Both the Nature article and the posting here on/. are exceedingly misleading (I don't blame the poster... he/she just reported what the Nature article said)
All that the two articles *may* have found is the location of a part of VISUAL working memory. This would be the area that tracks objects through space and binds features that are processed seperately by the visual system (say color and form) into the same object. This is NOT the seat of all intelligence.
There are many different aspects to working memory: people have hypothesized that there is a phonological working memory, one involved in the spelling process, one involved in computing things like syntactic relations, etc. And yes, there is probably such a thing as a general-purpose working memory. All they may have found is the location of the visual-spatial component of working memory. This is a far cry from finding anything that limits one's intelligence, unless you define intelligence as "visual-spatial ability".
In fact, it is quite wrong to even suggest that the visual-spatial working memory is somehow related to intelligence. There are many instances of people with working memory deficits who are able to function quite normally in other domains.
For the sake of brevity I won't go into the finer about the studies themselves (one of the studies used the ERP recording technique, which is *awful* at localization) because the main point is that in and of themselves the studies are fine. It's this conclusion that they've somehow found "the RAM" or the thing that would limit intelligence that's exceedingly problematic.
I'd be interested in seeing where you found this information about the Telegraph receiving false information (not the Christian Science Monitor) I would find it highly strange that it got it's information from some random "source" as it clearly reported to be getting its information from the Iraqi Coalition Government itself.
"However, the tantalising detail provided in the intelligence document uncovered by Iraq's interim government suggests that Atta's involvement with Iraqi intelligence may well have been far deeper than has hitherto been acknowledged."
In addition, as of today, December 14, the Telegraph is still publishing new articles about the Atta/Nidal/Baghdad link, as seen here. Sounds to me like you're making up stories.
Interesting that people here call it outrageous when the RIAA sues a grandmother for downloading music (she couldn't possibly be downloading music), but call for blood when a grandmother is a spammer.
Frivolous lawsuits are bad, but on the other hand, anybody is capable of anything
You're Wrong. The Telegraph published a report this week that the Iraqi Coalition government has found documents showing that Mohammed Atta was trained by the Palestinian Terrorist Abu Nidal in Baghdad shortly before the attacks on New York and Washington.
Details of Atta's visit to the Iraqi capital in the summer of 2001, just weeks before he launched the most devastating terrorist attack in US history, are contained in a top secret memo written to Saddam Hussein, the then Iraqi president, by Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, the former head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.
The handwritten memo, a copy of which has been obtained exclusively by the Telegraph, is dated July 1, 2001 and provides a short resume of a three-day "work programme" Atta had undertaken at Abu Nidal's base in Baghdad.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ ne ws/2003/12/14/wterr14.xml&sSheet=/portal/2003/12/1 4/ixportaltop.html
These documents are proof that Iraq and Saddam was tied to 9/11. Capturing Saddam is a wonderful victory on its own merits, but since you need proof connecting him with 9/11, here it is.
I was under the impression that flashing text quickly so that your eye doesn't notice it was just another form of subliminal messaging...
I was also under the impression that these types of subliminal messages don't work...
So can anyone sort this out? I must be confused about something.
Sure. What we have here in the glasses is exactly as you stated -- a prime. The idea behind priming is that if you flash a semantically related word right before certain kinds of decisions, the semantic links are strengthened, or "primed" so you are slightly more likely and slightly quicker to respond with a particular response.
If I recall correctly, 180 ms is not fast enough to be undetectable. It is, however, fast enough so that your eye won't be able to saccade over to it before it disappears. (A saccade takes approximately 200ms) This means that for all intents and purposes, you probably won't be fully aware of what it says, though you might be aware that something was flashed, if you were paying attention.
So the idea (as I understand it) is that if the glasses flash a person's name very briefly, you'll be more likely to respond with that name if you are put in a situation where you have to recall it, as the links to it have been strengthened.
As for your question about subliminal messages, I think what you're referring to is the infamous idea that if you flicker pictures of Coca Cola between the frames of a movie, people are more likely to go buy a coke. Well, it's true that this kind of strategy doesn't work -- there's a huge difference between having Coke semantically primed and carrying out the complex behavior of buying a coke (you have the time delay, first of all, which diminishes the activation, the planning required to buy a coke, etc...)
