There has been research, lots of it, and conferences and RFCs and discussion and development and testing and everything else and it led to IPv6. You seem to suggest that someone is going to come up with a magic 'new' network protocol from out of their arse, which seems unlikely.
Nobody wants IPv6 because for the most part IPv4 works for them. When that stops happening there will be a shift towards IPv6 (hopefully, I can imagine there will be some horrible bodged setups that sort of work, but not on tuesdays if it's raining before then). The other issue is that people are afraid of having to remember longer numbers.
But wouldn't you be better off assigning a fraction of the years marks (10% - 30%) to tests taken during the term and the remainder on an end of term exam? Thus the students have some motivation to study for the tests, and rather than failure being a crushing blow it is a warning that they'd better get their act together for the end of term exams.
Alternatively use coursework: applying the concepts that a course covers surely improves understanding and retention of those concepts? It also helps teach some time management skills, as well as providing a way for those who aren't as hot on exams to show their capabilities.
With both methods progress can be monitored so that students who are struggling can be helped before they get a final damning grade.
As you said, there are plenty of people who can do the work but don't think: When I started my degree there were plenty of people who were much better than I was at remembering all the pointless details that were required to pass uncreative exams. When the course actually started to require applied knowledge and understanding of principles a lot of these people started struggling. If people are copying then try and give each person a reasonably unique assignment at school we had things like:
- Essays from a predetermined list based on course text for the year or a student could suggest their own.
- Science experiments based on something studied during the year (effect of heat on enzyme reaction rates, that sort of thing)
The great thing about this approach is that you can copy stuff, but you have to rewrite it and apply it uniquely to your particular assignment, which requires to some extent that you understand what you are writing. Every coursework in science is going to have some boilerplate text about doing a fair test, but detailing how you are are going to make your test a fair test ensures that you understand the principle behind it. Unless you have people who are actually doing the work for them it's pretty solid, their friends can help them out by helping them understand the problem rather than solving it for them.
The Erbium Doped Fibre Amplifier was invented at Southampton University in the UK. Due to issues getting the patent, they have lost quite a serious amount of cash:
These guys and their department (although i'm fairly sure they aren't short of cash) would probably have done a lot of good things with the royalties that they should have received.
Which seems to be a more modern phenomena. I've seen some of the old patents from BBC Research they were written as clearly as possible and with all relevant detail. They were apparently told to do this so that if a case came to court it would be easy to explain the content to a jury, who are unlikely to be technically minded.
Thank god we have lawyers these days who can translate all the obfuscation for us, and hence patents can be completely unreadable.
I was always led to believe that you don't look at Intel/AMD or anyone of that ilk for the latest semiconductor technology. You look at people like Samsung who make DRAM. Since it is simpler and there is more of it manufactured, it is used to test and prove new processes long before something with the complexity of an x86 processor it made.
There are a huge number of companies out there that are not floated on the stock markets, and are privately owned by one or more people. These people are usually the founders and head honchos of that organisation. It is for these people that honesty and integrity is paramount since they have a stronger attachment to the company, and they have some of their own personal reputation staked in it.
Some people build their businesses through hard work and immense sacrifice, and there are probably a lot more smaller businesses like this than there are large corporate entities.
In this case, much as it pains me, it has nothing to do with windows, and everything to do with you getting the wrong tool for the job. You have a double garage and two cars, but you can't drive them both.
I on the other hand have friends I like to let use my spare car: Things like VHDL Simulators and FPGA synthesis tools, that will gladly consume a core and several gigs of memory for a few hours. On a single core machine you might as well go to sleep because the system will be next to unresponsive while it's processing that kind of load (well windows systems, in my experience linux and unix systems maintain an impressive level of responsiveness even when they are being hammered). The core2duo in my machine at the moment means I can carry on using my machine and do the heavy processing (or do two lots of heavy processing and go to sleep).
For me it's more efficient and convenient than having two PCs, and not as expensive. Which seems like a good solution. At the end of the day it sounds like you don't have any application that will make use of your extra cores.
