers accountable for their slip ups, because otherwise nothing will change. I disagree. I think that even though no serious harm came to the hapless pwned, they're going to feel violated knowing that some lurker was recording everything they did over the Internet. They will probably also see that sometimes the banks won't be there to cover their asses when the hackers come.
I'm not saying that people shouldn't be responsible for their own computers; I'm saying that even if the key loggers didn't cost the dupes money, most of them are still going to change their careless ways after this wake-up call.
An easy explanation: if your cold reservoir is as hot as your hot reservoir, you'll be emitting exactly as many infra-red photons as you're absorbing. Solar cells couldn't work (even in theory, with ideal materials) if they were at the temperature of the surface of the sun, since they would radiate as much energy as they absorb.
ITER has dropped the "International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor" interpretation, since some people don't get a warm, fuzzy feeling from the word "Thermonuclear." Conveniently, ITER means "the way" in Latin, so they took that word as their namesake.
Step 1: sell short on diamond stocks. Step 2: drop a boatload of artificial diamonds over the *natural* diamond mines in Namibia. Document your "salting" of the diamond mines, but keep it secret. Step 3: wait until you're sure the new artificial diamonds are in the system (i.e. sold as natural diamonds). Step 4: reveal the documented evidence that there are artificial diamonds being sold as natural ones. Step 5: profit!
This idea was originally proposed by A.M., a friend of mine. Pure genius!
direct hooks between Google Office and my word processor of choice. As soon as Google Office respects.odt enough so that it can keep track of all changes people make (even if the web interface isn't yet able to let you use all of.odt), you should be able to get the collaborative benefits of Google Office along with all the benefits of having a local office app.
Think: all open standard word procesors could instantly have the best collaboration system on the planet (i.e. real time co-editing, with backups and rollbacks possible) with minimal coding effort.
There's a difference between energy and momentum - you're confusing the two. Burning a given amount of fuel will give you a constant change in momentum. Since kinetic energy goes as velocity (and thus momentum) squared, I stand by my previous statement: a given amount of speeding up costs more energy if you're already moving fast. When you're going slowly (compared with the exhaust velocity), most of the energy goes into the moving exhaust, not your space ship. If you're moving faster than the exhaust velocity, you actually get *more* than the energy of combustion of the fuel added to your kinetic energy - this is possible since the fuel has lost so much energy because it's moving slower now.
If you don't believe me, please check out that "high school physics" yourself before posting back.
What's nice about the EM plus rocket concept is that you don't have to build a gigantic EM launching strip, the length of which goes as the square of the desired final velocity. (Vf^2 = 2*A*d where d is the length of the EM launcher.)
I think a lot of folks here are confused about the "2000 gs" part of this device. This acceleration is from the centripetal acceleration needed to keep the payload moving in a circular path.
Here's the math: The acceleration A needed to keep something moving at speed V in a circle of radius R is V^2/R.
A = (8 000 m/s)^2 / (1000 m) = (64 000 m/s/s) = 6 400 gs.
TFA says "More than 2000 gs" - my guess is that this is a mixture of sloppy journalism, and maybe confusion over the minimum acceleration needed to get to escape velocity (about 5.5 km/s). If they did get their wires crossed and report the 8 km/s figure but the g force of getting to escape velocity, the needed A is:
A = (5 500 m/s)^2 / (1000 m) = about (30 000 m/s/s) = 3 000 gs, so they're still wrong.
Incidentally, I love the ring idea, but it could only ever launch pretty specialized cargo due to the g forces needed. What I'd love to see would be a linear accelerator which got a rocket up to about 3-4 km/s, then the rocket would take over. EM launching systems with reasonable length can be built for low speeds, and rockets have high efficiency only when they're already moving fast (otherwise, most kinetic energy goes into making the exhaust, and not the payload, go fast), so a switchover plan seems pretty natural (except that it demands all the infrastructure of a small EM launcher as well as all the problems of a chemical fuel rocket - although some of these problems are less of an issue if you can accelerate the rocket to faster than the fuel's exhaust velocity before it reaches the muzzle of the EM launcher - then your shiny equipmetn doesn't get burned.)
"Hi. I have to do a random security screen. Which of you three would like to be searched?"
That question was asked to me and my two travelling companions. We sent my wife's friend to get searched since she had the least baggage.