The priming effect is real, but very small, usually only detectable in terms of milliseconds or trends. All in all, recall is the type of task that priming can help in, so this may be very useful. But displaying "Buy Coke" or "kill your boss" really isn't going to do anything at all.
Mod the parent up. In this case, it is definitely the marketing companies that are the suckers. Let me first preface this by saying (in concordance with the parent) that fMRI is a very valuable research and diagnostic tool. It is limited, but when used in correctly designed experiments backed by sound interpretation, it can be very useful.
The biggest flaw with trying to use fMRI to tailor marketing is that seeing activity in a particular area of the brain that happens to be associated with function X DOES NOT mean that X is occuring when the person sees your product. Take, for instance, the example in the article where activation was seen in the fusiform area. While it is entirely true that that area is essential for the recognition of faces, this does not mean subjects were seeing faces in the cars. The fusiform area is involved in any kind of higher-order spatial organization, for instance grouping notes on a page, viewing disparate lines as a whole, etc. While it is appropriate to conclude that the subjects were integrating the many visual elements into larger perceptual wholes, it is not appropriate to assume that they saw the cars as faces, and certainly not to then conclude that they will then be more likely to buy the cars. If you want to test vehicle brand recognition, then you need to test that explicitly, not just in some simple presentation paradigm.
The following quote is completely misleading:
"In contrast, M.R.I. scanning offers the promise of concrete facts -- an unbiased glimpse at a consumer's mind in action. To an M.R.I. machine, you cannot misrepresent your responses. Your medial prefrontal cortex will start firing when you see something you adore, even if you claim not to like it. ''Let's say I show you Playboy,'' Kilts says, ''and you go, 'Oh, no, no, no!' Really? We could tell you actually like it.''"
First of all, fMRI is entirely reliant upon interpretation, so there are no "unbiased" "concrete facts". The activation is concrete, but trying to assign meaning to that activation is extremely tricky. Secondly, regarding secret lusts for Playboy, you may see activation in areas that typically indicate arousal, but that does not mean that the person actually likes it or will buy it. There are a million miles from the activity of non-concious processes of the brain and actual conscious behavior. If the "social image" centers light up with Coke and not Sprite (remember, image is nothing, thirst is everything (tm)) what does that show? I still might like Coke over Sprite! *sigh* Unfortunately, cognitive neuroscience is now being dragged through the mud of popular psychology.
Apart from some minor annoyances, I think iTunes works really really well. The only major feature I'd like to see is the ability to minimize it so only the icon in the systray remains visible. I like to listen to music when I'm working and if I have a lot of programs open, I don't my music program taking up space in the taskbar.
Oh, it would also be nice to be able to remove cover art once you've added it. The way it is now, if you make a mistake, you're stuck with the wrong cover art.
In true military fashion, they made no attempt to find the real author of the e-mail, but instead threatened to court martial the guy who left the computer logged on, for violating security rules.
In contrast to this, the Chief of Information Security at my university told the tale of how one year a student sent a threatening email to the president of the US via an another student's email account that was left open. Needless to say the Secret Service guys descended at the university. He never told how, but the folks at the university's information security department somehow managed to track down the real sender. Thank goodness for dedicated information security peoples!
If anybody is interested in finding out more about these spambot "turing tests", check out http://www.captcha.net/.
I seem to remember one of their earlier tests involved determining which word didn't belong in a particular phrase. They would give you something like "The girl went to the mall to buy a giraffe" and the answer would be "giraffe". This sort of test could be given either visually or aurally, and would require a lot of NLP resources to crack (would have to determine part of speech and some amount of the syntactic structure). This kind of system might be the answer.. theoretically it would be accessible to all english speakers, blind or deaf.
There is something wrong about that. It kind of reminds me of the whole Snow Crash thing really.
