A biological weapon??? you can brew it in a basement
Never taken microbiology, have you? Keeping just the bugs you like alive without being eaten by other bugs, while maintaining sterile conditions around it is tricky. Think of chip-manufacturing clean-rooms and you get the idea. The budget required to keep such an operation successful is huge, even with a surplus of underpaid, talented Russian engineers on the market.
I'll repeat the other posters who know what they're talking about - for your money, explosives are still by far your best bet. They will be for a very long time. There will certainly be more effective weapons produced, as per the Human Condition Algorithm:
I agree with you about music - abstract, impossible to rank objectively, etc. But it really misses the point of the Evergreen article.
What is being asked here is whether the RIAA is moving towards a business model that is only sustainable in a very short term. If so, how long could it be expected to last. As was pointed out earlier, if I were a shareholder, I'd consider this a very interesting study.
Music may be abstract, but sales figures certainly aren't, and if the RIAA were doing short-sighted things with My Valuable Shareholder money, I'd be inclined to shift my money elsewhere
Can't speak for the American Oil crowd, but I know for a fact that the Euroeans are looking very seriously at all sorts of alternative/renewable energies. BP and Shell are two fairly big players in solar, biomass, geothermal, and forestry.
The green-leaning unwashed masses aren't the only ones who are aware that we're burning dinosaurs faster than we're making them. Forecasts vary on the catastrophic oil-running-out deadline (the
USGS forecasts
are held in fairly high repute). There are many more you can find, with wildly varying dates.
However, a fact much more interesting to an Oil company is when it's going to stop getting cheap to recover oil. All these businesses know it is definately going to get more expensive to extract oil. They also know it's a real posiblity it's going to get more expensive to buy it from countries which make it cheap (OPEC getting its shit together, and other "disaster" scenarios).
So yeah, they thought of that. They reckon that as companies who've got a pretty good idea how energy is used, they're pretty qualified to in this area. Anyone heard any oil company propoganda on fuel cells?
I think you guys are mixing terms with the word "trivial". There's algorithm trivial and implementation trivial
Cracking PGP *is* trivial, in the sense that the algorithm to do it is published, understood, and widely believed to be the best we're going to have for a long time. Effectively, it's at a standtill as far as evoltion of real implementations goes. And to do it takes more computing power than we've got. Algorithm trivial, but not implementation trivial.
Now, the number theory and algorithm research going into crypto is *very* non-trivial, but this has yet to trickle down to the implementations in a meaningful way
Massive simulations such as a nuclear detonation are still an open-ended problem at the algorithm level. We've got some pretty good ideas about ways to do it that might reflect reality, but different angles are published regularly. Which degrees of freedom to play with, shrkinking residual versus orthoganal residual convergence, blah blah blah... *And*, as an added bonus, these things can be investigated and the results evaluate *before* our sun becomes a neutron star (unlike, say, cracking RSA).
This is one we'd call implementation trivial, but not algorithm trivial.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled slashdot fodder...:)
However, it was a good company in its effects. It brought taxation and simple democracy to India. It breathed the first light of the west's wisdom on those dark and primitive lands.
You must be reading John Stuart Mill's account.
We're talking about the same East India Company that, but for logistical snags and the fear of serious local unrest, would've torn down the Taj Mahal for its marble, aren't we? That enlightened and enlightening bunch?
They also weren't really done in by the Government - it most mostly the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 that weakened them to a next-to-useless state. They weren't up to much after that, and the Gub'mint took over running the company.
The company existed and prospered using the traditional divide-and-conquor tricks, augmented with the bonus that from 1600 to 1813, they had a government sanctioned monopoly in the region. A British company trying to set up shop was illegal; a foreign company setting up was an act of war.
What stopped them was probably the combination of the monopoly being broken, putting pressure on them from the West, and the local uprisings, adding pressure on another front. Is anyone else making comparisons here? A monopoly existing mainly because it's a monopoly, and no other reason? Hmm.....
I'm glad you brought the East India Company up, but more because it's an interesting historical parallel than a counter-example. Bluntly, you've done more to help Jon Katz's argument than your own.
Most European countries have rules permitting short-term work to be done in the country by individuals who represent a foreign company.
"Short" in this case means about three months. There is also usually a rule that you can't be a significant shareholder in said company. In a nutshell, they haven't hired you; they've bought the services of an overseas company (that's you). Said company is sending a representative over to complete the work (that's also you). Here's what is usually done:
Set yourself up a limited liability company (legal business terminology may vary in the US - basicly register your own company).
