If I were to try to live near work and walk in (43rd and Broadway, NYC), my monthly rent would easily triple to somewhere in the range of $3000/mo.
While I'm all for not driving, the answer isn't walking. It's public transportation.
"How is this relavant to the article", you might ask. Well, that's a mighty good question. My idea, see, is to invent a habitable plastic sphere which has a bouyancy which would naturally put it about 800 to 1000 meters underwater. That way, you can live in Tasmania, get up in the morning, get dressed, pop into your sphere, and roll yourself off into the ocean. After descending, you'll be briskly whisked away to Australia's east coast (without any fossil fuels being burned!), which is where I'm assuming you work. Now, the article doesn't mention the speed at which this 'supergyre' flows, so we'll assume ~1500kph, which would mean you'd be pulling up off the coast about 15 mins after leaving!!
In this case, he's basically (but not totally) correct. The enigma would have been virtually incapable of being "solved", but the Germans decided to save effort and did not use their keys properly. Sure, they were distributed securely, but they weren't used properly.
Particular messages were sent at the same time every day, which the allies were able to guess certain portions of (ie: sending weather reports just after 8am, and listing the cities in a predictable order). Additionally, the same text was routinely encrypted twice using the same key, which is a bad idea when you're using a system which will encrypt the same string differently each time. These "cribs" allowed cryptographers to work out particulars of how the machine was configured at a given time (scrambler arrangements, plugboard settings...), which drastically reduced the amount of possible keys. After this reduction in the range of the keys, a brute-force attack was possible. Had the German beaurocracy not weakened the power of the Enigma by introducing these redundancies into the system, it would not have been cracked.
For anyone interested in cryptography (with an entire long chapter dedicated to the Enigma, its construction, and how it was broken) from both a historical and technical standpoint, I recommend "The Code Book" by Simon Singh as a good place to start.
They really need more of these dogs? How much confiscated cocaine does this government have that they need to start cloning dogs just to sniff it all up? And what if they suddenly run out? I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to see an angry cokehead dog not get his fix...
...sounds like a recipe for disaster if you ask me.
From what I remember, one of the bigger worries in all of this is the following:
Joe is a fairly well-off man (or, further in the future, a middle-income or low-income man) who's going to the doctor for a genetic analysis to see whether there are any treatable diseases which he is genetically at risk for, so that treatments and preventatives can begin before problems start arising.
Now, once this genetic analysis is complete, the issue becomes: who controls this information? Indeed, if an insurance company were to come across it, they'd obviously want to increase his premiums when they find out there's a 92% chance he'll develop Alzheimers and 700x the national average of his developing colon cancer within the next 5 years (for instance). Knowing this, Joe could be much less likely to ask his doctor to do the genetic analysis to begin with, since any bad news could end up making him uninsurable.
The other non-parent-post comments relating this to flying cars may not be appropriate, as the human genome is already completely sequenceable, and the cost of doing this has come down drastically in the past few years (and wil very likely continue to fall into the future). Personally, I'd much rather have laws in place protecting my personal information now, before this becomes an issue... regardless of whether this forces an existing service providing industry to operate sub-optimally (or, even, prevents the advent of newer industries altogether). From what I can gather, this doesn't forbid you from using your information to your benefit as you see fit, once it's available to you...
I know that it is indeed a contract mutually agreed upon by 2 parties but its just rediculous. Someone should not be paying unless they are getting something.
Normally, I'd agree with you, but today I'll play a little devil's advocate.
[Simpsons pinball reference]
Anyway, yesterday I went into a T-Mobile store, because both my wife's and my phones were broken (yeah... don't ask...). Since my contract had expired almost a year earlier, I could freely at this point cancel with them at absolutely no charge. As an incentive to remain their customer, they offered me a total of $300 off of 2 replacement phones (yes, I did shop around online, and these prices were just barely better than what I could get for a used version on Ebay). To get this incentive, of course, I had to willingly submit to making myself a T-mobile customer for 24 more months, with a pentalty of $200 for early termination.
Do I agree that early-termination fees are called for? No. I think they're a way of extorting customers who have very few options when it comes to avoiding them. From a business point of view, however, I can't help but hope the guy who thought it up got a big fat bonus that year.
Assuming your post isn't a joke (it is modded funny, afterall)...