You really don't have to worry. As is pointed out in this thread and elsewhere, the level of information that can be gained from fMRI as to specific responses is very small. It's an excellent technique, but all it does is show activation. Show a complicated visual scene and you will get activation in the visual centers. You might even be able to detect differences in activation depending on the type of scene, but that's about it. You can't play somebody one jingle and tell that they like it better than another, or that one will get you to buy the product more than the other. Additionally, experiments with fMRI (as in all science experiments) need to be factored down so you can test one variable at a time. Because of this, the information you get from the experiment will necessarily be very simple, somehting along the lines of "people pay more attention to a visual scene when there is music present" or "people react more strongly to advertisements with people in them than without". All of this stuff could be determined through common sense and through psychological testing, or from what we already know from fMRI.
Here's another way to think about it. fMRI measures oxegnation and blood flow, with the idea that when the brain is performing a certain task (say processing a sentence) it will have to work harder and so the relavent brain center has higher energy demands. This is akin to looking at a motherboard through infra-red and discovering that the math-coprocessor is hotter than normal, and figuring that some something heavily mathematical is being processed. But notice however, that if you want to know something more about the specific complexity of the problem that's being processed, you have to have some outside knowledge of the theory behind it, say Big-O. This is the same thing for brain events. You can learn a lot about the brain by studying its reaction to a stimulus, but in order to understand more sophisticated things about the stimulus, you need a theory, say something that psychology could give you.
I know this is Offtopic, but just thought this would be interesting to think about. ENIAC, the first general purpose digital computer was used in part to calculate artillary arc tables. ENIAC could do in 30 seconds what it took a human 12 hours to do, so it was approx. 1400 times faster than a human. The amazing thing is that ENIAC ran at 0.1 Mhz.
Just think now, a 3 Ghz machine is 30,000 times faster than the first computer. Amazing how far we've come in 40 years.
Actually, I'm very much reminded of John Nash's theory, which ws elegantly described in A Beautiful Mind. If every does what's best for himself, everybody blocks each other, as we see here with what happens when each client tries to maximize his or her own search requeries. What must happen is that everybody on the network must do what's best for him AND for the network, in this case backing off from queries, not auto-promoting to supernodes, etc.
In this case the moral man sees nothing wrong with distributing information or with receiving information. The legal man sees that distributing the information in this manner would be illegal in the U.S., who knows in Iran.
HUH?? How about this: In this case the moral man sees nothing wrong with distributing a few bullets forcefully into another's body. The legal man sees that distributing bullets in this matter would be illegal in the U.S., who knows in Iran.
Um, Hello? By your definition, Moral == Blind. Using evolution (and a very poor example, no less) does not make an act moral. Killing and elderly person and eating them makes good evolutionary sense, but I don't think any moral men would consider that moral.
what else were you planning on giving her... rope, and the Worst Case Scenario handbooks? Give her things that she will really make use of and appreciate.
Probably the best thing that you can give her is a good pillow and a foam eggcrate for the mattress. Dorm beds are killer (more plastic than bed) and it can be very hard to fall asleep with them. This is something that will help her *every* single night, as opposed to a lock-pick set which might help once a year, if that. (once she has it, will she even figure out how to use it?)
Also, if you must give her a gadget or something, give her something like a lava lamp -- another cool thing that she can appreciate on a regular basis.
Re:One that we did - killing long distance nighty
on
Debug your Code, or Else!
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
We had a similar situation where we accidentally ddos'd our university's engineering school. We were working on a file-sharing service that had over 600 people sharing at any one time. The lead programmer made a change to how the clients and main server pinged each other in order to make it more compatible with firewalls. The way he did it was that the client would send out a ping, the server would catch it, and throw it back, and so on. The problem was that he forgot to set a delay for this.
One night our system vanished from the web. Our clients couldn't connect, the website was gone, and we couldn't ssh in. Later on we found out what happened. As more and more clients auto-updated to the new version they began pinging the server to alert it to its presence. It in turn responded, and soon it was doing nothing but sending and receiving pings. To over 700 computers. As fast as it could.
Somewhere between 700-800 clients the router died, bringing with it the internet connection to the entire engineering school. Somehow we were never disciplined and everything was brought back online within the next day or so. Now that's something to put on a resume: Effectively launched a 700+ system DDoS on own university. Now remember kids, make sure you trust the company that makes your P2P software!
