chkn0 - Slashdot User

Comment Godwin's Law for Networks (Score 2, Insightful) 213

by chkn0 on Saturday February 28, 2009 @06:07PM (#27025439) Attached to: Canadian ISPs Speak Out Against Net Neutrality

Hello, the Internet. I would like to propose Godwin's Law for Networks: In any discussion on network policy, such as net neutrality, traffic shaping, quality of service, protocol-based filtering, etc., if you introduce a claim that involves child pornography, you lose the argument.

The child pornography community will use whatever technology is available for information transfer, just like the rest of us. Any policy short of inspection of every document that passes through the network and forbidding any opaque encoding (which includes forbidding anything novel and forbidding all encryption), is irrelevant to the issue of child pornography.

The child pornography issue is being used for its shock value. It's as if "child pornography" is a magic phrase that is expected to turn people's brains off and prevent them from critically examining the surrounding proposal. We cannot allow this kind of irresponsible irrational advocacy to dominate our public discussion.

Fight sound bites with sound bites: "Godwin's Law for Networks".

Comment Globulation (Score 1) 634

by chkn0 on Tuesday December 16, 2008 @05:54PM (#26138133) Attached to: Great Games To Put On a Free PC?

Globulation

Submission + - Decoding the Brain's Network of Neurons

Submitted by

Reservoir Hill

on Monday November 19, 2007 @12:46PM

Reservoir Hill writes: "New technologies that allow scientists to trace the fine wiring of the brain more accurately could soon generate a complete wiring diagram — including every tiny fiber and miniscule connection — of a piece of brain. "The brain is essentially a computer that wires itself up during development and can rewire itself," says Sebastian Seung, a computational neuroscientist at MIT. "If we have a wiring diagram of the brain, we might be able to understand how it works." With an estimated 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses in the human brain, creating an all-encompassing map of even a small chunk is a daunting task. Winfried Denk, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany, has developed a new technique to make more fine-scaled wiring maps using electron microscopy. Starting with a small block of brain tissue, the researchers bounce electrons off the top of the block to generate a cross-sectional picture of the nerve fibers in that slice. They then take a very thin — 30-nanometer — slice off the top of the block and repeat the process going through slice by slice to trace the path of each nerve fiber. "Repeat this [process] thousands of times, and you can make your way through maybe the whole fly brain," says Denk. To speed the process, the researchers train an artificial neural network to emulate the human tracing process. To date, they've been able to speed the process about one hundred- to one thousand-fold."

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