I use Ubuntu at home and I'm afraid the same thing applies: Unless you have applications that are designed for parallel processing, or you actually want to do more than one thing at the same time, then you won't see the second core get used. VMware won't magically parallelise your code, so unless you are running two instances that are doing things at the same time you won't see both cores get used.
That's just the way things are: there aren't too many applications that are easily parallelisable that haven't already been parallelised.
My point was that the cameras do nothing to deter crime - in this specific case drug dealing which was the reason for the camera to be put up - but that they simply move it, whether that crime be drug dealing (the law says it's a crime, whether I agree with that or not is irrelevant in this context) or vandalism or any of the other things you mention. You won't get mugged on that footpath either, you will get mugged around the corner where the camera doesn't point. Which brings me back to the point I was making: Unless you surveil everything everywhere you can't prevent street crime simply with cameras.
There's cameras on the footpath that runs past then end of the row of houses where I live, probably due to the amount of drug dealing that used to go on there. Handily they put up a camera so now the drug dealing goes on outside the front of the house, or round another corner - all out of view of the cameras. Unless you surveil everyone, everywhere it ain't going to work, it will just push street crime into slightly shadier corners.
When there's actually a bunch of guys with tanks and guns waiting to land on your shores and occupy your lands then you've got a war that requires serious changes to laws and rights. When a few people want to blow some stuff up your in the situation that has occurred in many countries in the rest of the world since Guy Fawkes' time and earlier.
You will _never_ have a world leading democracy that doesn't inspire hatred in the hearts of those that can't accept, understand or tolerate your freedoms. What you propose is to give up those freedoms to destroy them, when all you will achieve is to become like them.
I concur. I got stung a couple of times as a student. Go past your overdraft limit and all your payments stop. Get charged for unauthorised overdraft , £35. Direct debit can't be paid £35. And just to ice the cake, the next time you put some money in your account they try and take the fees. Of course they don't check if you actually have enough to pay the fees so you go past your overdraft limit and get charged another fee. It's a real vicious cycle.
I found that going to the bank and calling them a bunch of bastards worked and that there was no way I was paying the extra charges because _they_ decided to charge me when they knew full well the money wasn't there usually got most of them removed. Things like the direct debit charge though - it costs them _nothing_ to process that. They send a message back to the company expecting payment that the amount isn't available and that's it. The creditor (e.g. phone company) then sends you a letter saying they still need payment. How that costs £35 is beyond me.
Also, I can't remember exactly off the top of my head, but there is some misleading stuff being bandied around by the banks re. this High Court case. It only applies to certain kinds of charges (I think being charged for going overdrawn when a free overdraft or larger limit would have been freely available) not many of the other charges that are unfair. Of course the banks are refusing to refund _all_ charges because of the case, even if they are not part of it.
Exercise releases endorphins - opiates that are more powerful than morphine, which is what people get addicted to. My guess would be that you may become psychologically addicted to the buzz of exercising, but you can also become physically addicted to the endorphins that exercise releases. IANAD but I'd imagine the difference is that psychological addiction leads to a craving whereas physical addiction will have actual withdrawal symptoms.
Heroin and other opiates are so effective because they operate on the same pathways as endorphins. They also start to replace them: your body produces less endorphins because of the heroin, hence why heroin withdrawal is painful.
All encryption can be broken. The solution then, is to ensure that the encryption cannot be broken within a useful timeframe. I really don't care if you manage to decrypt my credit card number if the card has already expired. If I'm having a secret meeting this time tomorrow then the encryption only needs to last just over 24 hours, since by the time you work it out it will be too late.
I actually think you've got it backwards. Encrypt them strongly and you can put the data on a billboard in the centre of picadilly circus and no one will be able to work it out in a useful timeframe. Ever seen Kryptos? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptos The data is public, there are many thousands of people attempting to break it, and yet the hardest section remains unresolved. The acceptable risk is related to the minimum amount of time that you can allow for the code to be broken, which determines how strong you need your encryption.
But if _everyone_ is using encryption, how will they know what's worth looking at to demand the keys? Demanding keys from a large number of people will (hopefully) lead to a bit of resentment, which will of course force this to be repealed, in line with the demands of the populace. A bit like speed cameras,fuel tax, alcohol tax, and foxhunting...