Recently my company sent me to Holland for 2 1/2 months of training. Never having been outside the US before (Canada totally doesn't count), this was an incredible opportunity. All the benefits of vacationing in a foreign country (when you're working, you still get weekends off and have the right to use sick days... accruing more of them all the while), but without having to worry about moving in, finding yourself a hotel, etc. Plenty of time after work every day to go out and mix with the locals, and you're in town long enough to actually find your way around and pick up a bit of the language and culture.
If you look at it from the point of view of "I'm doing my same job, just from a much cooler office" instead of "I'm on vacation stuck doing work for the man", you'll feel much better about the whole thing.
Then again, the more I think of it, my situation is nothing like that in the article... in his case, the vacation was his idea.:sigh: Time to go home.
Parent is modded "funny"? I know it was a bit over the top, and the examples didn't seem important... but imagine if this technology takes off, and these wave farms start going up off coastlines around the globe.
This is the same problem I have with the damming of rivers (Damn you rivers!! Get off my lawn!)... sure, the changes to the environment aren't immediately all that great... but the fact is, nobody can predict the long term effects of, well, pretty much any action in a system as complex as earth.
Don't go thinking I'm against this idea however. If we had to factor in all possible effects of any given action, nobody would ever end up doing... anything.
NYC is a haven for programmers who don't mind (or enjoy, I guess) working in the financial industry. Many massive investment firms, and the thousands of software companies that support them, operate largely out of NYC. My situation's the exact reverse of yours... I haven't stopped looking forward to getting out of here since I arrived... but damn, the opportunities here make it so tough to leave.
What I don't understand is that I thought GPUs were made to offload a lot of graphics computations from the CPU. So why are we merging them again? Isn't a GPU supposed to be an auxillary CPU only for graphics? I'm so confused.
You're partially right. GPUs were made to execute the algorithms developed for graphically-intensive programs directly in silicon... thus avoiding the need to run compiled code within an operating system, which entails LOTS of overhead. Being able to do this directly on dedicated hardware (with entirely different processor designs optimized for graphical computations)makes it possible to execute ALOT more calculations per second. You can really see the difference if you, for instance, use DirectX on two nearly identical video cards; one with hardware based DirectX, the other with it running as software.
Moving it right up next to the CPU will allow the data to flow between the two alot faster than currently where it has to go over a bus... they can finally get rid of the bottlenecks that have been around since the two were seperated.
These types of devices could be incredibly helpful inside live animals (including humans). Imagine a farmer being able to touch a machine to a computer laying just beneath the skin of livestock. He could use this to collect info from internal probes and other data gathering tools... sugar, water, and fat levels, hormone levels, known pathogens, etc... all could be checked every time the cow wandered in to get milk (as happens automatically in many big farms).
Inside people, temporary chips could be used to do similar jobs for patients in hosiptals; assisting data reporting for patients with diabetes, heart irregularity, etc.
Quick question: If we have viable alteratives, such as those presented by the Open Voting Consortium, why do we continue to bother with these stupid Diebold machines?
Because it's alot harder to steal an election on a system that can be proven to work all the time.
Your argument is valid, but somewhat off topic. The article isn't talking solely about stocks (many of which, especially in larger companies, are more predictable than you'd think; since rises and falls in price aren't the main attractor, dividend payments are), but about all types of investment instruments: equities ("stocks"), bonds, futures, foreign exchange markets, money market exchanges, options, swaptions, FRAs, CDs, repurchase agreements etc... and all of these instruments lend themselves well to analysis by computers. If a portfolio manager decides that he wants to take X level of risk with a certain set of investments with average maturity length Y (or a fixed maturity date; or a rolling, never-ending set of investments; etc...), it's relatively simple to use computers to determine which instruments match his terms. The optimal applications of this software are not to "predict the future", simply to decrease the amount of time and psychological bias present in the task of selecting investment options.
The only problem I have with your arguement is this: the only way to access the hidden content is with a modified PS2, something that violates the agreement you had with Sony when you purchased your console. Anyone who was completely law abiding would never have had access to this content.
Am I trying to say they should be in the clear for putting the material on the disk? I don't know. On the one hand, they must have known that given enough time someone would find the hidden content. It's what us nerds do. On the other hand, there was no legal or practical reason for anyone to be looking for that material on the disk, so maybe some lenience is acceptable.