Sell the shares to someone you really trust for a dollar.
Apply for short term contract positions. Jobpilot is pretty good for this in Europe (jobpilot.fr, jobpilot.de, etc).
This allows you to get your foot in the door, and possibly get them to sponsor you for
a visa. This is good - nobody is going to hire you sight unseen and sponsor you for a work visa at the same time. Usually, you have to be out of the country while the visa is being processed, but that's an hour's train ride just about anywhere you go in Europe. Take a vacation on the Riviera (you might need it after three months of intense work).
Consult the embasies, consulates, etc of the countries concerned. This may be legal to varying degrees in different contries (IANAL). Be really frank and candid about your intentions. Believe me, it's a hell of a lot better to annoy the clerk at a consulate than it is to annoy immigration authorities once you're there.
There are probably a lot of Jack Chick satire sites (I mean, how can you resist - fish, barrel,you know the saying), but my favorite was
this one. Needless to say, it generated a
bit of contreversy. But isn't lively debate what keeps the intelect from being snuffed out completely? Oh, wait, this was just tasteless humor... good enough;-)
every reference? Hell's bells, in my student days I used to pad my bibliographies if I thought they looked a little slim.
Just look in the bibs. of your reference books, and copy those refereces that look juicy, and throw them in the citations as you write. Hell, I used to make citations up!
Oh, wait... we were talking about the honor system..... whoops....
how did these companies get so goddamn big? Your money.
erm.... yes. But it's a bit more tricky than
that. Most of the money media outlets recieve isn't from the customers directly, but from advertising revenue. For example, the cover price of a dead tree copy of the New York Times is a tiny fraction of the revenue that edition will collect. It's more accurate to say the media outlets got big because *advertisers* got big on our money.
That's just the start. As has been pointed out, GE is a major owner of media
outlets. Some of their most profitable exercises, however, have more to do with supplying industrial and weapons componentry. Jet engines, nuclear detonator components, and landmine componentry to domestic and overseas markets are some of the more striking items. I could promise to stop buying them, but I'm not yet a customer.
I don't really mind having six or seven corporations, or whatever, personally. Doesn't bother me a bit, because they still can't force me to do anything.
However, what they can do is take away your ability to make informed decisions. If the information required to make a choice is controlled by editors who understand the importance of responsibility to G.E.'s shareholders, then your ability to make decisions that reflect badly on G.E. is severly curtailed.
This isn't conspiracy theory - this is a basic fact. If you have any role at all in the modern corporate world, have a look around at who's getting promoted. It's usually people who have a pretty good sense of responsibility to the shareholders. To expect a media outlet, which is a company, to be subject to different rules is naive.
Given this, it's pretty unlikely you'll see articles dismissing a media outlet's parent company. Have a look at that list of who owns what media to get an idea of who's not going to get bad press.
The truth is, the internet is exactly the kind of tool that these companies fear, because it offers diversity
Agreed. But have you noticed the drop in diversity over the past five years? Part of the point of the article is that Internet portals are going the way of newspapers. True, content of material on the Internet is mostly up to the individual users, but Quality of Service isn't. Which is going to get more hits - a flashy site, owned by a portal with huge bandwidth, or one not owned by said portal, that doesn't have the bandwidth to choke an ant.
In most of the developed world, finding good food instead of McFast Food is an uphill battle. It seems information is going the same way.
To answer the topic - what to do about it. Give a toss. Spread information. Use the Internet for something productive. Become known in your neighborhood as that wacko who babbles about media control, in the hopes that a few people will catch on and keep demand for diversity alive.
Allan Konrad, the owner of this patent, is suing GM in Texas (Why Texas? The guy lives in California.)
In an unrelated news story about Toshiba pulling a dammage-control move by settling a class-action suit in the states, Toshiba vice-president Masaichi Koga was quoted:
"U.S. law is not the same as elsewhere," Koga said. "The United States and especially Texas are very high risk zones for litigation. We feared that in the worst case this could imperil our company's chances of survival, so we made the extremely hard decision to pay the settlement." [emphasis added]
Short answer: because he can. Texas is, apparently, known to be a lucrative area for litigation.
I was asked, and I should probably know.... is it possible to scan incomming mail on the spooler for virii? I've heard of M$ Mail Server apps that could do this, but it's never been high profile in the UN*X world, near as I can tell. Anyone done this, had any experiences, etc?
