I found this discussion extremely informative, and I am grateful to all the people knowledgeable about stock trading who provided enlightening comments.
It was interesting to see the "stupid" ideas some people had who thought they may actually profit from getting in early on pump & dump scams, or by selling short. Thank God that I am certainly much smarter than these "stupid" people. Instead of displaying my ignorance for all to see, I watched and read others post the same doubts I myself may have posted (were I not so brilliant) and saw them get shot down, thus sparing me from displaying my own ignorance in public.
What I am trying to say here in a very round about way is a comment on the tendency many of the technical 1337s on Slashdot have of calling everybody who doesn't have our level of knowledge "stupid people who deserve what they get". This is not an attitude worthy of a professional. If we have more knowledge than others, it is our duty as members of human society to help others with our knowledge, not to put them down and call them stupid. I believe that pretty much everybody has the same number of brain cells, only some people have had more opportunity or motivation to inform themselves better in certain areas than others. All have the same claim to being a member of our human family. I would suggest that if we could develop our humility and humanity to the same level as our technical skills, we would benefit from a more gratifying life.
Use of the word 'Man' as reference to humankind excludes women...
Wikipedia says...
The English term "Man" (from Proto-Germanic mannaz "man, person") and words derived therefrom can designate any or even all of the human race regardless of their gender or age. This is indeed the oldest usage of "Man" in English. This derives from a Proto-Indo-European root *man-" meaning hand. A similar cognate is Old Norse "mund", hand. The distinctive and dexterous hands of humans, compared to those of other animals, are the basis of this term and the similarly derived term, "manual" (from Latin "Manus", hand), by hand.
However, your point is well taken when you say "Welcome to the 21st century, enjoy your stay.", as it is well known that these days people often employs gender neutral terms in order to be politically correct. I am sorry, but I just never got the hang of all that politically correct speech. It all began well after I graduated and formed my primary vocabulary. I hope that my respect for women-kind is obvious in more direct, everyday actions and behaviour, even if I do not adopt the latest trendy double-think. Speaking directly to any women who may be reading this, if I have offended you, please accept my deepest apologies. Clearly women have made every bit as much or more contribution to our culture as men, but why in the world would you ever doubt that anyhow?
As the man said "Music and song were thriving for thousands of years before the recording industry."...and now - it's totally corrupt. Just think about it - how the record industry created these "Big Stars" - just like Hollywood and the National League [of your favourite sport here]. What fools we have all been to elevate these people to the status of gods! Of course, we have been manipulated by the mightiest marketing machine history has never known, but still, we bear the responsibility for our own actions in the end.
It's totally absurd that in this world where a quarter of the world's population suffers famine and we have so many other problems and priorities, that a few "stars" earn millions, and their promoters earn billions. And who are these people? For the most part, they are not musical geniuses; rather, they are icons of a corrupt pop-culture. They are stand-in symbols for whatever the current generation wants - anti-authority figures - 'sex, drugs, and Rock n' Roll'.
Centuries ago, art and music served as a form of worship, reaching for the highest ideals and aspirations that Man could strive for. Bach wrote his Fugues. Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Shakespeare wrote his plays, Byron, Shelley, Keats wrote poetry, Handel wrote his choral works, Beethoven, Vivaldi, Mozart composed their symphonies, the list goes on and on. Did any of these people, whose works have endured for centuries, ever earn millions of dollars? And did someone acting as their agent or producer earn many times more?
What has this world come to? I just typed "Greatest artists of all time" into Google and what do I get? Michelangelo? Leonardo da Vinci? Rembrandt? No, though that is exactly what I was looking for. Get this: According to Google, it's 1. The Beatles, 2. The Rolling Stones, 3. Jimi Hendrix, 4. Led Zeppelin, 5. Bob Dylan, 6. James Brown, 7. David Bowie, 8. Elvis Presley, 9. The Who, 10. The Police, 11. Stevie Wonder, 12. Ray Charles, 13. The Beach Boys, 14. Marvin Gaye, 15. Eric Clapton. Isn't there something wrong here?
Give me a break! "Greatest artists of all time" - how many of these people will even be remembered a century from now? I would only call one of these people an artist - Bob Dylan, and many of the rest are monster pop-icons created by the music industry back in the good ol' payola days. (Well, I have to admit, I too liked their music - most of them anyhow - what can I say? But that doesn't make them the "Greatest artists of all time". It's a matter of proportion, isn't it? What kind of a narrow view do we have, as reflected by Google?
Now, please don't get me wrong. I love contemporary music as much as anybody. I probably don't know any more about Classical Music, Fine Art, or Great Literature than you, and there certainly were times in my life when I would have liked nothing better than sex, drugs, and Rock n' Roll if/when I could get it.
My thesis is that record companies grew to be giant multinationals by catering to the worst within us, corrupting us with there greed, polluting our values, hijacking our culture for thier own monetary gain. Let them go back to Hell where they came from. It's time for this bullshit to end.
I beg to differ. Wikipedia lists the sound pressure level of a whisper at 20 dBs. To calculate the sound of a thousand people whispering, we need to do 20 times log10(ratio). The ratio is 1000 whispers to one. log10 of 1000 is 3, so the SPL level of a thousand people whispering is only 3 time 20, or 60 dBs.