It might be smart to exempt people who are moderating from the page count, for the duration of their moderator status.... People won't want to have to root through the comments to find the good and the bad if they know that each one is reducing their page count. And hey, it lasts for only three days, so it's not that much... if it becomes a problem, reduce it to 1 or 2 days.. it's sort of like giving something back to the reader for taking the time to weed out the comments. Just a thought...
This is a snippet from a user's post under today's story about the hearings over the future of IP:
Whens it going to end? Capitalism is fine, but too much of anything is bad. When will people figure out, too much capitalism, too much competition, and not enough sharing is bad? Yes moderate competition fuels innovation, too much competition however makes the enviornment so competitive that no one can innovate.
Imagine the innovation and the new technologies we'd have, if third world countries had access to all the information in the world, and any kid rich or poor could be the next einstien or bill gates, any living person, any of the 6 billion people could come out with an idea, which changes the world and shares the idea for free.
So now who are we (Slashdot) gonna support in this issue? A patent which is always bad (EVIL! EVIL!) or are we going to side with Microsoft's right to innovate, as expressed (indirectly) by the quote above? Is it possible that all pantents aren't bad? Or is it possible that not everything Microsoft does is bad? Hmm.....
Would anybody be calling the USPS biased or giving in to corporations if suddenly they started handing out free RedHat cds and avertising their service plan? I don't think so. That would just be considered "advertising" not "creating a dangerous link between corporation and state" as many people have written. *sigh*
Just because they're connected with the government and has special privileges doesn't mean that they're not allowed to deal with private corporations. The fact that the USPS is currently in a seven year partnership with Federal Express (a corporation) apparently doesn't seem to matter to you.
Whether or not it's wise for them to do this with MS is another issue, but it is most certainly within their jurisdiction to do so.
And in other news, the Associated Press is reporting that Linus Torvalds has sent out a memo to the core Linux development team telling them to make stability their "highest priority". In his memo he called this strategy "Trustworthy Computing", saying that it should not be the case that people have to use previous versions of the OS in order to find a stable working environment.
I think this idea is simply brilliant and one of the best uses for an internet appliance that I've ever heard. Imagine if you had one machine that was totally dedicated to your audio/visual needs (ok, not your high end, rendering Toy Story 3 needs, but a/v all the same) that had a highspeed internet connection, solely for downloading content. How cool would this be: want an mp3? Download it in less than a minute. Want a music video? Download that in less than 3. I cannot tell you the amount of effort that goes into finding all of the older, more obscure music videos that were released before computers got their tv/video cards. Imagine all of this content, plus a dvd and maybe email on a simple dedicated machine? It'd be the new entertainment center... and you wouldn't have to buy an entire cd, you could finally only get the music you want! Sure, let them put in all the content-protection they want. As long as I can access whatever I want, whenever I want, I don't need an actual copy of the music. This wouldn't replace a computer, but would handle all of the entertainment aspects of it. Make it a reasonable price with a flat screen and this is a surefire seller.
A light pulse that is brought to a standstill is not destroyed. The atoms 'remember' it, so the pulse can be regenerated by changing the intensity of the coupling laser to allow the atoms to re-emit photons - the particles of which light is composed.
This sounds like it came straight out of the a Star Wars technical manual! Maybe when Star Wars Ep III comes out, Lucas will be able make his billions by packaging a tiny lightsaber in every happy meal.
Unbelievable! Anybody notice how clear, concise and FUD free this post by michael was? It seems only yesterday that we had a full page rant by michael himself that deplored Microsoft for not revealing a GAPING secutiry hole until recently.
Microsoft has known about it since November 19; they refuse to provide any information about when a patch might be made available, if ever.
Now lets see... "ISS discovered the loophole in October" Hmm.... that's a whole month longer than Mircosoft held out...
Netscape and most other browsers have no problem with this.
This is a *serious* security hole, and it's all sun's fault. Macintosh, Windows and most other operating systems don't have a problem with this.
