Carbon nanotubes are about 200 times more sticky than the gecko's foot hairs, and their semiconducting nature is being exploited to make memory chips. To put it somewhat crudely, these work by slinging tiny mats of carbon nanotubes between lumps of silicon inside a chip to form very small bridge-like structures.
I didn't see any evidence in this article of the technology coming from inspection of Gecko feet. It appears that these "bucky tubes" where constructed and then someone said, "Oh, look, they're like setae!" I'm highly dubious that anyone studied Gecko feet and started to build silicon chips out of the tiny hairs.
This article could more aptly be titled, "New technology happens to reflect Gecko trait."
And so it comes to it. While Democracy is a form of government and capitalism is a way to run your market system, these two are being compared in this issue. Which is more American.
Obviously, there is a conflict of interest between these two ideals. On one hand, it's very American to be a capitalist. After all, what is the American dream? On the other hand, it's very American to cherish the freedoms that we are privileged to have. But is it American to push the ideals of Democracy on the rest of the world? Some people would say that it most certainly is, some people would wager to leave well enough alone.
Depending on how you want to look at it, Google and Microsoft are more American than Thomas Jefferson.
Because of the Cold War in the 80's, the worst thing you could call an American was a Communist. But Communism is only talking about the market--Socialism is how the government is run. So what do we value more as Americans, our market system or government? If you claim them to be inseparable, you're greatly mistaken.
And now, Google and Microsoft are trying to bring out beloved capitalism to China. But they aren't also enforcing Democracy in their wheeling and dealing. Is this so wrong? Probably not if you believe every country has a right to govern itself as it so chooses. To quote Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill K.G.:
Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
So I encourage you to think twice before faulting Microsoft and Google for their entrance into China. One of the most revered and holy things the American people have is a free and open market system. Granted it's not perfect, we still value it to a great extent. With our corporations extending into China, perhaps they will change to full blown Capitalism also. This is also capital exported from China to America which benefits our economy in some small way.
So remember, we elect our congressmen to represent us, not the people of China. I'd like to see them show more concern for the ebbing of Democracy in our own damn country before they start working on forcing the Chinese to accept our form of government. Perfect the system we have here and, as in the case of East and West Berlin, the people will vote with their feet.
I'm not going to tell you what company I work for but it is easily in the top 50 of the Fortune 500. And, yes, Skype is banned--my employer would never let anyone use Skype.
On top of that, I don't have administrative rights to install anything on my computer. I have to go through a large control process to achieve that which requires me to explain what the software will be used for (and it better be a company resource). Therefore, it's almost out of the question to ask for it to be installed.
My company (and I have the feeling that many others are like this, too) would far rather throw truck loads of money at AT&T rather than risk something going wrong with the P2P aspects of Skype.
Furthermore, any kind of free software scares my employer. Big time. I know Skype isn't necessarily free so this is about other software I may want to use. They have this fear that they would be a large target if whoever wrote said software decided to take legal action upon discovering that employees of company X all used it to complete their daily jobs.
Not even stadiums full of lawyers claiming that, due to some software licenses, there's nothing to worry about could convince them otherwise.
My friend, I was in the food service industry for over four years of my young adult life. It has been ingrained into me to be able to tolerate some of the worst forms of human communication.
To those who think they break me through mere text, I welcome their assault. To those who have a glass of merlot and a full plate of prime rib to throw into my chest... well, I'd rather not go through with that again...
Do not dare to question the actions nor the motives of the current government administration, or indeed any government administration.
Oh, I can and I will. I don't care how much I'm flamed. Flame me all you want... anyone who can't listen to criticisms from the American people doesn't deserve to serve the American people.
For a classic demonstration, see my comments on the the EFF's latest action. This is not just a special case. This is the kind of resistance which I have received for years.
I'm confused, was I just asked to join an underground movement to overthrow the U.S. government?
Ok, here's one from kindergarten: Actions speak louder than words.
Ok, I'm fairly certain that I can find a lot of evidence revealing how many leaders of academia actually feel about George W. Bush. And there's a lot of documentation on his actual actions regarding science and research in the nation.
Harvard's Howard Gardner calls Bush's science adviser a "prostitute." And we all remember the Scientists and Engineers for Change organization compromised of sixty Nobel scientists and Tech Leaders. I'll let you guess out their stance on bush. Don't forget their open letter to the American people stating, " President Bush and his administration are compromising our future."