However, though wikipedia does not state at what distance the SPL level of a whisper was measured, usually we would imagine that it would be a person standing right next to us, or certainly within a meter. Clearly you cannot have a thousand people standing right next to you. Even within a meter of you, considering perhaps two people per square meter including yourself, within a circle of a one meter radius you have only about 3 square meters - room for 5 people besides yourself at the centre. To accommodate a thousand people, you would need a circle with a radius of over twelve meters. Most of those people are going to be at least 6 meters away from you. Wikipedia says "Note that the SPL emitted by an object changes with distance d from the object with 1/d.", so that implies that well over half of these people only contribute a fraction of their potential to the total sound level.
Beyond that, we have all these whispers generating an incoherent pattern of sound waves, sometimes reinforcing each other, and sometimes cancelling each other out, such that by the time this reaches your ears it has only a fraction of the energy that it would posses if everybody whispered in absolutely perfect unison, offset by their distance from you. In the end, the total SPL level is beyond my capability to calculate, but I would just guess that on a practical level it would not reach the level of a normal conversation between two people.
Now, if you want to hear something loud, consider the sound of a thousand hands clapping. Going by the previous example, it is easy to calculate. We begin with an estimate of the sound pressure level of one hand clapping... Oh oh...
I came across this almost as soon as it was posted. It was already slashdotted, but immediately gave me ideas all the same. I wondered what DNA data would sound like represented as musical notes. Since I have some code modules I developed previously to generate musical notes, I knew that I could have something up and running quickly enough.
Before even trying to learn anything with all the resources available at this site, I quickly wiped up an algorithm to play the data found in the Genome example from Gene Boy. Next was the choice of how to represent the musical notes. Now - I am not a musician by any stretch of the imagination, but at least I know when notes clash or harmonize. I decided that I would experiment with some note assignments and just see how they sound. The proteins are represented by G, A, T, and C so begin I simply assigned G4, A4, B4, and C5 to represent GATC. I set my code up to play fast, and it sounded like a jig. Then I tried playing all the other files available with Gene Boy, including plain, random data. Well, they all sounded much the same, so obviously I needed a better approach. It was time to read the material and learn a bit more about DNA transcription.
I soon learned that it is codon triplets that in the end get transcripted, so its useless to look for patterns at the level of single nucleotides. Only certain regions code anything meaningful, and the rest is basically garbage from the perspective of trying to find audibly meaningful patterns. However, though I quickly learned how to identify the start and end of "Open reading frames" - regions that code actual proteins, I also learned that there are stretches call introns and extrons, and that the introns do not contribute to the final protein, being dropped in the end by the mRNA.
Finally, I have come to the conclusion that it would probably be much more rewarding to use the sequences from the actual proteins produced by the mRNA transcrition process, and that is what I will do next. If anybody wants to collaborate with me - especially - a musician, send me an email: gtaylorATmagmaDOTca. In the end we will post our results. And oh, by the way - I finally saw the images and I think they suck bad. The author of that site, being a biology graduate, could have shown much more insight and imagination. I would not hire these people.
Don't you advocates of encryption worry that one fine day some random bit on your encrypted drive is going to get flipped by a cosmic ray particle and turn all your carefully archived data into nothing but meaningless bits? I would worry.
When Vista comes into common usage (however long that is going to take) with all these people in the corporate world automatically using data encryption on a daily bases for everything, are we suddenly going to be reading articles about disasterous data losses from time to time?
I just posted this in the topic about Window's new DRM patents, and realized after that that discussion is already dead. Seems everyone jumped into the discussion about the guy who gave up on Linux after 10 years, and now there has been almost a dozen discussions since then. I just want to make a point I feel really strongly about. I don't think there is anything really wrong with this if you are up front about it. At the risk of being marked off topic, here I go with my little rant...
While many of you Linux user don't seem to be too worried about this, I think you should be. As pointed out by others, it will have a detrimental effect right across the board. No more dual boot with Windows and Linux. No Wine, no more popular drivers for Linux because of the DRM, no virtual machines that run Linux without paying a Windows tax, and in the end, it will get harder every day to find a computer that will even run Linux.
As a Window's programmer since 3.1, I am seeing a nightmare scenario staring me in the face. I can see the day coming when a person can no longer develop software on their own computer, because it will only run in some kind of sandbox, if at all, unless you buy a special developer's license. Of course I too will finally defect to Linux long before that happens, if that is still an option.
I'm am seriously disturbed by the vision I am seeing in all I have read tonight - but I am too tired to articulate it all - it's late at night where I am at the moment and it's been a long day. It's like someone said - the frog in the pot thing - the public has to wake up to this DRM business before it's too late.
Before I go - there is one more thing I want to get off my chest here. One might hope and pray that it will be stopped by anti-trust laws before it goes too far, but I wouldn't get my hopes up. Why did the courts not press for a breakup of Microsoft? I think they were leaned on by the US government - for a reason I have not seen articulated before. The fact is that Microsoft is a US corporation, one of America's finest. It brings in big bucks to the good ol' US of A. So from a local perspective, among fellow Americans, Microsoft's monopolistic practices are scandalous, but if an American - especially a Congressman - looks at it from a nationalistic perspective, it's good for America. In fact, the worse it becomes (the monopolistic practices) the better it is for USA. Bill Gates' age old dream of world domination happens to coincide with America's dream of world domination. That's why we can't count on the US courts to put a stop to this.