PS I'm Canadian, and I love it when I see Canadian officials interjecting a bit of common sense (i.e. that these random searched probably don't really help, so let's make them as painless as possible) into their work.
You said "In order for a hash to be completely collision proof, it has to contain all of the non-redundant information contained in the original file." I don't think that's accurate, since a 256 bit hash of a completely random 512 bit message is 256 bits long, so it cannot contain the 512 bits of information in the original message. I believe you mean that for an N-bit hash function to be completely collision-proof, it must share at least N bits of mutual information with the message. If every bit of the hash is sensitive to every bit of the message in a unique way, then as long as the message has at least a little more information than N bits the hash will be collision-free.
What The_Wilschon means (I think) is that unless the original html document had a long padded sequence outside the tag, the sizes of the real and fake pages wouldn't be the same. However, if the phony page could have a slightly smaller size than the original between the html tags (say, a bank login page with 16 bytes less), then adding the total file size doesn't really help you.
The only thing I think that would really help is sending an html page without any comments and data that's not processed, and declaring that there shouldn't be any hidden data. The problem here is that the random data used to make the hashes collide could be white text against a white background (or other invisible changes), so the bottom line is that you're right, wfberg, there's no way to make sure you're not going to get pwned without a secure hashing algorithm.
Slashdot Mirror
Dear Swillden,
The trouble with the Condorcet pairwise method is that you have to assume everybody is competent enough to understand the best strategy in a Condorcet contest. Condorcet methods ask voters to rank their candidates in order of preference. Even though the election is determined only from pairwise contests between each candidate, if there are two front runners, voters will rank their first choice #1 but they might rank the other front runner in last place, thinking that this will be a good way of boosting their candidate. (Let me be clear that both of us know that ranking the other guy last or #2 doesn't change a thing in the contest between the two front runners, but I don't trust the majority of voters to understand that.)
I think a good alternative is to use approval voting, where each voter indicates whether or not she approves of each candidate. With approval voting there's no impression that voting strategically can help your favorite, and clarity might be important when dealing with a populace known to have trouble with butterfly ballots.
What do you think?
They might say God's special in that He can observe Himself, and bootstrap Himself into existence. You know:
I am that I am.
If you like the "Many Worlds" interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (which is that there are no special, God-like observers and thus there is no one special "real" path the universe might take), then every entity which can ask questions will exist, and will have answers to their questions consistent with their existence.
There's no way to know if the "Many Worlds" interpretation is right, but TFA sure supports it, and the metaphysical consequences are trippy.
(I'm a Physicist in Berkeley CA; I'm allowed to say that.)
LeDopore
You have a good point. A chip twice as thick takes twice as long for heat to diffuse through it, so even if the new chips have the same power/area of today's chips they will operate at twice the temperature increase above ambient temperature.
If they merely sandwich two processors together, you'll have twice the heat generated with half the conductivity, so these chips would run at 4 times higher than ambient temperature than today's chips.
Aside: do you think we should start asking for chips which need to be run at low temperatures? Two of the biggest heat losses on modern chips are conduction losses (which decrease with temperature) and MOSFET conduction while the gate is neither completely on or off. A fundamental switching range limit comes from thermal noise, such that for a 30 mV range (really kBT/e) thermal noise is enough to keep the gate between on and off, so electrons can get through but they dissipate a lot of heat doing it.
What if we just turned down T to the boiling point of liquid Nitrogen? Then switching losses would be drastically reduced, operating voltages could be lower and wire interconnects could be of lower resistance.
I'm just a physicist; are there any chip designers out there who know the reasons why big data center chips aren't designed at 100 K? Is it that the market share is too small to justify optimizing a new chip?
Thanks for showing the math on this. I wonder if you should also factor in the non-fuel-related costs.
/. story yet is that the car is going to cost only about $10K, and that maintenance costs are going to be really low too. Since this is unproven tech, it could be that these things won't last well; but if they work as advertised (I'm not holding my breath) they (or a second-gen model) could take a chunk out of the traditional vehicle market. Ya think?
I think that one of the biggest points that hasn't been covered in this
With ping times over 10 years? Maybe not.
So, does that mean you think the professional journalists are doing a fine job?
At the very least, their incentives are to scare and sensationalize. Don't criticize something until you have something better to replace it with.