Remember, he only said he supports it. Let's see some actual actions to follow that up.
And if you have time to read up on Bush's actions in the science community, take a look at the Politics and Science in the Bush Administration. I find it hilarious that anyone could expect me to swallow Bush's "scientific research and technology proposals" when his actions are no more proposals than death knells.
Indeed, it seems the hardest issue regarding science that Bush is struggling with is how to silence it.
And yet the vast majority of Russia lives in poverty.
It's good they've built a better mouse. That's what the people need. *note sarcasm*
Anyone find any numbers on what these "zig-zagging" missiles cost to develop? Anyone else sick of seeing countries burn money on defense while their people starve?
What it's come down to is simply Fruedian penis...err...missile envy.
EMPs are difficult to produce from a small machine. Large machines could probably generate a fluctuating field that acts as an EMP but any small device that creates an EMP is most likely some form of nuclear warhead.
So you want to fight fire with fire? Please do include how your device creates an EMP without itself being a nuclear warhead.
Slim Pickens: "Well, boys, I reckon this is it - nuclear combat toe to toe with the Roosskies. Now look, boys, I ain't much of a hand at makin' speeches, but I got a pretty fair idea that something doggone important is goin' on back there. And I got a fair idea the kinda personal emotions that some of you fellas may be thinkin'. Heck, I reckon you wouldn't even be human bein's if you didn't have some pretty strong personal feelin's about nuclear combat. I want you to remember one thing, the folks back home is a-countin' on you and by golly, we ain't about to let 'em down. I tell you something else, if this thing turns out to be half as important as I figure it just might be, I'd say that you're all in line for some important promotions and personal citations when this thing's over with. That goes for ever' last one of you regardless of your race, color or your creed. Now let's get this thing on the hump - we got some flyin' to do."
...anyone care to post the bottom line, i.e. for someone building an SLI system...
If you're building an SLI system and you want to take advantage of the SLI enabled cards, you're going to have to stick to Nvidia's line of cards that currently utilizes the bridge accross two cards. To my knowledge, these are the only cards that will allow a user to use SLI to bridge them, hook up one monitor and enjoy the cards alternating on computing frames in a coordinated effort to make your view full of gooey warmness.
I'm guessing that they used an X1800 XT with 512MB of GDDR3 while most 7800 GTXs only have 256MB GDDR3. They come to be about the same price but I attribute their release dates... remember Moore's Law.
Newegg has a great datasheet regarding all mainstream cards.
As we all know, Google has a patented page ranking system that calculates the correlation of words with websites. It does this (primarily) by reading links from all of its cached websites and parsing html links to determine what words are being used to describe the page in the link.
A while back, this was known as Google Bombing and certain individuals exploited Google's system very effectively by linking to pages with words that, by all rights, were not very accurate. After all, do a Google search for the word 'failure' and the top site is George W. Bush's Whitehouse domain Biography.
So what do you do to help the Chinese? Perhaps you could make a page with two columns. In one column would be the correct text with no link and the key word. In the other column would be all the permutated misspellings with links to the real sites. You could host this one your website and send it to friends asking them to also host it. They would need to slightly alter it and host it but it would effectively provide the page ranks for the misspellings and allow anyone in China (who has access to your page) a key if they need it.
... you might not know me but I buy your product and pay a monthly fee for accounts.
I like your game a lot, I feel the virtual reality that you provide to be satisfying. In fact, I left reality on June 8th, 2003 when you launched your first server. Since then, I have preferred destroying for endless hours day after day and on multiple occasions have, as a result, been accused of being a scripted bot by a game master.
I appreciate you trying to make changes to the game... but, well, with the latest patch my no longer does damage per tick.
Having spent a small fortune on this recently leaves me in despair.
Unfortunately for you, I've acquired your home address and am on my way over to your house to commit hari kari in your front lawn.
Goodbye."
Yeah, it's farfetched. But I believe that was indicative of the outburst when Star Wars Galaxies was changed for the betterment of the game in the eyes of Sony Entertainment Online and Lucasfilm.
Anyone care to speculate what would happen if the very basics and foundations of World of Warcraft were to be altered in a patch?