Wow - I didn't think I was going to say all these things. It's like suddenly I see where all this is going now, and it's real scary.
While many of you Linux user don't seem to be too worried about this, I think you should be. As pointed out by others, it will have a detrimental effect right across the board. No more dual boot with Windows and Linux. No Wine, no more popular drivers for Linux because of the DRM, no virtual machines that run Linux without paying a Windows tax, and in the end, it will get harder every day to find a computer that will even run Linux.
As a Window's programmer since 3.1, I am seeing a nightmare scenario staring me in the face. I can see the day coming when a person can no longer develop software on their own computer, because it will only run in some kind of sandbox, if at all, unless you buy a special developer's license. Of course I too will finally defect to Linux long before that happens, if that is still an option.
I'm am seriously disturbed by the vision I am seeing in all I have read tonight - but I am too tired to articulate it all - it's late at night where I am at the moment and it's been a long day. It's like someone said - the frog in the pot thing - the public has to wake up to this DRM business before it's too late.
Before I go - there is one more thing I want to get off my chest here. One might hope and pray that it will be stopped by anti-trust laws before it goes too far, but I wouldn't get my hopes up. Why did the courts not press for a breakup of Microsoft? I think they were leaned on by the US government - for a reason I have not seen articulated before. The fact is that Microsoft is a US corporation, one of America's finest. It brings in big bucks to the good ol' US of A. So from a local perspective, among fellow Americans, Microsoft's monopolistic practices are scandalous, but if an American - especially a Congressman - looks at it from a nationalistic perspective, it's good for America. In fact, the worse it becomes (the monopolistic practices) the better it is for USA. Bill Gates' age old dream of world domination happens to coincide with America's dream of world domination. That's why we can't count on the US courts to put a stop to this.
Wow - I didn't think I was going to say all these things. It's like suddenly I see where all this is going now, and it's real scary.
Do W2K and XP not perform the job they are supposed to do?
I very much enjoy programming on these platforms. However, what I think gave them a bad reputation was their lack of security - so bad that perhaps one quarter of all platforms running MS operating systems may be p0wned drones of botnets.
By the way, I suspect the moderation was an error, rather than some vicious plot against me. I say this because one night I was moderating, rewarded two good items on a page, hit the moderate button, then scrolled back to see if the points were properly credited. To my horror, they showed exactly the opposite to what I had intended! I panicked and went searching for some way to report the bug, and found no way to undo the damage I had done. I felt terrible. Who knows if I just ruined somebody's career, caused him to commit suicide or something? So you all should be aware of this. I think, rather than a bug, it might have been "finger trouble". It is a possibility that I had left the focus on the moderation box, and when I scrolled down the page (in Firefox), the points scrolled. Has this happened to anybody before? Why is there no way to undo a moderation error - or is there?
Who is the insentive clod who marked this a Troll? I am certainly not in the habit of trolling, as can be seen by my record on Slashdot. I was joking - making a timely reference to a news piece I saw on TV today.
US military base of Aviano, northern Italy
The imam was allegedly driven to a US military base after his abduction.
Italian authorities have issued arrest warrants for 13 people they claim are agents "linked to the CIA". The suspects are accused of abducting an Islamic cleric in Milan in 2003 and flying him to Egypt for interrogation.
Don't you watch the news? If I said something to defend DRM or Microsoft - then I would be a troll. I can't imagine that anyone on Slashdot would take offense with my comment. Isn't Slashdot a forum that champions free speach? I would suggest that you research your victims a bit before you accuse them of being trolls.
The difference [with DVR] is that... you will loose some quality (because of the digital/analog conversion process). I think that loss of quality is acceptable and covered under the act.
You certainly will also suffer loss of quality through mp3 encoding - and though we don't know what the bit rate is in this case, it certainly will be far from being a digitally perfect copy. I think therefore, you have raised a good point in favour of XM without realizing it.
My prime number generator algorithm finds all the primes in the 64 bit number space in 100 lines of C.
Tried to post this, but I guess it got filtered out by the lameness filter.
If there are an infinite number of prime numbers, you would need a much larger search space than 'infinite' to contain them all.
Since there can not be more than an infinite number of numbers, therefore the number of primes must be finite.
With a scene that's much sexier than it has any right to be, a Tinkerbell-like spark enters the ship, finds a sleeping Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis), moves under her covers, and impregnates her. The alien baby starts to grow much faster than a normal gestation period, shrinking the time frame down to a couple of days. Worf wants to terminate the pregnancy, Data wants to study the life form, and Troi decides to keep the baby no matter what anyone thinks. Once born, the boy continues its rapid growth, but is discovered to have an adverse effect on the specimens of a dangerous plasma plague they are carrying to a scientific research facility. None too subtly, the whole episode explores ideas about family.
While preparing to transport samples of a lethal plasma plague, the crew receives some startling news: Counselor Troi (Marina Sirtis) is pregnant.
According to Troi, she was impregnated by a glowing white light. The ship's new Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Kate Pulaski (Diana Muldaur), watches in amazement as Troi gives birth to Ian, a half-human, half-Betazoid boy who ages eight years in one day.
programmers are privileging speed and efficiency over security, which leads to the famous "buffer overflows"...