If you routinely browse with Internet Explorer or read mail with Outlook, keep in mind that any web page you visit or any email you open can take over your computer, steal sensitive files, destroy your machine, anything.
If you routinely use Solaris or AIX to login and do work, keep in mind that anybody can take over your computer, steal sensitive files, destroy your machine, anything.
Happy browsing!
Congrats! You've got Gaping Security Hole!
Hmm.. maybe we can do with a little more balanced reporting here on bash-Microdot.org
Slashdot Mirror
Both the Nature article and the posting here on /. are exceedingly misleading (I don't blame the poster... he/she just reported what the Nature article said)
All that the two articles *may* have found is the location of a part of VISUAL working memory. This would be the area that tracks objects through space and binds features that are processed seperately by the visual system (say color and form) into the same object. This is NOT the seat of all intelligence.
There are many different aspects to working memory: people have hypothesized that there is a phonological working memory, one involved in the spelling process, one involved in computing things like syntactic relations, etc. And yes, there is probably such a thing as a general-purpose working memory. All they may have found is the location of the visual-spatial component of working memory. This is a far cry from finding anything that limits one's intelligence, unless you define intelligence as "visual-spatial ability".
In fact, it is quite wrong to even suggest that the visual-spatial working memory is somehow related to intelligence. There are many instances of people with working memory deficits who are able to function quite normally in other domains.
For the sake of brevity I won't go into the finer about the studies themselves (one of the studies used the ERP recording technique, which is *awful* at localization) because the main point is that in and of themselves the studies are fine. It's this conclusion that they've somehow found "the RAM" or the thing that would limit intelligence that's exceedingly problematic.
I'd be interested in seeing where you found this information about the Telegraph receiving false information (not the Christian Science Monitor) I would find it highly strange that it got it's information from some random "source" as it clearly reported to be getting its information from the Iraqi Coalition Government itself.
"However, the tantalising detail provided in the intelligence document uncovered by Iraq's interim government suggests that Atta's involvement with Iraqi intelligence may well have been far deeper than has hitherto been acknowledged."
In addition, as of today, December 14, the Telegraph is still publishing new articles about the Atta/Nidal/Baghdad link, as seen here.
Sounds to me like you're making up stories.
Interesting that people here call it outrageous when the RIAA sues a grandmother for downloading music (she couldn't possibly be downloading music), but call for blood when a grandmother is a spammer.
Frivolous lawsuits are bad, but on the other hand, anybody is capable of anything
You're Wrong. The Telegraph published a report this week that the Iraqi Coalition government has found documents showing that Mohammed Atta was trained by the Palestinian Terrorist Abu Nidal in Baghdad shortly before the attacks on New York and Washington.
/ ne ws/2003/12/14/wterr14.xml&sSheet=/portal/2003/12/1 4/ixportaltop.html
Details of Atta's visit to the Iraqi capital in the summer of 2001, just weeks before he launched the most devastating terrorist attack in US history, are contained in a top secret memo written to Saddam Hussein, the then Iraqi president, by Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, the former head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.
The handwritten memo, a copy of which has been obtained exclusively by the Telegraph, is dated July 1, 2001 and provides a short resume of a three-day "work programme" Atta had undertaken at Abu Nidal's base in Baghdad.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=
These documents are proof that Iraq and Saddam was tied to 9/11. Capturing Saddam is a wonderful victory on its own merits, but since you need proof connecting him with 9/11, here it is.
I was under the impression that flashing text quickly so that your eye doesn't notice it was just another form of subliminal messaging...
I was also under the impression that these types of subliminal messages don't work...
So can anyone sort this out? I must be confused about something.
Sure. What we have here in the glasses is exactly as you stated -- a prime. The idea behind priming is that if you flash a semantically related word right before certain kinds of decisions, the semantic links are strengthened, or "primed" so you are slightly more likely and slightly quicker to respond with a particular response.
If I recall correctly, 180 ms is not fast enough to be undetectable. It is, however, fast enough so that your eye won't be able to saccade over to it before it disappears. (A saccade takes approximately 200ms) This means that for all intents and purposes, you probably won't be fully aware of what it says, though you might be aware that something was flashed, if you were paying attention.