How about for AI? The methods I've used so far involve figuring out all possible moves that could be made (classical computer), then using a heuristic to determine which, of all the possible moves (different input values), is the best. Even a simple game of Tic-Tac-Toe has 362880 different outcomes. Imagine if all computer-controlled AI characters were able to make the optimal moves without having to sit there for 5 seconds trying to figure them out. Difficult mode could consist of more than enemies with stronger armor and more powerful bullets for once.
When world oil peaks within the next few years then people will be faced with tearing the walls of their houses apart and in the alternative freezing in the dark.
Don't you worry, global warming will get here to cancel it out in time.
Slashdot Mirror
Just picking a nit...
If I were to try to live near work and walk in (43rd and Broadway, NYC), my monthly rent would easily triple to somewhere in the range of $3000/mo.
While I'm all for not driving, the answer isn't walking. It's public transportation.
"How is this relavant to the article", you might ask. Well, that's a mighty good question. My idea, see, is to invent a habitable plastic sphere which has a bouyancy which would naturally put it about 800 to 1000 meters underwater. That way, you can live in Tasmania, get up in the morning, get dressed, pop into your sphere, and roll yourself off into the ocean. After descending, you'll be briskly whisked away to Australia's east coast (without any fossil fuels being burned!), which is where I'm assuming you work. Now, the article doesn't mention the speed at which this 'supergyre' flows, so we'll assume ~1500kph, which would mean you'd be pulling up off the coast about 15 mins after leaving!!
Getting home... now that's another matter.
In this case, he's basically (but not totally) correct. The enigma would have been virtually incapable of being "solved", but the Germans decided to save effort and did not use their keys properly. Sure, they were distributed securely, but they weren't used properly.
Particular messages were sent at the same time every day, which the allies were able to guess certain portions of (ie: sending weather reports just after 8am, and listing the cities in a predictable order). Additionally, the same text was routinely encrypted twice using the same key, which is a bad idea when you're using a system which will encrypt the same string differently each time. These "cribs" allowed cryptographers to work out particulars of how the machine was configured at a given time (scrambler arrangements, plugboard settings...), which drastically reduced the amount of possible keys. After this reduction in the range of the keys, a brute-force attack was possible. Had the German beaurocracy not weakened the power of the Enigma by introducing these redundancies into the system, it would not have been cracked.
For anyone interested in cryptography (with an entire long chapter dedicated to the Enigma, its construction, and how it was broken) from both a historical and technical standpoint, I recommend "The Code Book" by Simon Singh as a good place to start.
They really need more of these dogs? How much confiscated cocaine does this government have that they need to start cloning dogs just to sniff it all up? And what if they suddenly run out? I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to see an angry cokehead dog not get his fix...
...sounds like a recipe for disaster if you ask me.
From what I remember, one of the bigger worries in all of this is the following:
Joe is a fairly well-off man (or, further in the future, a middle-income or low-income man) who's going to the doctor for a genetic analysis to see whether there are any treatable diseases which he is genetically at risk for, so that treatments and preventatives can begin before problems start arising.
Now, once this genetic analysis is complete, the issue becomes: who controls this information? Indeed, if an insurance company were to come across it, they'd obviously want to increase his premiums when they find out there's a 92% chance he'll develop Alzheimers and 700x the national average of his developing colon cancer within the next 5 years (for instance). Knowing this, Joe could be much less likely to ask his doctor to do the genetic analysis to begin with, since any bad news could end up making him uninsurable.
The other non-parent-post comments relating this to flying cars may not be appropriate, as the human genome is already completely sequenceable, and the cost of doing this has come down drastically in the past few years (and wil very likely continue to fall into the future). Personally, I'd much rather have laws in place protecting my personal information now, before this becomes an issue... regardless of whether this forces an existing service providing industry to operate sub-optimally (or, even, prevents the advent of newer industries altogether). From what I can gather, this doesn't forbid you from using your information to your benefit as you see fit, once it's available to you...
Sounds to me like someone needs a trip to the Alternative Education Center...
...lets hope you don't have any images of any public buildings on that HD of yours.
Sorry for the pedantism, but don't you mean three of the four?
Normally, I'd agree with you, but today I'll play a little devil's advocate.
[Simpsons pinball reference]
Anyway, yesterday I went into a T-Mobile store, because both my wife's and my phones were broken (yeah... don't ask...). Since my contract had expired almost a year earlier, I could freely at this point cancel with them at absolutely no charge. As an incentive to remain their customer, they offered me a total of $300 off of 2 replacement phones (yes, I did shop around online, and these prices were just barely better than what I could get for a used version on Ebay). To get this incentive, of course, I had to willingly submit to making myself a T-mobile customer for 24 more months, with a pentalty of $200 for early termination.