See my post a few comments above - a "my worst bug" story about a buffer overflow.
"It turned out that I had made a bad assumption about the data that would enter that buffer - assuming (for good reasons) that it would always be some multiple of 8 bytes. I was doing some assembler language processing of that data in this module that realized a significant optimization based on this assumption."
That was exactly my error - "privileging speed and efficiency over security, which leads to the famous 'buffer overflows'"
I fully agree with you to the extent that it would be a grave error to attach the Diehard or simlilar thing to software under development. We would never know where we are.
A few weeks ago I had one of the worst bugs I had ever encountered in a decade of C/C++ programming. Something was overwriting the end of a buffer in a multithreaded program where each thread used the same algorithm, processing different data. Thankfully, the bug was reproducible under a complex setup of inputs, but for a long time I could not be certain which element in the series of test data was causing the problem, or why it caused it, or even in which thread it happened. In the end, it took quite some time to solve the problem. Rather than being in the new code, it was in a module that I suspected the least since it had been running in the field for over a year with no problems. It turned out that I had made a bad assumption about the data that would enter that buffer - assuming (for good reasons) that it would always be some multiple of 8 bytes. I was doing some assembler language processing of that data in this module that realized a significant optimization based on this assumption. The thing was, it turns out in the end that there are some potential generators of that data that just don't behave the way I expected. Fortunately they had never been encountered yet in the field. By luck rather than design, my test setup included such a generator.
This leads me to my conclusion: We must always follow best practices and do proper testing. Then, when all is properly done and ready ship, I don't think it would hurt at all to recompile with the Diehard system or something similar, as an insurance policy against unforeseen circumstances.
Great joke - but I'm afraid that only people with 3D graphics programming experience would get it...
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternion for non-graphics programmers)
It IS unethical, because the simulation was actually being hurt. Unbeknownst to the experimenters, it had achieved intelligence. The physilogical responses of the people administering the shocks is solid evidence that it clearly passed a turing test.
Directly from TFA... "One of those participants claimed to see signs of discomfort in the behaviour of the Learner (even though none had been programmed), and said that he felt uncomfortable continuing with the experiment."
The real disease is: those vast botnets. Really, it's a scary thought. We are lucky that they only being used for spam and the usual phishing scams and the like - as far as we know! Imagine if the terrorists buy themselves some botnets for some nefarious purpose, or the Chinese or North Korea government corner the market on them to run millions of bots to steal corporate secrets or IDs or who knows what? What I'm saying here is that the large increase in spam should be triggering off alarm bells everywhere. The spam is not the problem - it's the botnets. Why in the world don't responsible world governments unite to put a swift end to this problem? Really - it could be dealt with swiftly and effectively in a hundred different ways that I will up to the imagination of the reader. I am just astonished this hasn't happened. I mean - couldn't our friend and champion of democracy George W. include this in his initiative against terrorism? He would probably have more luck tackling this problem then he is having in Iraq. What if he put that on his agenda - and set loose all his military might along with the help of some coalition of the willing? Perhaps he could salvage what's left of his image? Are you listening Mister Bush?
That would be the proof of Novel's "good intentions" that I would like to see. They alluded to this kind of thing in the defense of their alliance with M$ - that it would be a two-way street.
You know - I would like to believe Novel, but just think - if M$ bought _YOU_ (you the reader - not the parent) for $400 million - where would _YOUR_ loyalties lie? Be pragmatic now and consider this.
Marketing is the art of... illiciting a non rational emotional response from the consumer in order to override the consumers rational thought and purchase a certain product, regardless of pre-existing need, use, desire, or the existance of a better solution.
So you don't consider emotional needs as worthy of being served by the market place? Emotions are what make us human. Buying a product for no "rational" reason other than "you like it" or "you want it" IS rational, when you consider the complexity of the reality of being human. It's just that you are not buying that product for obvious reasons based on its functionality alone.
Consider branding, for example. The tremendous variety of products available today allow each and every one of us to express his own unique personality, something we have been doing since the dawn of time. There is a distinct human need for this. If a new product comes out that allows even better opportunity for self expression, but perhaps at the cost of less efficiency or reduced functionality, it still may be a rational decision to buy that product in light of the bigger picture of what our real needs are.
Free market theory... relies on the assumption of a well informed marketplace, where the market purchases the best products based on complete information.
I don't believe that "your" free market theory would be very useful as it fails to take into account the full reality of human nature.
"if I can just have that, or if I can just make that much more money... then I'll be happy". Wealth wealth above all else!
...nothing we haven't heard a thousand times before. Of course you raise a valid point, but its the obvious one. I guess for me your theses is so lacking in originality that I wanted raise the other side by pointing out that issues are far more complex than you care to acknowledge.
There is an important lesson in this for technical people. We must never forget that in the end our work must serve real human beings, and that a technical specification alone can never describe the ultimate function of our work, which in the end must acknowledge and serve the full range and complexity of human needs to be successful.
Slashdot Mirror
I found this discussion extremely informative, and I am grateful to all the people knowledgeable about stock trading who provided enlightening comments.