Whilst I agree with your comments that blaming everything on terrorism is counter productive and see an irony in the use of 'terrorism' to force through laws that seek to reduce our freedoms, I can't agree with the idea that terrorism is a 'real threat to the US and the western world'. I'm not denying that it is possible, or that it is a terrible thing that causes suffering and misery, but it is not a 'real threat' to the western way of life, or any others unless we allow it to be.
Contrast terrorism to any large war in the last few years: Here people were actually occupied, countries invaded, sovereignty taken. How does two buildings getting destroyed compare to nightly bombing raids, napalm, gas raids? Tanks rolling through cities and villages? That is a credible threat to your way of life. That _will_ force a regime on you that you did not choose. That _will_ take your freedoms.
Do you seriously believe that a bunch of guys in a cave somewhere are going to destroy the society you value?
I don't know about the US, but in the UK an expert witness must give completely impartial testimony, or face being held in contempt. Whilst a company may hire an expert witness to investigate a case, once they are sworn in they must answer all questions in a completely honest manner, even if it is detrimental to their employers case. We had a lecture at uni from a guy who worked as an investigative engineering consultant (or something like that). He said he'd quite often inform companies that hired him that maybe they shouldn't take a case to court as he would be obliged to give honest and impartial testimony, and that may not be a good thing for them.
I call BS. Do an experiment: Drive at 70 MPH in fourth gear, and drive at 70 MPH in 5th gear. Fuel comsumption decreases. Now if you are having to rev the nuts off your little engine to get enough power out of it for motorway speeds then suddenly it gets all inefficient.
Case in point: I had two Ford Fiestas, both the same age, almost identical except one had a 1.1 litre engine, and the other a 1.4. Pottering around town, the 1.1 was more efficient, but on the motorway, the 1.4 blew it away. That's because in the 1.1 slightest incline meant changing down a gear and revving the nuts off it to hold speed, whilst 1.4 had enough power to make a downshift unnecessary.
That's not to say that the very largest engine is the most efficient, but there is a balance. I think I recall reading somewhere that the 2.2 Diesel Freelander (apparently one of the most popular cars here in the UK) is more economical at motorway speeds than a 1.5 Renault Clio. In city driving this is not the case, where the extra engine size and weight of the freelander are its undoing.
I agree though, I can't see for the life of me why they don't use Diesel engines in hybrids (other than, as you said, the US regulations). You can get a BMW 320D that will do 60 UK MPG, and still have 150 bhp and plenty of torque etc. Put something like that into your hybrid and you would likely have something that's even more economical and maintains the same performance.
Not necessarily. This is the fallacy of assuming that when something is broken, it stops. What about if it is producing bad results (e.g. running too fast or slow). A Clock that runs 1% faster than it needs to will only tell the correct time once every 35 days or so*, but will be almost correct for quite a lot longer. Wasn't there a story recently about a redundant system that broke because a network card was outputting spurious data? Same problem: whoever designed it assumed that a broken card 'stops' rather than carries on but making mistakes.
Surely he should be offering the money to someone since he has had to flee his home country! The spam king spamming people with a scam email to trick them out of money with the offer of money he received by sending people spam email as the spam king. It's so internetty that I want to work out the round trip time for this wonderfully circuitous scenario.
On the other hand this does sound like the sort of thing that could break the internets.
Learn about semaphores, mutexes, spinlocks and other crazy magic and why you need them. Then you're set to start writing multi-threaded applications. Modern Operating Systems by Andrew Tanenbaum was a recommended book whilst I was at uni, and might be quite helpful. PThreads is used a lot on unix systems, Java has a lot of concurrency and synchronisation stuff built so there's a good few places you can play with things.
Slashdot Mirror
Diesel is oil - a hydrocarbon chain. What part of it is either conductive or ferrous and hence can be affected by an electric field?
There has been research, lots of it, and conferences and RFCs and discussion and development and testing and everything else and it led to IPv6. You seem to suggest that someone is going to come up with a magic 'new' network protocol from out of their arse, which seems unlikely. Nobody wants IPv6 because for the most part IPv4 works for them. When that stops happening there will be a shift towards IPv6 (hopefully, I can imagine there will be some horrible bodged setups that sort of work, but not on tuesdays if it's raining before then). The other issue is that people are afraid of having to remember longer numbers.