Do I agree that early-termination fees are called for? No. I think they're a way of extorting customers who have very few options when it comes to avoiding them. From a business point of view, however, I can't help but hope the guy who thought it up got a big fat bonus that year.
Assuming your post isn't a joke (it is modded funny, afterall)... Recently my company sent me to Holland for 2 1/2 months of training. Never having been outside the US before (Canada totally doesn't count), this was an incredible opportunity. All the benefits of vacationing in a foreign country (when you're working, you still get weekends off and have the right to use sick days... accruing more of them all the while), but without having to worry about moving in, finding yourself a hotel, etc. Plenty of time after work every day to go out and mix with the locals, and you're in town long enough to actually find your way around and pick up a bit of the language and culture. If you look at it from the point of view of "I'm doing my same job, just from a much cooler office" instead of "I'm on vacation stuck doing work for the man", you'll feel much better about the whole thing. Then again, the more I think of it, my situation is nothing like that in the article... in his case, the vacation was his idea. :sigh: Time to go home.
This is the same problem I have with the damming of rivers (Damn you rivers!! Get off my lawn!)... sure, the changes to the environment aren't immediately all that great... but the fact is, nobody can predict the long term effects of, well, pretty much any action in a system as complex as earth.
Don't go thinking I'm against this idea however. If we had to factor in all possible effects of any given action, nobody would ever end up doing... anything.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
Limericks are not suitable, they are just plain inappropriate.
NYC is a haven for programmers who don't mind (or enjoy, I guess) working in the financial industry. Many massive investment firms, and the thousands of software companies that support them, operate largely out of NYC. My situation's the exact reverse of yours... I haven't stopped looking forward to getting out of here since I arrived... but damn, the opportunities here make it so tough to leave.
Not losing customers to competing services is a great way to keep making money...
Moving it right up next to the CPU will allow the data to flow between the two alot faster than currently where it has to go over a bus... they can finally get rid of the bottlenecks that have been around since the two were seperated.
These types of devices could be incredibly helpful inside live animals (including humans). Imagine a farmer being able to touch a machine to a computer laying just beneath the skin of livestock. He could use this to collect info from internal probes and other data gathering tools... sugar, water, and fat levels, hormone levels, known pathogens, etc... all could be checked every time the cow wandered in to get milk (as happens automatically in many big farms).
Inside people, temporary chips could be used to do similar jobs for patients in hosiptals; assisting data reporting for patients with diabetes, heart irregularity, etc.
Because it's alot harder to steal an election on a system that can be proven to work all the time.
Your argument is valid, but somewhat off topic. The article isn't talking solely about stocks (many of which, especially in larger companies, are more predictable than you'd think; since rises and falls in price aren't the main attractor, dividend payments are), but about all types of investment instruments: equities ("stocks"), bonds, futures, foreign exchange markets, money market exchanges, options, swaptions, FRAs, CDs, repurchase agreements etc... and all of these instruments lend themselves well to analysis by computers. If a portfolio manager decides that he wants to take X level of risk with a certain set of investments with average maturity length Y (or a fixed maturity date; or a rolling, never-ending set of investments; etc...), it's relatively simple to use computers to determine which instruments match his terms. The optimal applications of this software are not to "predict the future", simply to decrease the amount of time and psychological bias present in the task of selecting investment options.
The only problem I have with your arguement is this: the only way to access the hidden content is with a modified PS2, something that violates the agreement you had with Sony when you purchased your console. Anyone who was completely law abiding would never have had access to this content.
Am I trying to say they should be in the clear for putting the material on the disk? I don't know. On the one hand, they must have known that given enough time someone would find the hidden content. It's what us nerds do. On the other hand, there was no legal or practical reason for anyone to be looking for that material on the disk, so maybe some lenience is acceptable.
How about for AI? The methods I've used so far involve figuring out all possible moves that could be made (classical computer), then using a heuristic to determine which, of all the possible moves (different input values), is the best. Even a simple game of Tic-Tac-Toe has 362880 different outcomes. Imagine if all computer-controlled AI characters were able to make the optimal moves without having to sit there for 5 seconds trying to figure them out. Difficult mode could consist of more than enemies with stronger armor and more powerful bullets for once.
Don't you worry, global warming will get here to cancel it out in time.