It was interesting to see the "stupid" ideas some people had who thought they may actually profit from getting in early on pump & dump scams, or by selling short. Thank God that I am certainly much smarter than these "stupid" people. Instead of displaying my ignorance for all to see, I watched and read others post the same doubts I myself may have posted (were I not so brilliant) and saw them get shot down, thus sparing me from displaying my own ignorance in public.
What I am trying to say here in a very round about way is a comment on the tendency many of the technical 1337s on Slashdot have of calling everybody who doesn't have our level of knowledge "stupid people who deserve what they get". This is not an attitude worthy of a professional. If we have more knowledge than others, it is our duty as members of human society to help others with our knowledge, not to put them down and call them stupid. I believe that pretty much everybody has the same number of brain cells, only some people have had more opportunity or motivation to inform themselves better in certain areas than others. All have the same claim to being a member of our human family. I would suggest that if we could develop our humility and humanity to the same level as our technical skills, we would benefit from a more gratifying life.
Use of the word 'Man' as reference to humankind excludes women...
Wikipedia says... The English term "Man" (from Proto-Germanic mannaz "man, person") and words derived therefrom can designate any or even all of the human race regardless of their gender or age. This is indeed the oldest usage of "Man" in English. This derives from a Proto-Indo-European root *man-" meaning hand. A similar cognate is Old Norse "mund", hand. The distinctive and dexterous hands of humans, compared to those of other animals, are the basis of this term and the similarly derived term, "manual" (from Latin "Manus", hand), by hand.
However, your point is well taken when you say "Welcome to the 21st century, enjoy your stay.", as it is well known that these days people often employs gender neutral terms in order to be politically correct. I am sorry, but I just never got the hang of all that politically correct speech. It all began well after I graduated and formed my primary vocabulary. I hope that my respect for women-kind is obvious in more direct, everyday actions and behaviour, even if I do not adopt the latest trendy double-think. Speaking directly to any women who may be reading this, if I have offended you, please accept my deepest apologies. Clearly women have made every bit as much or more contribution to our culture as men, but why in the world would you ever doubt that anyhow?
As the man said "Music and song were thriving for thousands of years before the recording industry." ...and now - it's totally corrupt. Just think about it - how the record industry created these "Big Stars" - just like Hollywood and the National League [of your favourite sport here]. What fools we have all been to elevate these people to the status of gods! Of course, we have been manipulated by the mightiest marketing machine history has never known, but still, we bear the responsibility for our own actions in the end.
It's totally absurd that in this world where a quarter of the world's population suffers famine and we have so many other problems and priorities, that a few "stars" earn millions, and their promoters earn billions. And who are these people? For the most part, they are not musical geniuses; rather, they are icons of a corrupt pop-culture. They are stand-in symbols for whatever the current generation wants - anti-authority figures - 'sex, drugs, and Rock n' Roll'.
Centuries ago, art and music served as a form of worship, reaching for the highest ideals and aspirations that Man could strive for. Bach wrote his Fugues. Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Shakespeare wrote his plays, Byron, Shelley, Keats wrote poetry, Handel wrote his choral works, Beethoven, Vivaldi, Mozart composed their symphonies, the list goes on and on. Did any of these people, whose works have endured for centuries, ever earn millions of dollars? And did someone acting as their agent or producer earn many times more?
What has this world come to? I just typed "Greatest artists of all time" into Google and what do I get? Michelangelo? Leonardo da Vinci? Rembrandt? No, though that is exactly what I was looking for. Get this: According to Google, it's 1. The Beatles, 2. The Rolling Stones, 3. Jimi Hendrix, 4. Led Zeppelin, 5. Bob Dylan, 6. James Brown, 7. David Bowie, 8. Elvis Presley, 9. The Who, 10. The Police, 11. Stevie Wonder, 12. Ray Charles, 13. The Beach Boys, 14. Marvin Gaye, 15. Eric Clapton. Isn't there something wrong here?
Give me a break! "Greatest artists of all time" - how many of these people will even be remembered a century from now? I would only call one of these people an artist - Bob Dylan, and many of the rest are monster pop-icons created by the music industry back in the good ol' payola days. (Well, I have to admit, I too liked their music - most of them anyhow - what can I say? But that doesn't make them the "Greatest artists of all time". It's a matter of proportion, isn't it? What kind of a narrow view do we have, as reflected by Google?
Now, please don't get me wrong. I love contemporary music as much as anybody. I probably don't know any more about Classical Music, Fine Art, or Great Literature than you, and there certainly were times in my life when I would have liked nothing better than sex, drugs, and Rock n' Roll if/when I could get it.
My thesis is that record companies grew to be giant multinationals by catering to the worst within us, corrupting us with there greed, polluting our values, hijacking our culture for thier own monetary gain. Let them go back to Hell where they came from. It's time for this bullshit to end.
Even a thousand whispers can get pretty loud
I beg to differ. Wikipedia lists the sound pressure level of a whisper at 20 dBs. To calculate the sound of a thousand people whispering, we need to do 20 times log10(ratio). The ratio is 1000 whispers to one. log10 of 1000 is 3, so the SPL level of a thousand people whispering is only 3 time 20, or 60 dBs.