What we need here is a new incentive program for therapy discovery. In a blog post of mine I've outlined a way we could reward researchers for discovering cures, not just for finding new patentable molecules.
Take a look and see if you can find any holes in my idea, and leave comments either here or on the blog if you have any more ideas.
Thanks!
At the danger of being modded O/T, I'm going to post some of the research I did regarding medical patents in general.
/.ers to help refine the details. You're always good at spotting holes in arguments, and I'd love to find them to see if they can be plugged.
I'm against patents for medical technology, because the incentives to the drug companies barely match the desires of the patients. As I recently showed in my blog, only 14% of drug revenue goes towards R & D, half of this 14% is wasted by looking for new drugs which don't treat diseases better than old ones (but are patentable, hence profitable), and the remaining 7% funds research skewed towards untested, patentable treatments even if well-known drugs might do as good or better a job. We've set up incentives for drug companies to find patentable tech they can then market to us. I think we need an entirely new incentive system, and I think we can do it and still have a free-market-friendly environment for research companies.
In this blog post, I outline a way for drug companies to get rewarded based on how much good their research does for humanity, using an Mprise-like system. Companies would get rewards proportional to how much better their treatment was shown to be over the current best treatment.
I have some ideas on how to implement this system so that everybody wins (yes - everybody - don't forget the parable of the broken window), but I would love some input from
Thanks!
You shall have iQUEEN, beautiful and one-button as the Dawn.
But I'll charge way too much for hardware: all shall love me and despair!
Serious question: "How many gentoo users actually DO hand pick the features they compile?" My guess is that:
1 It might be hard to know what you can safely leave out of a compile and not break anything
2 It's difficult to foresee every function you are going to want in a program at compile-time, even if you're familiar with it
3 There are so many programs on a typical Linux box that to hand-choose modules for them all would take ages.
I guess in some environments (like cash register systems) you're doing only one thing and you want many identical machines, so it's possible to trim a bit more. However, for my desktop needs, selecting exactly the features I want wouldn't work for the above 3 reasons.
I agree with you 100% about subsidies; let's try to think of a way our politicians could drop them without losing too much of the vote. Maybe they would have to be blanketly against special interests...
/. dogma, maybe the fact that someone's designing a laptop specifically for open source hardware + firmware is a good thing regardless of the effects on the 3rd world.
That being said, if you're a tech geek and not a politician, playing to your strengths and helping the OLPC project is better than trying to start an anti-subsidy lobby effort. Also, it could be that OLPC will help open source projects over here as well as the 3rd world. If you subscribe to the
I'm no 'net expert, but I've heard that bandwidth costs fall by about half every year. Ad revenue per view, on the other hand, should stay roughly constant (or it might go up if companies currently underestimate how much cash they could make by targeted video ads). In any case, as long as Google can automate the video hosting to a large degree, it's just a matter of time until ads will more than pay for bandwidth costs, and then the biggest company out there is going to be in a nice position.
He who breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.
There's a lot of sentiment on /. which says we should make the people who had key loggers accountable for their slip ups, because otherwise nothing will change. I disagree. I think that even though no serious harm came to the hapless pwned, they're going to feel violated knowing that some lurker was recording everything they did over the Internet. They will probably also see that sometimes the banks won't be there to cover their asses when the hackers come.
I'm not saying that people shouldn't be responsible for their own computers; I'm saying that even if the key loggers didn't cost the dupes money, most of them are still going to change their careless ways after this wake-up call.
An easy explanation: if your cold reservoir is as hot as your hot reservoir, you'll be emitting exactly as many infra-red photons as you're absorbing. Solar cells couldn't work (even in theory, with ideal materials) if they were at the temperature of the surface of the sun, since they would radiate as much energy as they absorb.
ITER has dropped the "International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor" interpretation, since some people don't get a warm, fuzzy feeling from the word "Thermonuclear." Conveniently, ITER means "the way" in Latin, so they took that word as their namesake.
Thanks for the articles!
Step 1: sell short on diamond stocks.
Step 2: drop a boatload of artificial diamonds over the *natural* diamond mines in Namibia. Document your "salting" of the diamond mines, but keep it secret.
Step 3: wait until you're sure the new artificial diamonds are in the system (i.e. sold as natural diamonds).
Step 4: reveal the documented evidence that there are artificial diamonds being sold as natural ones.
