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if you don't think a MAC address can't be linked to a specific model and the credit card used to buy it, think again

MAC addresses are visible only to the router you're connected to. They're not used by the IP protocol, but only by the underlying transport protocol, which is used only for the first hop. So, no, MAC addresses can't be used to identify you unless (a) the entity trying to spy on you is on the local network you're connected to, (b) some application-level protocol you use decides to send your MAC address, or (c) you're using IPv6 and your network stack decides to use your MAC address as the lower 48 bits of your IP address (which very early IPv6 stacks did, until it was pointed out that it's very bad for privacy).

Yes, see http://loebnerprize15.abdn.ac.uk for a judge conversing with a human and bot at the same time.

If anyone wants to see things as they unfolded, the webcast is available at http://loebnerprize15.abdn.ac.uk.

as in, this was on mainstream two days ago.

http://www.abdn.ac.uk/news/718... & http://www.abdn.ac.uk/oceanlab... (original research)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/scie...

and a seriously poor writeup from the Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

as in, this was on mainstream two days ago.

http://www.abdn.ac.uk/news/718... & http://www.abdn.ac.uk/oceanlab... (original research)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/scie...

and a seriously poor writeup from the Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

This isn't a national thing, it's a side-effect caused by an overall rising standard of living within any given culture.

Actually in the UK (and I expect other countries) the poorer members of society are the fatter ones (citation). So the evidence collected thus far completely contradicts your comment. It may well be the case that as a culture (or country) itself raises its standards of living the population as a whole get fatter - but that wasn't your observation.

Statistically, what percentage of impacts are from objects originating in the outer solar system? Is that even possible to determine?

We don't know, and it's unlikely to be easy to determine.

When an impactor makes it to the surface at interplanetary speeds (minimum 11km/s, typically more like 25-30km/s), the kinetic energy is sufficiently high that the overwhelming majority of the impactor is vaporized and blown back out of the crater. While this material does fall back to earth, it's very dispersed and extremely metamorphosed. I was out on a field trip last year with John Parnell from Aberdeen to examine a putative impact ejecta sheet from a billion years ago in NW Scotland. Mineralogically, it's not convincing (in hand specimen), but the field relations are quite puzzling, and do fit with John's model that it is an ejecta sheet, and not the (extremely peculiar, and solitary) volcanic deposit that it has been mapped as for the last century and a bit. Out in the field things are not necessarily cut and dried (it is geology, after all).

What would distinguish an outer solar system impactor from an inner solar system impactor? There would be a lot of ices in the outer solar system impactor, but they'd simply disperse in the impact ; there might be an isotopic signature in the oxygen composition (but we'd need a verified outer solar system object to calibrate against). There are likely to be some silicate grains, though they'd probably have been vaporized and re-condensed, or at least melted to glass (and after a billion years, devitrified to clay minerals). But the same is going to be true for most inner solar system impactors too (nickel-iron impactors aren't terribly common).

To be honest, counting the damned things up in the sky is going to be a lot more accurate than counting the broken bits on the ground. Mind you, looking would be more interesting than drilling holes in the ground for oil.

Truth, Lies and Bullshit http://homepages.abdn.ac.uk/ma...

Great essay, but I'm not sure if it's on topic for the discussion.
I couldn't decide whether to moderate it "interesting" or "off-topic," so I'll just post as AC instead.

"In particular, the distinction is being made between lies and bullshit, following the work of Harry Frankfurt. The difference is that someone who tells a lie has access to the truth, whereas the concept of bullshit requires no knowledge of the truth at all. That is, the liar knows that what he says is not true, whereas the bullshitter has no proper knowledge to support the statements he or she is making. We point out that different situations, in multi-agent systems as well as in human society, provide strong individual incentives for bullshit. "

Truth, Lies and Bullshit http://homepages.abdn.ac.uk/ma...

Great essay, but I'm not sure if it's on topic for the discussion.
I couldn't decide whether to moderate it "interesting" or "off-topic," so I'll just post as AC instead.

"In particular, the distinction is being made between lies and bullshit, following the work of Harry Frankfurt. The difference is that someone who tells a lie has access to the truth, whereas the concept of bullshit requires no knowledge of the truth at all. That is, the liar knows that what he says is not true, whereas the bullshitter has no proper knowledge to support the statements he or she is making. We point out that different situations, in multi-agent systems as well as in human society, provide strong individual incentives for bullshit. "

Truth, Lies and Bullshit http://homepages.abdn.ac.uk/ma...

[images] such as the ones generated by MRIs when there is insufficient time to complete a scan.

(my emphasis)

So, you're in one of two situations : you've got an acute problem - suffocation, massive bleeding, something really, really time-critical - and if they don't stop the MRI now and do something else now, then you're dead meat ; or, there has been some mechanical or financial issue with the machinery and someone is trying to save money by not re-doing the scan. In the one case, you've got a choice between a perfect MRI of a corpse, or an imperfect MRI of someone who's alive. In the other case, well ,someone, somewhere is playing with your life for their financial gain. Do you suffer under some sort of capitalist healthcare system there or something equally barbaric? (I am of course writing from a handful of miles away from where MRI was developed, under a socialized healthcare system. I used to ice climb with people who worked on the development.)