So the idea (as I understand it) is that if the glasses flash a person's name very briefly, you'll be more likely to respond with that name if you are put in a situation where you have to recall it, as the links to it have been strengthened.
As for your question about subliminal messages, I think what you're referring to is the infamous idea that if you flicker pictures of Coca Cola between the frames of a movie, people are more likely to go buy a coke. Well, it's true that this kind of strategy doesn't work -- there's a huge difference between having Coke semantically primed and carrying out the complex behavior of buying a coke (you have the time delay, first of all, which diminishes the activation, the planning required to buy a coke, etc...)
The priming effect is real, but very small, usually only detectable in terms of milliseconds or trends. All in all, recall is the type of task that priming can help in, so this may be very useful. But displaying "Buy Coke" or "kill your boss" really isn't going to do anything at all.
Mod the parent up. In this case, it is definitely the marketing companies that are the suckers. Let me first preface this by saying (in concordance with the parent) that fMRI is a very valuable research and diagnostic tool. It is limited, but when used in correctly designed experiments backed by sound interpretation, it can be very useful.
The biggest flaw with trying to use fMRI to tailor marketing is that seeing activity in a particular area of the brain that happens to be associated with function X DOES NOT mean that X is occuring when the person sees your product. Take, for instance, the example in the article where activation was seen in the fusiform area. While it is entirely true that that area is essential for the recognition of faces, this does not mean subjects were seeing faces in the cars. The fusiform area is involved in any kind of higher-order spatial organization, for instance grouping notes on a page, viewing disparate lines as a whole, etc. While it is appropriate to conclude that the subjects were integrating the many visual elements into larger perceptual wholes, it is not appropriate to assume that they saw the cars as faces, and certainly not to then conclude that they will then be more likely to buy the cars. If you want to test vehicle brand recognition, then you need to test that explicitly, not just in some simple presentation paradigm.
The following quote is completely misleading: "In contrast, M.R.I. scanning offers the promise of concrete facts -- an unbiased glimpse at a consumer's mind in action. To an M.R.I. machine, you cannot misrepresent your responses. Your medial prefrontal cortex will start firing when you see something you adore, even if you claim not to like it. ''Let's say I show you Playboy,'' Kilts says, ''and you go, 'Oh, no, no, no!' Really? We could tell you actually like it.''"
First of all, fMRI is entirely reliant upon interpretation, so there are no "unbiased" "concrete facts". The activation is concrete, but trying to assign meaning to that activation is extremely tricky. Secondly, regarding secret lusts for Playboy, you may see activation in areas that typically indicate arousal, but that does not mean that the person actually likes it or will buy it. There are a million miles from the activity of non-concious processes of the brain and actual conscious behavior. If the "social image" centers light up with Coke and not Sprite (remember, image is nothing, thirst is everything (tm)) what does that show? I still might like Coke over Sprite! *sigh* Unfortunately, cognitive neuroscience is now being dragged through the mud of popular psychology.
Ahhh, thanks!!
Apart from some minor annoyances, I think iTunes works really really well. The only major feature I'd like to see is the ability to minimize it so only the icon in the systray remains visible. I like to listen to music when I'm working and if I have a lot of programs open, I don't my music program taking up space in the taskbar.
Oh, it would also be nice to be able to remove cover art once you've added it. The way it is now, if you make a mistake, you're stuck with the wrong cover art.
In contrast to this, the Chief of Information Security at my university told the tale of how one year a student sent a threatening email to the president of the US via an another student's email account that was left open. Needless to say the Secret Service guys descended at the university. He never told how, but the folks at the university's information security department somehow managed to track down the real sender. Thank goodness for dedicated information security peoples!
If anybody is interested in finding out more about these spambot "turing tests", check out http://www.captcha.net/.