Short answer: It looks like it probably will be either useless or a very bad thing.
Long answer: For those of you who took probability and statistics, feel free to check/correct/laugh at my numbers here....
Something funny happens when you test for rare events in a large population, which I'll try to illustrate below:
I don't know how accurate Mosaic-2000 is, so I'll talk about a ficticous test, called Mysaic-2000.
Assumptions (based on very little): 1) Mysaic-2000 gives a false positive result 5% of the time. A false positive occurs when Mysaic-2000 predicts a dangerous person, when the person is in fact quite harmless. (I have grave doubts that any psyco-sociological profile is anywhere near this accurate).
2) Mysaic-2000 gives a false negative result 1% of the time. A false negative occurs when Mysaic-2000 predicts a safe person who is actually quite dangerous.
3) Genuinely dangerous people are about 1 in 1000. Seriously dangerous here - violent, nasty, willing to use hardware, not just their fists.
Question: given that someone has been ranked "seriously dangerous" by Mysaic-2000, what are the odds that they actaully are?
In a population of 100,000 people..... 100 seriously dangerous. 99,900 not seriously dangerous.
Apply Mysaic-2000 to find out who they are, and here's what you'll get:
Of the 100 seriously dangerous people, there will, on average, be 1 false negative (1% false negative rate). 99 of them will by "caught" by Mysaic-2000.
OF the 99,900 safe people, there will, on average, be 4,995 false positives (5% false positive rate).
So, in a population of 100,000, 100 of whom are genuinely dangerous, Mysaic-2000 will find 5,094 genuine baddies (4,995 + 99).
The answer to the above question is this:
Given that you have tested positive as a genuinely dangerous person by Mysaic-2000, the odds that you truly are such a person are 100 in 5094. About 1 in 50, or 2%.
How the hell did we get such a meaningless result? We're testing for a rare event, that's how. A few false positives among a population of mostly-negatives adds up really quickly.
I doubt Mosiac-2000 is actually so accurate it only gives a false positive 5% of the time. Profiling just isn't that accurate when applied to large populations. I don't know how rare really dangerous people are, but the simple fact is that, by and large, most people aren't dangerous. Really dangerous people are *rare*.
What's being turned loose here will either be an electronic witch hunt, under the guise of rational, objective data analysis, or a flop. Hope (or pray, or do whatever it is you do to cope with dire potential consequences) that it turns out a flop.
Slashdot Mirror
Never taken microbiology, have you? Keeping just the bugs you like alive without being eaten by other bugs, while maintaining sterile conditions around it is tricky. Think of chip-manufacturing clean-rooms and you get the idea. The budget required to keep such an operation successful is huge, even with a surplus of underpaid, talented Russian engineers on the market.
I'll repeat the other posters who know what they're talking about - for your money, explosives are still by far your best bet. They will be for a very long time. There will certainly be more effective weapons produced, as per the Human Condition Algorithm:
if(!extinct) {buildBetterWeapon()}
But terrorists? Get real.
I agree with you about music - abstract, impossible to rank objectively, etc. But it really misses the point of the Evergreen article.
What is being asked here is whether the RIAA is moving towards a business model that is only sustainable in a very short term. If so, how long could it be expected to last. As was pointed out earlier, if I were a shareholder, I'd consider this a very interesting study.
Music may be abstract, but sales figures certainly aren't, and if the RIAA were doing short-sighted things with My Valuable Shareholder money, I'd be inclined to shift my money elsewhere
aw man, as if linking to them from here wasn't bad enough.... posting a script to mine their site?!?!
I like it. Using it now. That'll teach 'em for going after Napster ;-)
Can't speak for the American Oil crowd, but I know for a fact that the Euroeans are looking very seriously at all sorts of alternative/renewable energies. BP and Shell are two fairly big players in solar, biomass, geothermal, and forestry.
The green-leaning unwashed masses aren't the only ones who are aware that we're burning dinosaurs faster than we're making them. Forecasts vary on the catastrophic oil-running-out deadline (the USGS forecasts are held in fairly high repute). There are many more you can find, with wildly varying dates.
However, a fact much more interesting to an Oil company is when it's going to stop getting cheap to recover oil. All these businesses know it is definately going to get more expensive to extract oil. They also know it's a real posiblity it's going to get more expensive to buy it from countries which make it cheap (OPEC getting its shit together, and other "disaster" scenarios).
So yeah, they thought of that. They reckon that as companies who've got a pretty good idea how energy is used, they're pretty qualified to in this area. Anyone heard any oil company propoganda on fuel cells?