I've never heard of a brain tumour where taking an extra hour to get a better scan would be life-critical. An extra week, yes that can be an issue. But an hour ; n/a.

There is way more research being done at Aberdeen University and it just started in October Search for the first ‘man’s best friend’

Lead researcher Dr Neil Vargesson said the fact that thalidomide was taken by mothers-to-be at an early stage in their pregnancy was crucial to the deformities because that is when the limbs of babies are still forming. 'The blood vessels involved in this process, at this stage of pregnancy, are still at an immature stage when they rapidly change and expand to accommodate the outgrowing limb,' she [sic] explained.

'But the antiangiogenic activity of the drug stops the growth of these blood vessels and that results in limb defects. 'Now we understand which property of the drug causes limb defects, it remains possible that we could make a safer form of the drug that has the clinical benefits for sufferers of leprosy but does not cause limb defects.'

Found here, which is reporting this. The mere fact that it has taken 50 years to find out why it caused birth defects, shows that it wasn't a trivial problem that they could have prevented. How many drugs/chemicals/cosmetics are tested on pregnant apes these days ?

The 'C' in NIC stands for 'Controller', not 'Card'.

some people, including 3Com and Cisco, disagree with you.

Learning to accept that You Can Be Wrong is only the easiest step, and the one most easily forgotten.

Here's a simple mathematical test:

Do you believe that addition is commutative? i.e., that 1+2 = 2+1? For any values of 2 and 1? How about (-2) + 1 = 1 + (-2)?
In any circumstances? ALWAYS????

I used to.

And then I was working my way through (no, I have not yet completed it, and I probably need to begin anew at page 1) John Derbyshire's Prime Obsession -- a historical treatment of Riemann's Hypothesis that attempts to educate the non-professional mathematician reader so that they can at least kinda/sorta understand the problem. And then on pages 149-150, he introduces the Gentle Reader to "conditionally convergent" infinite series, which resolve into different results depending on the order the terms are summed! Yes, there have to be some subtractions mixed in with the additions in the infinite series, but I tend to treat subtraction as a flavor of addition (clearly an error, but I still don't see how) and it made me put down the book and walk around and ponder the significance of what I had read (and I found myself returning to those pages repeatedly instead of moving steadily forward).

While I can accept that I was wrong, I still don't understand WHY (and am almost certainly never going to). And if I can be wrong about something as apparently simple as addition -- even when dealing with the realm of the infinite (which is almost certainly wherein the difficulties lie) -- I can be wrong about pretty much anything. And so can You.

When we move from understanding simple mathematical concepts like addition/subtraction to dealing with a Reality that we can grasp only weakly, and can only perceive fragments of (can you see x-rays? feel neutrinos? hear frequencies beyond a narrow range?), it becomes quite impossible to wrap one's mind around even the notion of Absolute Truth. But we seem to be constructed to latch onto simple perceived truths and defend them as if they were the very foundations of our existence -- which in a sense, they are. But that's why being willing to re-invent oneself, casting aside those ideas that have been shown to be different than our notions of them, is so very important.

Proof is a slippery little devil, while Belief is incredibly sticky.

http://www.abdn.ac.uk/ aberdeen uni website

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Aberdee n

Interesting! This page gives an overview on the history of the drug and shows how it was produced by combining the synthesized frog poison Epibatidine with Nicotine, thereby getting rid of the enormous toxicity. It is said that it even "appears to be non-addictive", although nicotine is addictive.

"On June 4, 1844, three fishermen named Jon Brandsson, Sigurdr Islefsson and Ketil Ketilsson made a trip to the Icelandic island of Eldey. They had been hired by a collector named Carl Siemsen who wanted auk specimens. Jon Brandsson found an auk and killed it. Sigurdr Islefsson found another and did the same. Ketil Ketilsson had to return empty handed because his companions had just completed the extinction of the great auk." - http://www.abdn.ac.uk/~nhi708/treasure/auk/index.h tml

No, putting it on the menu did not save it.

Yes, great species do go extinct.

The amount of light generated by the customer should be equal to the amount being generated by the other end, unless you send a significantly disproportionalte number of 1 bits versus 0 bits. See Manchester Encoding.

The money changes hands in exchange for actually routing the data back and forth, not for providing the light. Where the light is concerned, you have a like-for-like (light-for-light?) exchange between two parties with no financial transaction involved. So basically, the companies should simply tell the government that the two parties performed a like-for-like exchange of equivalent amounts of light, and that no additional money changed hands as a result of any inequality in the number of zero (high) bits. Therefore, since 15% of zero is zero, no tax is owed. Problem solved.

http://www.abdn.ac.uk/physics/case/trans.htm "The attractive system uses conventional electromagnets mounted at the ends of a pair of structures under the train."