I seem to remember one of their earlier tests involved determining which word didn't belong in a particular phrase. They would give you something like "The girl went to the mall to buy a giraffe" and the answer would be "giraffe". This sort of test could be given either visually or aurally, and would require a lot of NLP resources to crack (would have to determine part of speech and some amount of the syntactic structure). This kind of system might be the answer.. theoretically it would be accessible to all english speakers, blind or deaf.
http://www.town.nantucket.ma.us/contact.htm
You really don't have to worry. As is pointed out in this thread and elsewhere, the level of information that can be gained from fMRI as to specific responses is very small. It's an excellent technique, but all it does is show activation. Show a complicated visual scene and you will get activation in the visual centers. You might even be able to detect differences in activation depending on the type of scene, but that's about it. You can't play somebody one jingle and tell that they like it better than another, or that one will get you to buy the product more than the other. Additionally, experiments with fMRI (as in all science experiments) need to be factored down so you can test one variable at a time. Because of this, the information you get from the experiment will necessarily be very simple, somehting along the lines of "people pay more attention to a visual scene when there is music present" or "people react more strongly to advertisements with people in them than without". All of this stuff could be determined through common sense and through psychological testing, or from what we already know from fMRI.
Here's another way to think about it. fMRI measures oxegnation and blood flow, with the idea that when the brain is performing a certain task (say processing a sentence) it will have to work harder and so the relavent brain center has higher energy demands. This is akin to looking at a motherboard through infra-red and discovering that the math-coprocessor is hotter than normal, and figuring that some something heavily mathematical is being processed. But notice however, that if you want to know something more about the specific complexity of the problem that's being processed, you have to have some outside knowledge of the theory behind it, say Big-O. This is the same thing for brain events. You can learn a lot about the brain by studying its reaction to a stimulus, but in order to understand more sophisticated things about the stimulus, you need a theory, say something that psychology could give you.
I know this is Offtopic, but just thought this would be interesting to think about. ENIAC, the first general purpose digital computer was used in part to calculate artillary arc tables. ENIAC could do in 30 seconds what it took a human 12 hours to do, so it was approx. 1400 times faster than a human. The amazing thing is that ENIAC ran at 0.1 Mhz.
Just think now, a 3 Ghz machine is 30,000 times faster than the first computer. Amazing how far we've come in 40 years.
Actually, I'm very much reminded of John Nash's theory, which ws elegantly described in A Beautiful Mind. If every does what's best for himself, everybody blocks each other, as we see here with what happens when each client tries to maximize his or her own search requeries. What must happen is that everybody on the network must do what's best for him AND for the network, in this case backing off from queries, not auto-promoting to supernodes, etc.
In this case the moral man sees nothing wrong with distributing information or with receiving information. The legal man sees that distributing the information in this manner would be illegal in the U.S., who knows in Iran.
HUH?? How about this: In this case the moral man sees nothing wrong with distributing a few bullets forcefully into another's body. The legal man sees that distributing bullets in this matter would be illegal in the U.S., who knows in Iran.
Um, Hello? By your definition, Moral == Blind. Using evolution (and a very poor example, no less) does not make an act moral. Killing and elderly person and eating them makes good evolutionary sense, but I don't think any moral men would consider that moral.
what else were you planning on giving her... rope, and the Worst Case Scenario handbooks? Give her things that she will really make use of and appreciate.
Probably the best thing that you can give her is a good pillow and a foam eggcrate for the mattress. Dorm beds are killer (more plastic than bed) and it can be very hard to fall asleep with them. This is something that will help her *every* single night, as opposed to a lock-pick set which might help once a year, if that. (once she has it, will she even figure out how to use it?)
Also, if you must give her a gadget or something, give her something like a lava lamp -- another cool thing that she can appreciate on a regular basis.
One night our system vanished from the web. Our clients couldn't connect, the website was gone, and we couldn't ssh in. Later on we found out what happened. As more and more clients auto-updated to the new version they began pinging the server to alert it to its presence. It in turn responded, and soon it was doing nothing but sending and receiving pings. To over 700 computers. As fast as it could.
Somewhere between 700-800 clients the router died, bringing with it the internet connection to the entire engineering school. Somehow we were never disciplined and everything was brought back online within the next day or so. Now that's something to put on a resume: Effectively launched a 700+ system DDoS on own university. Now remember kids, make sure you trust the company that makes your P2P software!