I think you guys are mixing terms with the word "trivial". There's algorithm trivial and implementation trivial
Cracking PGP *is* trivial, in the sense that the algorithm to do it is published, understood, and widely believed to be the best we're going to have for a long time. Effectively, it's at a standtill as far as evoltion of real implementations goes. And to do it takes more computing power than we've got. Algorithm trivial, but not implementation trivial.
Now, the number theory and algorithm research going into crypto is *very* non-trivial, but this has yet to trickle down to the implementations in a meaningful way
Massive simulations such as a nuclear detonation are still an open-ended problem at the algorithm level. We've got some pretty good ideas about ways to do it that might reflect reality, but different angles are published regularly. Which degrees of freedom to play with, shrkinking residual versus orthoganal residual convergence, blah blah blah... *And*, as an added bonus, these things can be investigated and the results evaluate *before* our sun becomes a neutron star (unlike, say, cracking RSA).
This is one we'd call implementation trivial, but not algorithm trivial.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled slashdot fodder... :)
You must be reading John Stuart Mill's account. We're talking about the same East India Company that, but for logistical snags and the fear of serious local unrest, would've torn down the Taj Mahal for its marble, aren't we? That enlightened and enlightening bunch?
They also weren't really done in by the Government - it most mostly the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 that weakened them to a next-to-useless state. They weren't up to much after that, and the Gub'mint took over running the company.
The company existed and prospered using the traditional divide-and-conquor tricks, augmented with the bonus that from 1600 to 1813, they had a government sanctioned monopoly in the region. A British company trying to set up shop was illegal; a foreign company setting up was an act of war.
What stopped them was probably the combination of the monopoly being broken, putting pressure on them from the West, and the local uprisings, adding pressure on another front. Is anyone else making comparisons here? A monopoly existing mainly because it's a monopoly, and no other reason? Hmm.....
I'm glad you brought the East India Company up, but more because it's an interesting historical parallel than a counter-example. Bluntly, you've done more to help Jon Katz's argument than your own.
Most European countries have rules permitting short-term work to be done in the country by individuals who represent a foreign company. "Short" in this case means about three months. There is also usually a rule that you can't be a significant shareholder in said company. In a nutshell, they haven't hired you; they've bought the services of an overseas company (that's you). Said company is sending a representative over to complete the work (that's also you). Here's what is usually done:
This allows you to get your foot in the door, and possibly get them to sponsor you for a visa. This is good - nobody is going to hire you sight unseen and sponsor you for a work visa at the same time. Usually, you have to be out of the country while the visa is being processed, but that's an hour's train ride just about anywhere you go in Europe. Take a vacation on the Riviera (you might need it after three months of intense work).
Consult the embasies, consulates, etc of the countries concerned. This may be legal to varying degrees in different contries (IANAL). Be really frank and candid about your intentions. Believe me, it's a hell of a lot better to annoy the clerk at a consulate than it is to annoy immigration authorities once you're there.
There are probably a lot of Jack Chick satire sites (I mean, how can you resist - fish, barrel,you know the saying), but my favorite was this one. Needless to say, it generated a bit of contreversy. But isn't lively debate what keeps the intelect from being snuffed out completely? Oh, wait, this was just tasteless humor... good enough ;-)
every reference? Hell's bells, in my student days I used to pad my bibliographies if I thought they looked a little slim.
Just look in the bibs. of your reference books, and copy those refereces that look juicy, and throw them in the citations as you write. Hell, I used to make citations up!
Oh, wait... we were talking about the honor system..... whoops....
Had to bite
erm.... yes. But it's a bit more tricky than that. Most of the money media outlets recieve isn't from the customers directly, but from advertising revenue. For example, the cover price of a dead tree copy of the New York Times is a tiny fraction of the revenue that edition will collect. It's more accurate to say the media outlets got big because *advertisers* got big on our money.
That's just the start. As has been pointed out, GE is a major owner of media outlets. Some of their most profitable exercises, however, have more to do with supplying industrial and weapons componentry. Jet engines, nuclear detonator components, and landmine componentry to domestic and overseas markets are some of the more striking items. I could promise to stop buying them, but I'm not yet a customer.
However, what they can do is take away your ability to make informed decisions. If the information required to make a choice is controlled by editors who understand the importance of responsibility to G.E.'s shareholders, then your ability to make decisions that reflect badly on G.E. is severly curtailed.