However, though wikipedia does not state at what distance the SPL level of a whisper was measured, usually we would imagine that it would be a person standing right next to us, or certainly within a meter. Clearly you cannot have a thousand people standing right next to you. Even within a meter of you, considering perhaps two people per square meter including yourself, within a circle of a one meter radius you have only about 3 square meters - room for 5 people besides yourself at the centre. To accommodate a thousand people, you would need a circle with a radius of over twelve meters. Most of those people are going to be at least 6 meters away from you. Wikipedia says "Note that the SPL emitted by an object changes with distance d from the object with 1/d.", so that implies that well over half of these people only contribute a fraction of their potential to the total sound level.
Beyond that, we have all these whispers generating an incoherent pattern of sound waves, sometimes reinforcing each other, and sometimes cancelling each other out, such that by the time this reaches your ears it has only a fraction of the energy that it would posses if everybody whispered in absolutely perfect unison, offset by their distance from you. In the end, the total SPL level is beyond my capability to calculate, but I would just guess that on a practical level it would not reach the level of a normal conversation between two people.
Now, if you want to hear something loud, consider the sound of a thousand hands clapping. Going by the previous example, it is easy to calculate. We begin with an estimate of the sound pressure level of one hand clapping... Oh oh...
I came across this almost as soon as it was posted. It was already slashdotted, but immediately gave me ideas all the same. I wondered what DNA data would sound like represented as musical notes. Since I have some code modules I developed previously to generate musical notes, I knew that I could have something up and running quickly enough.
The next thing to do then was to find a source of raw DNA data, and that was not so quick. I found where they have this "Gene Boy" teaching toy that explains about DNA transcription. I was also able to steal raw data from it by a simple copy and paste.
Before even trying to learn anything with all the resources available at this site, I quickly wiped up an algorithm to play the data found in the Genome example from Gene Boy. Next was the choice of how to represent the musical notes. Now - I am not a musician by any stretch of the imagination, but at least I know when notes clash or harmonize. I decided that I would experiment with some note assignments and just see how they sound. The proteins are represented by G, A, T, and C so begin I simply assigned G4, A4, B4, and C5 to represent GATC. I set my code up to play fast, and it sounded like a jig. Then I tried playing all the other files available with Gene Boy, including plain, random data. Well, they all sounded much the same, so obviously I needed a better approach. It was time to read the material and learn a bit more about DNA transcription.
I soon learned that it is codon triplets that in the end get transcripted, so its useless to look for patterns at the level of single nucleotides. Only certain regions code anything meaningful, and the rest is basically garbage from the perspective of trying to find audibly meaningful patterns. However, though I quickly learned how to identify the start and end of "Open reading frames" - regions that code actual proteins, I also learned that there are stretches call introns and extrons, and that the introns do not contribute to the final protein, being dropped in the end by the mRNA.
Finally, I have come to the conclusion that it would probably be much more rewarding to use the sequences from the actual proteins produced by the mRNA transcrition process, and that is what I will do next. If anybody wants to collaborate with me - especially - a musician, send me an email: gtaylorATmagmaDOTca. In the end we will post our results. And oh, by the way - I finally saw the images and I think they suck bad. The author of that site, being a biology graduate, could have shown much more insight and imagination. I would not hire these people.
Don't you advocates of encryption worry that one fine day some random bit on your encrypted drive is going to get flipped by a cosmic ray particle and turn all your carefully archived data into nothing but meaningless bits? I would worry.
When Vista comes into common usage (however long that is going to take) with all these people in the corporate world automatically using data encryption on a daily bases for everything, are we suddenly going to be reading articles about disasterous data losses from time to time?
I just posted this in the topic about Window's new DRM patents, and realized after that that discussion is already dead. Seems everyone jumped into the discussion about the guy who gave up on Linux after 10 years, and now there has been almost a dozen discussions since then. I just want to make a point I feel really strongly about. I don't think there is anything really wrong with this if you are up front about it. At the risk of being marked off topic, here I go with my little rant...
While many of you Linux user don't seem to be too worried about this, I think you should be. As pointed out by others, it will have a detrimental effect right across the board. No more dual boot with Windows and Linux. No Wine, no more popular drivers for Linux because of the DRM, no virtual machines that run Linux without paying a Windows tax, and in the end, it will get harder every day to find a computer that will even run Linux.
As a Window's programmer since 3.1, I am seeing a nightmare scenario staring me in the face. I can see the day coming when a person can no longer develop software on their own computer, because it will only run in some kind of sandbox, if at all, unless you buy a special developer's license. Of course I too will finally defect to Linux long before that happens, if that is still an option.
I'm am seriously disturbed by the vision I am seeing in all I have read tonight - but I am too tired to articulate it all - it's late at night where I am at the moment and it's been a long day. It's like someone said - the frog in the pot thing - the public has to wake up to this DRM business before it's too late.
Before I go - there is one more thing I want to get off my chest here. One might hope and pray that it will be stopped by anti-trust laws before it goes too far, but I wouldn't get my hopes up. Why did the courts not press for a breakup of Microsoft? I think they were leaned on by the US government - for a reason I have not seen articulated before. The fact is that Microsoft is a US corporation, one of America's finest. It brings in big bucks to the good ol' US of A. So from a local perspective, among fellow Americans, Microsoft's monopolistic practices are scandalous, but if an American - especially a Congressman - looks at it from a nationalistic perspective, it's good for America. In fact, the worse it becomes (the monopolistic practices) the better it is for USA. Bill Gates' age old dream of world domination happens to coincide with America's dream of world domination. That's why we can't count on the US courts to put a stop to this.