It might be smart to exempt people who are moderating from the page count, for the duration of their moderator status.... People won't want to have to root through the comments to find the good and the bad if they know that each one is reducing their page count. And hey, it lasts for only three days, so it's not that much... if it becomes a problem, reduce it to 1 or 2 days.. it's sort of like giving something back to the reader for taking the time to weed out the comments. Just a thought...
Whens it going to end? Capitalism is fine, but too much of anything is bad. When will people figure out, too much capitalism, too much competition, and not enough sharing is bad? Yes moderate competition fuels innovation, too much competition however makes the enviornment so competitive that no one can innovate.
Imagine the innovation and the new technologies we'd have, if third world countries had access to all the information in the world, and any kid rich or poor could be the next einstien or bill gates, any living person, any of the 6 billion people could come out with an idea, which changes the world and shares the idea for free.
So now who are we (Slashdot) gonna support in this issue? A patent which is always bad (EVIL! EVIL!) or are we going to side with Microsoft's right to innovate, as expressed (indirectly) by the quote above? Is it possible that all pantents aren't bad? Or is it possible that not everything Microsoft does is bad? Hmm.....
Would anybody be calling the USPS biased or giving in to corporations if suddenly they started handing out free RedHat cds and avertising their service plan? I don't think so. That would just be considered "advertising" not "creating a dangerous link between corporation and state" as many people have written. *sigh*
Whether or not it's wise for them to do this with MS is another issue, but it is most certainly within their jurisdiction to do so.
And in other news, the Associated Press is reporting that Linus Torvalds has sent out a memo to the core Linux development team telling them to make stability their "highest priority". In his memo he called this strategy "Trustworthy Computing", saying that it should not be the case that people have to use previous versions of the OS in order to find a stable working environment.
I think this idea is simply brilliant and one of the best uses for an internet appliance that I've ever heard. Imagine if you had one machine that was totally dedicated to your audio/visual needs (ok, not your high end, rendering Toy Story 3 needs, but a/v all the same) that had a highspeed internet connection, solely for downloading content. How cool would this be: want an mp3? Download it in less than a minute. Want a music video? Download that in less than 3. I cannot tell you the amount of effort that goes into finding all of the older, more obscure music videos that were released before computers got their tv/video cards. Imagine all of this content, plus a dvd and maybe email on a simple dedicated machine? It'd be the new entertainment center... and you wouldn't have to buy an entire cd, you could finally only get the music you want! Sure, let them put in all the content-protection they want. As long as I can access whatever I want, whenever I want, I don't need an actual copy of the music. This wouldn't replace a computer, but would handle all of the entertainment aspects of it. Make it a reasonable price with a flat screen and this is a surefire seller.
A light pulse that is brought to a standstill is not destroyed. The atoms 'remember' it, so the pulse can be regenerated by changing the intensity of the coupling laser to allow the atoms to re-emit photons - the particles of which light is composed.
This sounds like it came straight out of the a Star Wars technical manual! Maybe when Star Wars Ep III comes out, Lucas will be able make his billions by packaging a tiny lightsaber in every happy meal.
Unbelievable! Anybody notice how clear, concise and FUD free this post by michael was? It seems only yesterday that we had a full page rant by michael himself that deplored Microsoft for not revealing a GAPING secutiry hole until recently.
Microsoft has known about it since November 19; they refuse to provide any information about when a patch might be made available, if ever.
Now lets see... "ISS discovered the loophole in October" Hmm.... that's a whole month longer than Mircosoft held out...
Netscape and most other browsers have no problem with this.
This is a *serious* security hole, and it's all sun's fault. Macintosh, Windows and most other operating systems don't have a problem with this.
If you routinely browse with Internet Explorer or read mail with Outlook, keep in mind that any web page you visit or any email you open can take over your computer, steal sensitive files, destroy your machine, anything.
If you routinely use Solaris or AIX to login and do work, keep in mind that anybody can take over your computer, steal sensitive files, destroy your machine, anything.
Happy browsing!
Congrats! You've got Gaping Security Hole!
Hmm.. maybe we can do with a little more balanced reporting here on bash-Microdot.org