The name Nikola Tesla springs to mind. The Tesla Coil, a variant on the transformer (another of Tesla's inventions) ostensibly used roughly a home outlet's power to extract and/or guide the ZPE so as to yield usable power across any distance. It isn't considered to violate laws of thermodynamics, because you aren't getting the power from the power you put in, you put in power just to be able to make use of a flow of energy that already exists. One of his famous experiments involved setting a coil on a kitchen table and lighting something like 100,000 lightbulbs at once about a mile away (exact details blurred, feel free to correct). Using his theory of how the ZPE flows, you can send both usable power and communication signals at once across spacetime like a radio signal. Pretty cool theory for the turn of the 20th century, but it doesn't help the theory that he went insane and was scared of shiny objects and billiard balls etc.
Another (perhaps the most important) goal for this type of research is a bit more subtle than replacing the Hypothesis->Experiment->Analysis->Hypothesis sequence (Scientific Method) by computers. There will still be many experiments for which human insight is the best tool for deciding a possibly fruitful idea. However, humans (i.e. grad students, who often might suggest 'workhorse' as a better nominative) are not only slower at data analysis, we are severely limited in our abilities to 'see' patterns and correlations in very high dimension data. This has traditionally limited hypotheses to extensions/reworkings of the proposed process at work in a single experiment. If computers have access to both the data and a weighted list of most likely hypotheses for subsets of the entire oeuvre on a specific subject, they could run statistical classification and pattern matching algorithms to suggest new hypotheses based on immense amounts of information. Some of these may involve a large number of variables or inputs, but there are two very significant possibilities that make this research (and certainly other projects involved in similar applications) highly significant:
1) These complicated hypotheses could still be tested relatively easy by human scientists because most computer suggestion systems for new hypothesis possibilities would likely suggest a few tests that would help to support/disprove these new hypotheses.
2) Even more simplification comes from the fact that experiments may not need to be repeated nearly as much as they do now in order to make a hypothesis -- there is an incredible amount of data already gathered, and typical AI/pattern matching algorithms keep some of the data back for testing later. If the system finds a possible hypothesis on some level, experiments as to that concepts validity have essentially already been done in a virtual sense.
3) If the somewhat positivist version of current thought in physics http://www.toequest.com/, mathematics, chaos theory, complexity theory, cellular automata http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/toc.html, etc. is even vaguely valid, it is quite possible that, despite the complexity and dimensionality of the input data, the 'best' hypotheses developed even by purely automated means might still be simple and elegant and/or even yield insight into possible explanatory processes rather than just statistical indicators. This would be a valuable and beautiful victory for humanism and the importance of science as a truly elegant description of the world around us.
There are certainly some above-board sites, but the fake/spammy ones also list cities under the fake profiles. First, it's pretty unlikely that you are going to go through a bunch of other cities (or sites with slightly different names directed at different cities) and realize that a similar picture is listed again with a different name and different city. A second alternative, for the more fastidious fakers, is to set up a certain number of profiles and then either filter their email list or use scripts in their page to look up your (the site viewer) IP's rough location and then list those same profiles for everyone with filled in.
As a last resort, you could just run some extension of the old stock-pick scam: Pick a random stock, and send 4096 people an email with the news that the stock will go up, and 4096 the same email except that the stock will fall. After the stock did one or the other, email the 4096 with whom you were right a similar email, and again with the 2048 and 1024 with whom you continue to be right. Eventually you have a number of people left (say 256 people who have now been given 5 'perfect' picks) who think you are an incredible genius/sending legitimate 'personals.'
Anyhow, using common sense and caution is usually the best idea on the Interweb just as it has been for thousands of years before it.
Couldn't the writer use something like a (much more solid) version of what Winzip uses? You send them the name under which you plan to register, and they encode that. If he distributes the virus with the ability to do a cryptographic hash on the size in kb of your MyDocs folder, and just makes you send that number along with your payment. He has the same hash system and can generate the appropriate key. Everyone has a different key, at least, but of course Winzip's system is highly crackable anyways...
I actually like both of the redesigns, but it seems that, from a graphic design perspective at least, the winner is a little cleaner. Perhaps the rounded corners in the top left and bottom right of the article outlines separate the space better to my eye. Anyhow...both pages took a fair amount of time to load, and while this might be a simple question, is this because CSS has to load all the sheets before loading the page, or will my (XP) computer store the sheets offline and the sheets will load more quickly in the future?
And, not related to what the contestants really had control over (but hopefully not entirely off-topic), but is there a reason that you can't click on the article title to go to its page? Clicking the title seems more intuitive than looking for a 'Readmore' link at the bottom of the summary. I do also appreciate that the winner at least place this in the bottom right, which is the second place I would look.