"Lois, everyone has their sanctuary. The Catholics have churches, fat people have Wisconsin, and I have the Pawtucket Brewery." - Peter in Wasted Talent
Beer and cheese must not fall under the Atkins diet... or maybe they do but you're not supposed to consume them by the metric tonne? Having never tried said tomfoolery, I'm not sure how it works.
Looks like those 'sconnies found an excuse... remember, it's not that you're inactive or eat a lot. Thanks to technology, there are pills to cure obesity--3 AM TV told me so.
If you really want to nitpick, let's do this. From here:
decode
Main Entry: decode
Pronunciation: (")dE-'kOd
Function: transitive verb
1 a : to convert (as a coded message) into intelligible form b : to recognize and interpret (an electronic signal)
2 a : DECIPHER 3a b : to discover the underlying meaning of
Ok, so if it was an electrical signal, I'd let it slide. Otherwise, it is decoding a messege into something intelligible which GTAAACTTGAAAA isn't... or it is synonymous with decipher.
This is in addition to the foundation's incentive to completely decode the DNA of 100 or more people covered earlier on Slashdot.
If there's one thing that confuses me, it's why anyone ever uses the verb "decode" when speaking about DNA. Maybe it's just because it sounds cool and "sequence DNA" isn't quite as futuristic. Because that's all their asking for them to do--read the DNA into a form that reflects the ordering of G, T, A or C which are abbreviations for the different possible amino acids.
Now, to "decode" that would mean that it's encrypted somehow, but it's not. It's there in strands in the center of a cell's nucleus. Maybe "extract" would work as a verb, but we're certainly not cracking any encryption. Do I use RSA encryption to protect my genes from you? No. Even if I did, they'd likely only have to crack it once unless everyone used separate public keys.
What it would really mean to decode DNA would be to figure out what the sequence is actually telling us and we are a far far way from that. The sequence reveals the three letter nucleotides and these then reveal many different proteins that form upon folding. We need to find out which are junk, how recombination works, what defines a stop codon, which nucleotides form which proteins, understanding the C-value, etc. Once that happens, then we can start claiming we've decoded something. Please, people, its function is encrypted, not its sequence.
When an X-prize is issued using this wording, it really makes me think twice if they really even know what they want done to win the prize. If you take it literally, that's awfully ambitious. Of course, there's no way to reverse the use of this word as I believe the media has made it a permanent house-hold phrase...
You are underestimating the slashdot crowd. Try posting a link to your website here.
Yes, everyone's intent will be to view my vacation pictures.
Wait a minute... why is my internet slowing down... and what's a "port scanner." Well, if Window's firewall is asking me to allow it to come through on port 445, it must be ok.
*puts on his ragged and unused database admin hat*
*paints two large concentric circles on his chest, one inside the other*
*throws off his gloves... and steps into the circle of death that is known as a Slashdot forum*
Alright, I run a MYSQL database at home for my little crappy web server which no one visits because pictures of me visiting Mexico isn't exactly worth typing a number into your browser. All those details aside, why should I switch to either Microsoft's SQL Server 2005, Oracle 10g or DB2?
I'm a huge MYSQL fan... well, because I've enjoyed their stuff freely for quite some time. Suddenly, everyone (and their dog) is releasing their once-thousand-dollar database in a free and slightly inhibited form.
Why the hell should I even bother thinking about switching to these new databases? And, further more, it seems that most of these newly free databases are not intended for corporate use... like DB2's memory limit and the castrations of the other databases... so where do they belong? In the hands of small businesses? A company's "developer camp?"
And could you be so kind as to make the prior assumption that I know I'm an idiot so you don't need to tell me that. Just give me some nice hard facts that are easy to measurably prove one database has an advantage over another.
By the way, thanks ScuttleMonkey for clarifying that it's "free as in beer." Unfortunately it's only noon and now you've awakened my desire to get slammed over lunch.
Re:A Slashdot Orange
on
Mitnick on OSS
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· Score: 1, Offtopic
*relishing the only self esteem that Dim gets in life, he drives a crude shank into eldavojohn's throat and puts on his AC mask as he hears police moderator sirens in the distance*
*a dazed author of the GP lies under an overpass, gleefully singing about possible Linux/Unix flaws*
Alexander "brunes69" de Large: Oy! Lookie what we have here, droogies... someone who's trying to relay a point without including a complete manual on how to do it! Droogies: [in unison] HE FORGOT ABOUT PERMISSIONS! Alexander "brunes69" de Large: [bending over with his cane against his cod piece] That's right. And what happens to slashdotters we viddie that make mistakes? Droogie A: We brow beat them into a bloody pulp... *Alex and the droogs continually beat the poor slashdotter while emitting "Singing in the Rain"* eldavojohn: Please... oof!... I tried to warn you that I don't write viruses for a living!