This isn't conspiracy theory - this is a basic fact. If you have any role at all in the modern corporate world, have a look around at who's getting promoted. It's usually people who have a pretty good sense of responsibility to the shareholders. To expect a media outlet, which is a company, to be subject to different rules is naive.
Given this, it's pretty unlikely you'll see articles dismissing a media outlet's parent company. Have a look at that list of who owns what media to get an idea of who's not going to get bad press.
Agreed. But have you noticed the drop in diversity over the past five years? Part of the point of the article is that Internet portals are going the way of newspapers. True, content of material on the Internet is mostly up to the individual users, but Quality of Service isn't. Which is going to get more hits - a flashy site, owned by a portal with huge bandwidth, or one not owned by said portal, that doesn't have the bandwidth to choke an ant.
In most of the developed world, finding good food instead of McFast Food is an uphill battle. It seems information is going the same way.
To answer the topic - what to do about it. Give a toss. Spread information. Use the Internet for something productive. Become known in your neighborhood as that wacko who babbles about media control, in the hopes that a few people will catch on and keep demand for diversity alive.
Anyone got more suggestions?
I saw this, and was reminded of a Knuth quote (I believe from TAOCP):
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
I think that says it all.Allan Konrad, the owner of this patent, is suing GM in Texas (Why Texas? The guy lives in California.)
In an unrelated news story about Toshiba pulling a dammage-control move by settling a class-action suit in the states, Toshiba vice-president Masaichi Koga was quoted:
"U.S. law is not the same as elsewhere," Koga said. "The United States and especially Texas are very high risk zones for litigation. We feared that in the worst case this could imperil our company's chances of survival, so we made the extremely hard decision to pay the settlement." [emphasis added]
Short answer: because he can. Texas is, apparently, known to be a lucrative area for litigation.
I was asked, and I should probably know.... is it possible to scan incomming mail on the spooler for virii? I've heard of M$ Mail Server apps that could do this, but it's never been high profile in the UN*X world, near as I can tell. Anyone done this, had any experiences, etc?
Short answer: It looks like it probably will be either useless or a very bad thing.
Long answer:
For those of you who took probability and statistics, feel free to check/correct/laugh at my numbers here....
Something funny happens when you test for rare events in a large population, which I'll try to illustrate below:
I don't know how accurate Mosaic-2000 is, so I'll talk about a ficticous test, called Mysaic-2000.
Assumptions (based on very little):
1) Mysaic-2000 gives a false positive result 5% of the time. A false positive occurs when Mysaic-2000 predicts a dangerous person, when the person is in fact quite harmless. (I have grave doubts that any psyco-sociological profile is anywhere near this accurate).
2) Mysaic-2000 gives a false negative result 1% of the time. A false negative occurs when Mysaic-2000 predicts a safe person who is actually quite dangerous.
3) Genuinely dangerous people are about 1 in 1000. Seriously dangerous here - violent, nasty, willing to use hardware, not just their fists.
Question: given that someone has been ranked "seriously dangerous" by Mysaic-2000, what are the odds that they actaully are?
In a population of 100,000 people.....
100 seriously dangerous.
99,900 not seriously dangerous.
Apply Mysaic-2000 to find out who they are, and here's what you'll get:
Of the 100 seriously dangerous people, there will, on average, be 1 false negative (1% false negative rate). 99 of them will by "caught" by Mysaic-2000.
OF the 99,900 safe people, there will, on average, be 4,995 false positives (5% false positive rate).
So, in a population of 100,000, 100 of whom are genuinely dangerous, Mysaic-2000 will find 5,094 genuine baddies (4,995 + 99).
The answer to the above question is this:
Given that you have tested positive as a genuinely dangerous person by Mysaic-2000, the odds that you truly are such a person are 100 in 5094. About 1 in 50, or 2%.
How the hell did we get such a meaningless result? We're testing for a rare event, that's how. A few false positives among a population of mostly-negatives adds up really quickly.
I doubt Mosiac-2000 is actually so accurate it only gives a false positive 5% of the time. Profiling just isn't that accurate when applied to large populations. I don't know how rare really dangerous people are, but the simple fact is that, by and large, most people aren't dangerous. Really dangerous people are *rare*.
What's being turned loose here will either be an electronic witch hunt, under the guise of rational, objective data analysis, or a flop. Hope (or pray, or do whatever it is you do to cope with dire potential consequences) that it turns out a flop.
There's also Myanmar/Burma. I think that's about it, though.....