Step 5: profit!
This idea was originally proposed by A.M., a friend of mine. Pure genius!
direct hooks between Google Office and my word processor of choice. As soon as Google Office respects .odt enough so that it can keep track of all changes people make (even if the web interface isn't yet able to let you use all of .odt), you should be able to get the collaborative benefits of Google Office along with all the benefits of having a local office app.
Think: all open standard word procesors could instantly have the best collaboration system on the planet (i.e. real time co-editing, with backups and rollbacks possible) with minimal coding effort.
Hi joto.
There's a difference between energy and momentum - you're confusing the two. Burning a given amount of fuel will give you a constant change in momentum. Since kinetic energy goes as velocity (and thus momentum) squared, I stand by my previous statement: a given amount of speeding up costs more energy if you're already moving fast. When you're going slowly (compared with the exhaust velocity), most of the energy goes into the moving exhaust, not your space ship. If you're moving faster than the exhaust velocity, you actually get *more* than the energy of combustion of the fuel added to your kinetic energy - this is possible since the fuel has lost so much energy because it's moving slower now.
If you don't believe me, please check out that "high school physics" yourself before posting back.
What's nice about the EM plus rocket concept is that you don't have to build a gigantic EM launching strip, the length of which goes as the square of the desired final velocity. (Vf^2 = 2*A*d where d is the length of the EM launcher.)
I think a lot of folks here are confused about the "2000 gs" part of this device. This acceleration is from the centripetal acceleration needed to keep the payload moving in a circular path.
Here's the math:
The acceleration A needed to keep something moving at speed V in a circle of radius R is V^2/R.
A = (8 000 m/s)^2 / (1000 m) = (64 000 m/s/s) = 6 400 gs.
TFA says "More than 2000 gs" - my guess is that this is a mixture of sloppy journalism, and maybe confusion over the minimum acceleration needed to get to escape velocity (about 5.5 km/s). If they did get their wires crossed and report the 8 km/s figure but the g force of getting to escape velocity, the needed A is:
A = (5 500 m/s)^2 / (1000 m) = about (30 000 m/s/s) = 3 000 gs, so they're still wrong.
Incidentally, I love the ring idea, but it could only ever launch pretty specialized cargo due to the g forces needed. What I'd love to see would be a linear accelerator which got a rocket up to about 3-4 km/s, then the rocket would take over. EM launching systems with reasonable length can be built for low speeds, and rockets have high efficiency only when they're already moving fast (otherwise, most kinetic energy goes into making the exhaust, and not the payload, go fast), so a switchover plan seems pretty natural (except that it demands all the infrastructure of a small EM launcher as well as all the problems of a chemical fuel rocket - although some of these problems are less of an issue if you can accelerate the rocket to faster than the fuel's exhaust velocity before it reaches the muzzle of the EM launcher - then your shiny equipmetn doesn't get burned.)
My 2. Enjoy!
"Hi. I have to do a random security screen. Which of you three would like to be searched?"
That question was asked to me and my two travelling companions. We sent my wife's friend to get searched since she had the least baggage.
PS I'm Canadian, and I love it when I see Canadian officials interjecting a bit of common sense (i.e. that these random searched probably don't really help, so let's make them as painless as possible) into their work.
here
You said "In order for a hash to be completely collision proof, it has to contain all of the non-redundant information contained in the original file." I don't think that's accurate, since a 256 bit hash of a completely random 512 bit message is 256 bits long, so it cannot contain the 512 bits of information in the original message. I believe you mean that for an N-bit hash function to be completely collision-proof, it must share at least N bits of mutual information with the message. If every bit of the hash is sensitive to every bit of the message in a unique way, then as long as the message has at least a little more information than N bits the hash will be collision-free.
What The_Wilschon means (I think) is that unless the original html document had a long padded sequence outside the tag, the sizes of the real and fake pages wouldn't be the same. However, if the phony page could have a slightly smaller size than the original between the html tags (say, a bank login page with 16 bytes less), then adding the total file size doesn't really help you.
The only thing I think that would really help is sending an html page without any comments and data that's not processed, and declaring that there shouldn't be any hidden data. The problem here is that the random data used to make the hashes collide could be white text against a white background (or other invisible changes), so the bottom line is that you're right, wfberg, there's no way to make sure you're not going to get pwned without a secure hashing algorithm.