The biggest setback to biometric security is that few companies post the actual numbers concerning their precision and recall.
Before I ever buy into a biometric security device, I want to be able to sit down with the numbers and see what happens to the F-measure when I slide beta between zero and one.
Their sites should have a slider that goes between zero and one with the resulting number. That way, I would know how many times out of a hundred my guards are going to let Bin Laden Jr. through my security check points. But I also want to know how many times my guards are going to throw Grandma-down-the-street against the hood of a car and arrest her for being a dead hijacker from an infamous attack. Implementers of biometric security just don't seem to grasp the concept that a false positive can be a problem just like a true negative. Every white paper I've read on this issue makes certain that they include these figures at the end of their paper.
Because if you hit the production line, these numbers are all that matter to your consumer.
Fuzzing and Obfuscation
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Mitnick on OSS
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I figured I'd add a little more to how "fuzzing" works as the article left me a little disappointed as to what it actually is. There are a few things online about it, including a decent white paper written by Ilja van Sprundel. There's also a large amount of fuzzing going on to test the security of WAP. It's basically the standard buffer overflow attack.
The crux of this attack is using a buffer overflow to gain superuser privileges. This might be trivial on Windows, so I'll relay the "la/ls" story to you regarding how to gain it in Linux. The part of this trick involves figuring out how to get an executable file from your machine to another user's machine. Let's say you know some company or institution is running a webserver on their unix/linux machines from a server and you go to visit their site. Now, their code isn't completely up to date and there's a security hole in one of their web applications. You know (after toying around with said web app on your home machine) that certain large chunks of hex in a field will result in a submission that essentially writes your binary to their $HOME directory. The name of this file will be, of course, "la."
Now hopefully their home directory is like mine and it's full of crap. So they'll never notice the "la" file but everyday they use that machine, they type "ls" to display the file. One day, their finger slips and they type "la" resulting in the execution of my binary. Instantly, another executable is written, this time called "ps" and a thread is started that simply spin locks on the processor--chewing up cycles. The machine might slow or freeze but an admin will notice this process and go into the users directory (as root) and type "ps -al" to see all the existing processes. Instead, it executes your "ps" virus and subsequently, the spinlocking stops with "ps" printed to output with the super user killing "la" and thinking everything is fixed. In the background however, the "ps" process is active... silently idling waiting to do it's malicious purpose...
I'm sure there's a hundred things wrong with what I've said, I'm not a hacker--I just like to point out possible security holes.
Improbable but not impossible.
One more thing about the article, the beauty of OSS is that it is impossible to implement security through obfuscation--a major pitfall to security in application design.
What Doctor Olds eventually told me was that he guessed that there was something special in the way that the proteins formed the spires or "connections" in a ingenius or autistic person's brain. He said there are specific and different properties of each neuron's thousands of electrical connectors. These hair-like structures probably produce a greater influence on how smart the individual is than anything else.
Then again, this is primarily speculation as even our computer modeling is unsuccessful at predicting protein folding resulting from genetic sequences. I'm hoping that the story about better protein crystalis helps researches better understand protein formation and function in regards to not only viruses but also neurons as Alzheimer's desease is a big industry now that the baby boomers are living far past their prime.
A while back, NASA conducted a fifteen year anniversary study on the savant known as Kim Peek. Peek was born with a strange brain deformity known as macrocephaly which results in the two hemispheres of the brain being linked due to a pocket of water at the base of the brain.
Now, there has been a lot of speculation about how neurons work and what makes someone autistic. I once had a lengthy conversation with James Olds of George Mason's Krasnow Institute and asked him about Peek. Olds explained to me that it's very mysterious how savants develop. I asked him if Peek had an abnormally large cortex but he dismissed this, citing that elephants are not geniuses. He also gave me an anecdotal story of a Harvard football player that injured his shoulder blade as the star quarter back. When they x-rayed him, they also found out that his head was mostly filled with water and the result was a severe lack of brain tissue. However, he was a 4.0 grade point average student. I asked Dr. Olds if Peek's neurons might be more densely populated but he also dismissed this saying that neurons are huge on nutrient consumption and if they grow too closely together, they will kill each other.