Slashdot Mirror
The name Nikola Tesla springs to mind. The Tesla Coil, a variant on the transformer (another of Tesla's inventions) ostensibly used roughly a home outlet's power to extract and/or guide the ZPE so as to yield usable power across any distance. It isn't considered to violate laws of thermodynamics, because you aren't getting the power from the power you put in, you put in power just to be able to make use of a flow of energy that already exists. One of his famous experiments involved setting a coil on a kitchen table and lighting something like 100,000 lightbulbs at once about a mile away (exact details blurred, feel free to correct). Using his theory of how the ZPE flows, you can send both usable power and communication signals at once across spacetime like a radio signal. Pretty cool theory for the turn of the 20th century, but it doesn't help the theory that he went insane and was scared of shiny objects and billiard balls etc.
Another (perhaps the most important) goal for this type of research is a bit more subtle than replacing the Hypothesis->Experiment->Analysis->Hypothesis sequence (Scientific Method) by computers. There will still be many experiments for which human insight is the best tool for deciding a possibly fruitful idea. However, humans (i.e. grad students, who often might suggest 'workhorse' as a better nominative) are not only slower at data analysis, we are severely limited in our abilities to 'see' patterns and correlations in very high dimension data. This has traditionally limited hypotheses to extensions/reworkings of the proposed process at work in a single experiment. If computers have access to both the data and a weighted list of most likely hypotheses for subsets of the entire oeuvre on a specific subject, they could run statistical classification and pattern matching algorithms to suggest new hypotheses based on immense amounts of information. Some of these may involve a large number of variables or inputs, but there are two very significant possibilities that make this research (and certainly other projects involved in similar applications) highly significant:
1) These complicated hypotheses could still be tested relatively easy by human scientists because most computer suggestion systems for new hypothesis possibilities would likely suggest a few tests that would help to support/disprove these new hypotheses.
2) Even more simplification comes from the fact that experiments may not need to be repeated nearly as much as they do now in order to make a hypothesis -- there is an incredible amount of data already gathered, and typical AI/pattern matching algorithms keep some of the data back for testing later. If the system finds a possible hypothesis on some level, experiments as to that concepts validity have essentially already been done in a virtual sense.
3) If the somewhat positivist version of current thought in physics http://www.toequest.com/, mathematics, chaos theory, complexity theory, cellular automata http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/toc.html, etc. is even vaguely valid, it is quite possible that, despite the complexity and dimensionality of the input data, the 'best' hypotheses developed even by purely automated means might still be simple and elegant and/or even yield insight into possible explanatory processes rather than just statistical indicators. This would be a valuable and beautiful victory for humanism and the importance of science as a truly elegant description of the world around us.
There are certainly some above-board sites, but the fake/spammy ones also list cities under the fake profiles. First, it's pretty unlikely that you are going to go through a bunch of other cities (or sites with slightly different names directed at different cities) and realize that a similar picture is listed again with a different name and different city. A second alternative, for the more fastidious fakers, is to set up a certain number of profiles and then either filter their email list or use scripts in their page to look up your (the site viewer) IP's rough location and then list those same profiles for everyone with filled in.
As a last resort, you could just run some extension of the old stock-pick scam: Pick a random stock, and send 4096 people an email with the news that the stock will go up, and 4096 the same email except that the stock will fall. After the stock did one or the other, email the 4096 with whom you were right a similar email, and again with the 2048 and 1024 with whom you continue to be right. Eventually you have a number of people left (say 256 people who have now been given 5 'perfect' picks) who think you are an incredible genius/sending legitimate 'personals.'
Anyhow, using common sense and caution is usually the best idea on the Interweb just as it has been for thousands of years before it.
Couldn't the writer use something like a (much more solid) version of what Winzip uses? You send them the name under which you plan to register, and they encode that. If he distributes the virus with the ability to do a cryptographic hash on the size in kb of your MyDocs folder, and just makes you send that number along with your payment. He has the same hash system and can generate the appropriate key. Everyone has a different key, at least, but of course Winzip's system is highly crackable anyways...
I actually like both of the redesigns, but it seems that, from a graphic design perspective at least, the winner is a little cleaner. Perhaps the rounded corners in the top left and bottom right of the article outlines separate the space better to my eye. Anyhow...both pages took a fair amount of time to load, and while this might be a simple question, is this because CSS has to load all the sheets before loading the page, or will my (XP) computer store the sheets offline and the sheets will load more quickly in the future?
And, not related to what the contestants really had control over (but hopefully not entirely off-topic), but is there a reason that you can't click on the article title to go to its page? Clicking the title seems more intuitive than looking for a 'Readmore' link at the bottom of the summary. I do also appreciate that the winner at least place this in the bottom right, which is the second place I would look.