Wow - I didn't think I was going to say all these things. It's like suddenly I see where all this is going now, and it's real scary.
While many of you Linux user don't seem to be too worried about this, I think you should be. As pointed out by others, it will have a detrimental effect right across the board. No more dual boot with Windows and Linux. No Wine, no more popular drivers for Linux because of the DRM, no virtual machines that run Linux without paying a Windows tax, and in the end, it will get harder every day to find a computer that will even run Linux.
As a Window's programmer since 3.1, I am seeing a nightmare scenario staring me in the face. I can see the day coming when a person can no longer develop software on their own computer, because it will only run in some kind of sandbox, if at all, unless you buy a special developer's license. Of course I too will finally defect to Linux long before that happens, if that is still an option.
I'm am seriously disturbed by the vision I am seeing in all I have read tonight - but I am too tired to articulate it all - it's late at night where I am at the moment and it's been a long day. It's like someone said - the frog in the pot thing - the public has to wake up to this DRM business before it's too late.
Before I go - there is one more thing I want to get off my chest here. One might hope and pray that it will be stopped by anti-trust laws before it goes too far, but I wouldn't get my hopes up. Why did the courts not press for a breakup of Microsoft? I think they were leaned on by the US government - for a reason I have not seen articulated before. The fact is that Microsoft is a US corporation, one of America's finest. It brings in big bucks to the good ol' US of A. So from a local perspective, among fellow Americans, Microsoft's monopolistic practices are scandalous, but if an American - especially a Congressman - looks at it from a nationalistic perspective, it's good for America. In fact, the worse it becomes (the monopolistic practices) the better it is for USA. Bill Gates' age old dream of world domination happens to coincide with America's dream of world domination. That's why we can't count on the US courts to put a stop to this.
Wow - I didn't think I was going to say all these things. It's like suddenly I see where all this is going now, and it's real scary.
Do W2K and XP not perform the job they are supposed to do?
I very much enjoy programming on these platforms. However, what I think gave them a bad reputation was their lack of security - so bad that perhaps one quarter of all platforms running MS operating systems may be p0wned drones of botnets.
By the way, I suspect the moderation was an error, rather than some vicious plot against me. I say this because one night I was moderating, rewarded two good items on a page, hit the moderate button, then scrolled back to see if the points were properly credited. To my horror, they showed exactly the opposite to what I had intended! I panicked and went searching for some way to report the bug, and found no way to undo the damage I had done. I felt terrible. Who knows if I just ruined somebody's career, caused him to commit suicide or something? So you all should be aware of this. I think, rather than a bug, it might have been "finger trouble". It is a possibility that I had left the focus on the moderation box, and when I scrolled down the page (in Firefox), the points scrolled. Has this happened to anybody before? Why is there no way to undo a moderation error - or is there?
Who is the insentive clod who marked this a Troll? I am certainly not in the habit of trolling, as can be seen by my record on Slashdot. I was joking - making a timely reference to a news piece I saw on TV today.
Italy seeks 'CIA kidnap agents'
US military base of Aviano, northern Italy
The imam was allegedly driven to a US military base after his abduction. Italian authorities have issued arrest warrants for 13 people they claim are agents "linked to the CIA". The suspects are accused of abducting an Islamic cleric in Milan in 2003 and flying him to Egypt for interrogation.
Don't you watch the news? If I said something to defend DRM or Microsoft - then I would be a troll. I can't imagine that anyone on Slashdot would take offense with my comment. Isn't Slashdot a forum that champions free speach? I would suggest that you research your victims a bit before you accuse them of being trolls.
Some of these people won't even be affected by USA law, unless they decide to visit or transit through the country.
They don't have to visit or transit through the country - The US government will just send the CIA to kidnap them and send them to Egypt for torture.
Now, admittedly, the summary would have been more accurate if it said...
...and how do we know if the judge was quoted accurately anyhow?
You certainly will also suffer loss of quality through mp3 encoding - and though we don't know what the bit rate is in this case, it certainly will be far from being a digitally perfect copy. I think therefore, you have raised a good point in favour of XM without realizing it.
My prime number generator algorithm finds all the primes in the 64 bit number space in 100 lines of C. Tried to post this, but I guess it got filtered out by the lameness filter.
If there are an infinite number of prime numbers, you would need a much larger search space than 'infinite' to contain them all. Since there can not be more than an infinite number of numbers, therefore the number of primes must be finite.
With a scene that's much sexier than it has any right to be, a Tinkerbell-like spark enters the ship, finds a sleeping Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis), moves under her covers, and impregnates her. The alien baby starts to grow much faster than a normal gestation period, shrinking the time frame down to a couple of days. Worf wants to terminate the pregnancy, Data wants to study the life form, and Troi decides to keep the baby no matter what anyone thinks. Once born, the boy continues its rapid growth, but is discovered to have an adverse effect on the specimens of a dangerous plasma plague they are carrying to a scientific research facility. None too subtly, the whole episode explores ideas about family.
While preparing to transport samples of a lethal plasma plague, the crew receives some startling news: Counselor Troi (Marina Sirtis) is pregnant.