Anyone care to take a stab at this? Can anyone speculate on this?
And it was good. Very funny, very well done. Where the hell does YNG Turk Films get that kind of cash to make something as high quality as that (come on, the closing credits were stunning). Has it really become that easy to manipulate video on your home computer? Probably, but these guys know how to entertain.
After looking into more of YNG Turk Productions, it seems they're based out of Hopkins, Minnesota (just like MST3K!) but there seems to be little other information about them. What I do know is that they've done quite a few comedic sketches and you can find another one on Google Video called Pitching Mother but they've also done other various (primarily comedy) skits in their times. Will Ryan Wood gain a cult following?
I have to admit, the best thing about being a geek/nerd is that I love to see myself made fun of. I absolutely die laughing and love it. Any other stereotype gets offended whenever you make fun of them. And if you can't be lighthearted about everything, then you're going to have a hell of a time making it through life.
Slashdot Mirror
This article could more aptly be titled, "New technology happens to reflect Gecko trait."
Obviously, there is a conflict of interest between these two ideals. On one hand, it's very American to be a capitalist. After all, what is the American dream? On the other hand, it's very American to cherish the freedoms that we are privileged to have. But is it American to push the ideals of Democracy on the rest of the world? Some people would say that it most certainly is, some people would wager to leave well enough alone.
Depending on how you want to look at it, Google and Microsoft are more American than Thomas Jefferson.
Because of the Cold War in the 80's, the worst thing you could call an American was a Communist. But Communism is only talking about the market--Socialism is how the government is run. So what do we value more as Americans, our market system or government? If you claim them to be inseparable, you're greatly mistaken.
And now, Google and Microsoft are trying to bring out beloved capitalism to China. But they aren't also enforcing Democracy in their wheeling and dealing. Is this so wrong? Probably not if you believe every country has a right to govern itself as it so chooses. To quote Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill K.G.: So I encourage you to think twice before faulting Microsoft and Google for their entrance into China. One of the most revered and holy things the American people have is a free and open market system. Granted it's not perfect, we still value it to a great extent. With our corporations extending into China, perhaps they will change to full blown Capitalism also. This is also capital exported from China to America which benefits our economy in some small way.
So remember, we elect our congressmen to represent us , not the people of China. I'd like to see them show more concern for the ebbing of Democracy in our own damn country before they start working on forcing the Chinese to accept our form of government. Perfect the system we have here and, as in the case of East and West Berlin, the people will vote with their feet.
I'm not going to tell you what company I work for but it is easily in the top 50 of the Fortune 500. And, yes, Skype is banned--my employer would never let anyone use Skype.
On top of that, I don't have administrative rights to install anything on my computer. I have to go through a large control process to achieve that which requires me to explain what the software will be used for (and it better be a company resource). Therefore, it's almost out of the question to ask for it to be installed.
My company (and I have the feeling that many others are like this, too) would far rather throw truck loads of money at AT&T rather than risk something going wrong with the P2P aspects of Skype.
Furthermore, any kind of free software scares my employer. Big time. I know Skype isn't necessarily free so this is about other software I may want to use. They have this fear that they would be a large target if whoever wrote said software decided to take legal action upon discovering that employees of company X all used it to complete their daily jobs.
Not even stadiums full of lawyers claiming that, due to some software licenses, there's nothing to worry about could convince them otherwise.
My friend, I was in the food service industry for over four years of my young adult life. It has been ingrained into me to be able to tolerate some of the worst forms of human communication.
... well, I'd rather not go through with that again ...
To those who think they break me through mere text, I welcome their assault. To those who have a glass of merlot and a full plate of prime rib to throw into my chest
Ok, here's one from kindergarten: Actions speak louder than words.
Ok, I'm fairly certain that I can find a lot of evidence revealing how many leaders of academia actually feel about George W. Bush. And there's a lot of documentation on his actual actions regarding science and research in the nation.