According to http://erg.abdn.ac.uk/research/future-net/digital- video/dvb-trans.html each DVB multiplex runs at 24Mb/s.

So, storing one multiplex for a month needs
(24/8)*60*60*24*31 Mbytes of storage = 8 Terra Bytes

So 8TB per multiplex per month just about doable at the state of the art, but not very likely.

I haven't checked how many muxes in use for different channels. I think it's about 3, so say 24TB all in. That's a lot of disks!

It's all transparent to the switch. If it's a L2 switch it doesn't care what IP (or IPX, AppleTalk, etc) address is on a port, just which physical MAC (Ethernet) addresses are on the port. If it's L3 it will additionally associate one or IP addresses directly with a port. If switches had problems with multiple IPs/MACs sitting on a port then you couldn't build any topology with multiple switches. For more info:

http://www.itmweb.com/essay522.htm

http://www.erg.abdn.ac.uk/users/gorry/course/lan-p ages/switch.html

If you're near a University there's probably a wealth of literature at the library in the CS/CE/EE section on network topology and switching technologies.

Derek

Nope, I'm right. (In fact, I've written a program implementing the Miller-Rabin test myself.)

If you read the Wikipedia article, you'll see:

It can be shown that there always exists a strong witness for any odd composite n, and that at least 3/4 of the values for a are strong witnesses for the compositeness of n.

Also Mathworld says:

If N multiple independent tests are performed on a composite number, then the probability that it passes each test is 1/4^N or less.

And according to this page:

Choose k independent integers a1,...ak which 1 < ar < n - 1. Then if (odd) n passes the Rabin-Miller test for each base ar, the probability that n is composite is no more than 1/4^k.

The article was referring to Macintosh (or Mac) issues, and I'm wondering why you're capitalizing the word.

You can combine both. This is from the uni I attend. As far as I know there is a real shortage and therefore a demand for people who have a knowledge of both medicine and Computing Science. Could be the thing for you

Oh, that's great if everyone has just one computer. I currently use 5 IPs, plus 1 for my phone, and share IPs on 2 routers. Pretty soon, they'll require you to adopt some mammal for every IP you use. Sure, the lucky early-adopters will scramble to adopt all of the Pymgy Shrews, but the late ones will get stuck with odd-toed Tapirs

It doesn't exactly have to be measured. They just do that to check it's still right. Go read about the history of the Systeme International the NIST site and the definition of a kilogram at the same place

But essentially, its part of a way of ensuring that the measuring units Scientists use around the world are the same, not slightly different.

For instance, anyone around the world can reproduce (in a well equipped lab anyway) the definition for time (The second is the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom).

There are only 7 base SI units (meter, kilogram, second, ampere, kelvin, and candela) from which many more units are derived. Hence, if kilo is out/changing many of these are changing too.

and why should I care if it detoritates?

Presuming you're American, you would use feet, pounds, find metric too complicated, etc, etc - so probably wont care if it does.

Ethernet must be at the top if the list. The Aloha based system was not supposed to scale.

Central park is pretty isolated from the outside world - for a centipede.

Could this new species perhaps evolved there from a known centipede species?

A new species of mosquito evolved in the London underground, for example.

Frankly, all that i can do is offer my best jacques cousteau impression, and hope that they don't evolve further.

NASA

Another Squid Site

Discovery Channel and the Giant Squid

Weird Squids In Action (that one's just fun for the cool giant squid graphics- how would YOU have done it?)

A A 1996 article regarding giant squid discovery>

A 2002 discovery of a MUCH smaller 'giant' squid

and of course, proof that there's a convention group for everything.

And if anybody wants to know how i happen to know any of this, let's just say that i dated a marine biologist. It won't be true, but it would make my mum happy....

I remember writing scripts for SAS, the stat package. To get your data read in you wrote "cards;"

The circuit simulator SPICE shares this legacy.

You know, that might actually work...if the MAC address were stored in the IP packet.

Sheesh, I've seen MAC filtering mentioned 5 times already on this article. Maybe everyone should take a look at The anatomy of an IP packet.

It's not me who's saying that, that's just how things are, you can seet it here
You can also find good stuff about it at google.

I think someone ages ago showed me a screenshot of Microsofts next generation desktop and this was what they were doing, or seemed to be doing (it also involved a lot more HTML crap too IIRC)

Okay, not very impressive, I just wanted to show off that screenshot :)

I think someone ages ago showed me a screenshot of Microsofts next generation desktop and this was what they were doing, or seemed to be doing (it also involved a lot more HTML crap too IIRC)

Okay, not very impressive, I just wanted to show off that screenshot :)

I think someone ages ago showed me a screenshot of Microsofts next generation desktop and this was what they were doing, or seemed to be doing (it also involved a lot more HTML crap too IIRC)

Okay, not very impressive, I just wanted to show off that screenshot :)

Have you ever read Kaczynski's work? Yeah I know he was a psycho killer, but his manifesto is very well written and thought provoking. I hate to admit this but there is a lot of truth in it.