According to Troi, she was impregnated by a glowing white light. The ship's new Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Kate Pulaski (Diana Muldaur), watches in amazement as Troi gives birth to Ian, a half-human, half-Betazoid boy who ages eight years in one day.
programmers are privileging speed and efficiency over security, which leads to the famous "buffer overflows"...
See my post a few comments above - a "my worst bug" story about a buffer overflow.
"It turned out that I had made a bad assumption about the data that would enter that buffer - assuming (for good reasons) that it would always be some multiple of 8 bytes. I was doing some assembler language processing of that data in this module that realized a significant optimization based on this assumption."
That was exactly my error - "privileging speed and efficiency over security, which leads to the famous 'buffer overflows'"
I fully agree with you to the extent that it would be a grave error to attach the Diehard or simlilar thing to software under development. We would never know where we are.
A few weeks ago I had one of the worst bugs I had ever encountered in a decade of C/C++ programming. Something was overwriting the end of a buffer in a multithreaded program where each thread used the same algorithm, processing different data. Thankfully, the bug was reproducible under a complex setup of inputs, but for a long time I could not be certain which element in the series of test data was causing the problem, or why it caused it, or even in which thread it happened. In the end, it took quite some time to solve the problem. Rather than being in the new code, it was in a module that I suspected the least since it had been running in the field for over a year with no problems. It turned out that I had made a bad assumption about the data that would enter that buffer - assuming (for good reasons) that it would always be some multiple of 8 bytes. I was doing some assembler language processing of that data in this module that realized a significant optimization based on this assumption. The thing was, it turns out in the end that there are some potential generators of that data that just don't behave the way I expected. Fortunately they had never been encountered yet in the field. By luck rather than design, my test setup included such a generator.
This leads me to my conclusion: We must always follow best practices and do proper testing. Then, when all is properly done and ready ship, I don't think it would hurt at all to recompile with the Diehard system or something similar, as an insurance policy against unforeseen circumstances.
Great joke - but I'm afraid that only people with 3D graphics programming experience would get it... (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternion for non-graphics programmers)
It IS unethical, because the simulation was actually being hurt. Unbeknownst to the experimenters, it had achieved intelligence. The physilogical responses of the people administering the shocks is solid evidence that it clearly passed a turing test.
Directly from TFA... "One of those participants claimed to see signs of discomfort in the behaviour of the Learner (even though none had been programmed), and said that he felt uncomfortable continuing with the experiment."
See what I mean?
The real disease is: those vast botnets. Really, it's a scary thought. We are lucky that they only being used for spam and the usual phishing scams and the like - as far as we know! Imagine if the terrorists buy themselves some botnets for some nefarious purpose, or the Chinese or North Korea government corner the market on them to run millions of bots to steal corporate secrets or IDs or who knows what? What I'm saying here is that the large increase in spam should be triggering off alarm bells everywhere. The spam is not the problem - it's the botnets. Why in the world don't responsible world governments unite to put a swift end to this problem? Really - it could be dealt with swiftly and effectively in a hundred different ways that I will up to the imagination of the reader. I am just astonished this hasn't happened. I mean - couldn't our friend and champion of democracy George W. include this in his initiative against terrorism? He would probably have more luck tackling this problem then he is having in Iraq. What if he put that on his agenda - and set loose all his military might along with the help of some coalition of the willing? Perhaps he could salvage what's left of his image? Are you listening Mister Bush?
http://www.magma.ca/~gtaylor/AudioTestFileGen.htmThat would be the proof of Novel's "good intentions" that I would like to see. They alluded to this kind of thing in the defense of their alliance with M$ - that it would be a two-way street.
You know - I would like to believe Novel, but just think - if M$ bought _YOU_ (you the reader - not the parent) for $400 million - where would _YOUR_ loyalties lie? Be pragmatic now and consider this.
That's very creative! I think you are a writer.
Marketing is the art of ... illiciting a non rational emotional response from the consumer in order to override the consumers rational thought and purchase a certain product, regardless of pre-existing need, use, desire, or the existance of a better solution.
So you don't consider emotional needs as worthy of being served by the market place? Emotions are what make us human. Buying a product for no "rational" reason other than "you like it" or "you want it" IS rational, when you consider the complexity of the reality of being human. It's just that you are not buying that product for obvious reasons based on its functionality alone.
Consider branding, for example. The tremendous variety of products available today allow each and every one of us to express his own unique personality, something we have been doing since the dawn of time. There is a distinct human need for this. If a new product comes out that allows even better opportunity for self expression, but perhaps at the cost of less efficiency or reduced functionality, it still may be a rational decision to buy that product in light of the bigger picture of what our real needs are.
Free market theory ... relies on the assumption of a well informed marketplace, where the market purchases the best products based on complete information.
I don't believe that "your" free market theory would be very useful as it fails to take into account the full reality of human nature.
"if I can just have that, or if I can just make that much more money... then I'll be happy". Wealth wealth above all else!
...nothing we haven't heard a thousand times before. Of course you raise a valid point, but its the obvious one. I guess for me your theses is so lacking in originality that I wanted raise the other side by pointing out that issues are far more complex than you care to acknowledge.
There is an important lesson in this for technical people. We must never forget that in the end our work must serve real human beings, and that a technical specification alone can never describe the ultimate function of our work, which in the end must acknowledge and serve the full range and complexity of human needs to be successful.