Harvard's Howard Gardner calls Bush's science adviser a "prostitute." And we all remember the Scientists and Engineers for Change organization compromised of sixty Nobel scientists and Tech Leaders. I'll let you guess out their stance on bush. Don't forget their open letter to the American people stating, " President Bush and his administration are compromising our future."
Remember, he only said he supports it. Let's see some actual actions to follow that up.
And if you have time to read up on Bush's actions in the science community, take a look at the Politics and Science in the Bush Administration. I find it hilarious that anyone could expect me to swallow Bush's "scientific research and technology proposals" when his actions are no more proposals than death knells.
Indeed, it seems the hardest issue regarding science that Bush is struggling with is how to silence it.
And yet the vast majority of Russia lives in poverty.
It's good they've built a better mouse. That's what the people need. *note sarcasm*
Anyone find any numbers on what these "zig-zagging" missiles cost to develop? Anyone else sick of seeing countries burn money on defense while their people starve?
What it's come down to is simply Fruedian penis...err...missile envy.
EMPs are difficult to produce from a small machine. Large machines could probably generate a fluctuating field that acts as an EMP but any small device that creates an EMP is most likely some form of nuclear warhead.
So you want to fight fire with fire? Please do include how your device creates an EMP without itself being a nuclear warhead.
Slim Pickens: "Well, boys, I reckon this is it - nuclear combat toe to toe with the Roosskies. Now look, boys, I ain't much of a hand at makin' speeches, but I got a pretty fair idea that something doggone important is goin' on back there. And I got a fair idea the kinda personal emotions that some of you fellas may be thinkin'. Heck, I reckon you wouldn't even be human bein's if you didn't have some pretty strong personal feelin's about nuclear combat. I want you to remember one thing, the folks back home is a-countin' on you and by golly, we ain't about to let 'em down. I tell you something else, if this thing turns out to be half as important as I figure it just might be, I'd say that you're all in line for some important promotions and personal citations when this thing's over with. That goes for ever' last one of you regardless of your race, color or your creed. Now let's get this thing on the hump - we got some flyin' to do."
Oh, right, TFA.
... remember Moore's Law.
Surprisingly, the prices of these two cards are very close: ATI's X1800 XT & Nvidia's 7800 GTX.
I'm guessing that they used an X1800 XT with 512MB of GDDR3 while most 7800 GTXs only have 256MB GDDR3. They come to be about the same price but I attribute their release dates
Newegg has a great datasheet regarding all mainstream cards.
As we all know, Google has a patented page ranking system that calculates the correlation of words with websites. It does this (primarily) by reading links from all of its cached websites and parsing html links to determine what words are being used to describe the page in the link.
A while back, this was known as Google Bombing and certain individuals exploited Google's system very effectively by linking to pages with words that, by all rights, were not very accurate. After all, do a Google search for the word 'failure' and the top site is George W. Bush's Whitehouse domain Biography.
So what do you do to help the Chinese? Perhaps you could make a page with two columns. In one column would be the correct text with no link and the key word. In the other column would be all the permutated misspellings with links to the real sites. You could host this one your website and send it to friends asking them to also host it. They would need to slightly alter it and host it but it would effectively provide the page ranks for the misspellings and allow anyone in China (who has access to your page) a key if they need it.
... you might not know me but I buy your product and pay a monthly fee for accounts.
... but, well, with the latest patch my no longer does damage per tick.
I like your game a lot, I feel the virtual reality that you provide to be satisfying. In fact, I left reality on June 8th, 2003 when you launched your first server. Since then, I have preferred destroying for endless hours day after day and on multiple occasions have, as a result, been accused of being a scripted bot by a game master.
I appreciate you trying to make changes to the game
Having spent a small fortune on this recently leaves me in despair.
Unfortunately for you, I've acquired your home address and am on my way over to your house to commit hari kari in your front lawn.
Goodbye."
Yeah, it's farfetched. But I believe that was indicative of the outburst when Star Wars Galaxies was changed for the betterment of the game in the eyes of Sony Entertainment Online and Lucasfilm.
Anyone care to speculate what would happen if the very basics and foundations of World of Warcraft were to be altered in a patch?
"Lois, everyone has their sanctuary. The Catholics have churches, fat people have Wisconsin, and I have the Pawtucket Brewery."
... or maybe they do but you're not supposed to consume them by the metric tonne? Having never tried said tomfoolery, I'm not sure how it works.
... remember, it's not that you're inactive or eat a lot. Thanks to technology, there are pills to cure obesity--3 AM TV told me so.
- Peter in Wasted Talent
Beer and cheese must not fall under the Atkins diet
Looks like those 'sconnies found an excuse
If you really want to nitpick, let's do this. From here:
... or it is synonymous with decipher.
decode
Main Entry: decode
Pronunciation: (")dE-'kOd
Function: transitive verb
1 a : to convert (as a coded message) into intelligible form b : to recognize and interpret (an electronic signal)
2 a : DECIPHER 3a b : to discover the underlying meaning of
Ok, so if it was an electrical signal, I'd let it slide. Otherwise, it is decoding a messege into something intelligible which GTAAACTTGAAAA isn't
Now, to "decode" that would mean that it's encrypted somehow, but it's not. It's there in strands in the center of a cell's nucleus. Maybe "extract" would work as a verb, but we're certainly not cracking any encryption. Do I use RSA encryption to protect my genes from you? No. Even if I did, they'd likely only have to crack it once unless everyone used separate public keys.
What it would really mean to decode DNA would be to figure out what the sequence is actually telling us and we are a far far way from that. The sequence reveals the three letter nucleotides and these then reveal many different proteins that form upon folding. We need to find out which are junk, how recombination works, what defines a stop codon, which nucleotides form which proteins, understanding the C-value, etc. Once that happens, then we can start claiming we've decoded something. Please, people, its function is encrypted, not its sequence.
When an X-prize is issued using this wording, it really makes me think twice if they really even know what they want done to win the prize. If you take it literally, that's awfully ambitious. Of course, there's no way to reverse the use of this word as I believe the media has made it a permanent house-hold phrase
Wait a minute
*puts on his ragged and unused database admin hat*
... and steps into the circle of death that is known as a Slashdot forum*
... well, because I've enjoyed their stuff freely for quite some time. Suddenly, everyone (and their dog) is releasing their once-thousand-dollar database in a free and slightly inhibited form.
... like DB2's memory limit and the castrations of the other databases ... so where do they belong? In the hands of small businesses? A company's "developer camp?"
*paints two large concentric circles on his chest, one inside the other*
*throws off his gloves
Alright, I run a MYSQL database at home for my little crappy web server which no one visits because pictures of me visiting Mexico isn't exactly worth typing a number into your browser. All those details aside, why should I switch to either Microsoft's SQL Server 2005, Oracle 10g or DB2?
I'm a huge MYSQL fan
Why the hell should I even bother thinking about switching to these new databases? And, further more, it seems that most of these newly free databases are not intended for corporate use
And could you be so kind as to make the prior assumption that I know I'm an idiot so you don't need to tell me that. Just give me some nice hard facts that are easy to measurably prove one database has an advantage over another.
By the way, thanks ScuttleMonkey for clarifying that it's "free as in beer." Unfortunately it's only noon and now you've awakened my desire to get slammed over lunch.
*relishing the only self esteem that Dim gets in life, he drives a crude shank into eldavojohn's throat and puts on his AC mask as he hears police moderator sirens in the distance*
Alexander "brunes69" de Large: Oy! Lookie what we have here, droogies
Droogies: [in unison] HE FORGOT ABOUT PERMISSIONS!
Alexander "brunes69" de Large: [bending over with his cane against his cod piece] That's right. And what happens to slashdotters we viddie that make mistakes?
Droogie A: We brow beat them into a bloody pulp
*Alex and the droogs continually beat the poor slashdotter while emitting "Singing in the Rain"*
eldavojohn: Please
The biggest setback to biometric security is that few companies post the actual numbers concerning their precision and recall.
Before I ever buy into a biometric security device, I want to be able to sit down with the numbers and see what happens to the F-measure when I slide beta between zero and one.
Their sites should have a slider that goes between zero and one with the resulting number. That way, I would know how many times out of a hundred my guards are going to let Bin Laden Jr. through my security check points. But I also want to know how many times my guards are going to throw Grandma-down-the-street against the hood of a car and arrest her for being a dead hijacker from an infamous attack. Implementers of biometric security just don't seem to grasp the concept that a false positive can be a problem just like a true negative. Every white paper I've read on this issue makes certain that they include these figures at the end of their paper.
Because if you hit the production line, these numbers are all that matter to your consumer.
I figured I'd add a little more to how "fuzzing" works as the article left me a little disappointed as to what it actually is. There are a few things online about it, including a decent white paper written by Ilja van Sprundel. There's also a large amount of fuzzing going on to test the security of WAP. It's basically the standard buffer overflow attack.
... silently idling waiting to do it's malicious purpose ...
The crux of this attack is using a buffer overflow to gain superuser privileges. This might be trivial on Windows, so I'll relay the "la/ls" story to you regarding how to gain it in Linux. The part of this trick involves figuring out how to get an executable file from your machine to another user's machine. Let's say you know some company or institution is running a webserver on their unix/linux machines from a server and you go to visit their site. Now, their code isn't completely up to date and there's a security hole in one of their web applications. You know (after toying around with said web app on your home machine) that certain large chunks of hex in a field will result in a submission that essentially writes your binary to their $HOME directory. The name of this file will be, of course, "la."
Now hopefully their home directory is like mine and it's full of crap. So they'll never notice the "la" file but everyday they use that machine, they type "ls" to display the file. One day, their finger slips and they type "la" resulting in the execution of my binary. Instantly, another executable is written, this time called "ps" and a thread is started that simply spin locks on the processor--chewing up cycles. The machine might slow or freeze but an admin will notice this process and go into the users directory (as root) and type "ps -al" to see all the existing processes. Instead, it executes your "ps" virus and subsequently, the spinlocking stops with "ps" printed to output with the super user killing "la" and thinking everything is fixed. In the background however, the "ps" process is active
I'm sure there's a hundred things wrong with what I've said, I'm not a hacker--I just like to point out possible security holes.
Improbable but not impossible.
One more thing about the article, the beauty of OSS is that it is impossible to implement security through obfuscation--a major pitfall to security in application design.
What Doctor Olds eventually told me was that he guessed that there was something special in the way that the proteins formed the spires or "connections" in a ingenius or autistic person's brain. He said there are specific and different properties of each neuron's thousands of electrical connectors. These hair-like structures probably produce a greater influence on how smart the individual is than anything else.
Then again, this is primarily speculation as even our computer modeling is unsuccessful at predicting protein folding resulting from genetic sequences. I'm hoping that the story about better protein crystalis helps researches better understand protein formation and function in regards to not only viruses but also neurons as Alzheimer's desease is a big industry now that the baby boomers are living far past their prime.
A while back, NASA conducted a fifteen year anniversary study on the savant known as Kim Peek. Peek was born with a strange brain deformity known as macrocephaly which results in the two hemispheres of the brain being linked due to a pocket of water at the base of the brain.
Now, there has been a lot of speculation about how neurons work and what makes someone autistic. I once had a lengthy conversation with James Olds of George Mason's Krasnow Institute and asked him about Peek. Olds explained to me that it's very mysterious how savants develop. I asked him if Peek had an abnormally large cortex but he dismissed this, citing that elephants are not geniuses. He also gave me an anecdotal story of a Harvard football player that injured his shoulder blade as the star quarter back. When they x-rayed him, they also found out that his head was mostly filled with water and the result was a severe lack of brain tissue. However, he was a 4.0 grade point average student. I asked Dr. Olds if Peek's neurons might be more densely populated but he also dismissed this saying that neurons are huge on nutrient consumption and if they grow too closely together, they will kill each other.
Anyone care to take a stab at this? Can anyone speculate on this?
I didn't RTFA but I did WTFV.
And it was good. Very funny, very well done. Where the hell does YNG Turk Films get that kind of cash to make something as high quality as that (come on, the closing credits were stunning). Has it really become that easy to manipulate video on your home computer? Probably, but these guys know how to entertain.
After looking into more of YNG Turk Productions, it seems they're based out of Hopkins, Minnesota (just like MST3K!) but there seems to be little other information about them. What I do know is that they've done quite a few comedic sketches and you can find another one on Google Video called Pitching Mother but they've also done other various (primarily comedy) skits in their times. Will Ryan Wood gain a cult following?
I have to admit, the best thing about being a geek/nerd is that I love to see myself made fun of. I absolutely die laughing and love it. Any other stereotype gets offended whenever you make fun of them. And if you can't be lighthearted about everything, then you're going to have a hell of a time making it through life.