But wouldn't you be better off assigning a fraction of the years marks (10% - 30%) to tests taken during the term and the remainder on an end of term exam? Thus the students have some motivation to study for the tests, and rather than failure being a crushing blow it is a warning that they'd better get their act together for the end of term exams.
Alternatively use coursework: applying the concepts that a course covers surely improves understanding and retention of those concepts? It also helps teach some time management skills, as well as providing a way for those who aren't as hot on exams to show their capabilities.
With both methods progress can be monitored so that students who are struggling can be helped before they get a final damning grade.
As you said, there are plenty of people who can do the work but don't think: When I started my degree there were plenty of people who were much better than I was at remembering all the pointless details that were required to pass uncreative exams. When the course actually started to require applied knowledge and understanding of principles a lot of these people started struggling. If people are copying then try and give each person a reasonably unique assignment at school we had things like: - Essays from a predetermined list based on course text for the year or a student could suggest their own. - Science experiments based on something studied during the year (effect of heat on enzyme reaction rates, that sort of thing)
The great thing about this approach is that you can copy stuff, but you have to rewrite it and apply it uniquely to your particular assignment, which requires to some extent that you understand what you are writing. Every coursework in science is going to have some boilerplate text about doing a fair test, but detailing how you are are going to make your test a fair test ensures that you understand the principle behind it. Unless you have people who are actually doing the work for them it's pretty solid, their friends can help them out by helping them understand the problem rather than solving it for them.
The Erbium Doped Fibre Amplifier was invented at Southampton University in the UK. Due to issues getting the patent, they have lost quite a serious amount of cash:
http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/B/C/university_of_southampton_341_15kb.pdf
(page 3)
These guys and their department (although i'm fairly sure they aren't short of cash) would probably have done a lot of good things with the royalties that they should have received.
Which seems to be a more modern phenomena. I've seen some of the old patents from BBC Research they were written as clearly as possible and with all relevant detail. They were apparently told to do this so that if a case came to court it would be easy to explain the content to a jury, who are unlikely to be technically minded.
Thank god we have lawyers these days who can translate all the obfuscation for us, and hence patents can be completely unreadable.
I was always led to believe that you don't look at Intel/AMD or anyone of that ilk for the latest semiconductor technology. You look at people like Samsung who make DRAM. Since it is simpler and there is more of it manufactured, it is used to test and prove new processes long before something with the complexity of an x86 processor it made.
There are a huge number of companies out there that are not floated on the stock markets, and are privately owned by one or more people. These people are usually the founders and head honchos of that organisation. It is for these people that honesty and integrity is paramount since they have a stronger attachment to the company, and they have some of their own personal reputation staked in it.
Some people build their businesses through hard work and immense sacrifice, and there are probably a lot more smaller businesses like this than there are large corporate entities.
In this case, much as it pains me, it has nothing to do with windows, and everything to do with you getting the wrong tool for the job. You have a double garage and two cars, but you can't drive them both.
I on the other hand have friends I like to let use my spare car: Things like VHDL Simulators and FPGA synthesis tools, that will gladly consume a core and several gigs of memory for a few hours. On a single core machine you might as well go to sleep because the system will be next to unresponsive while it's processing that kind of load (well windows systems, in my experience linux and unix systems maintain an impressive level of responsiveness even when they are being hammered). The core2duo in my machine at the moment means I can carry on using my machine and do the heavy processing (or do two lots of heavy processing and go to sleep).
For me it's more efficient and convenient than having two PCs, and not as expensive. Which seems like a good solution. At the end of the day it sounds like you don't have any application that will make use of your extra cores.
I use Ubuntu at home and I'm afraid the same thing applies: Unless you have applications that are designed for parallel processing, or you actually want to do more than one thing at the same time, then you won't see the second core get used. VMware won't magically parallelise your code, so unless you are running two instances that are doing things at the same time you won't see both cores get used.
That's just the way things are: there aren't too many applications that are easily parallelisable that haven't already been parallelised.
My point was that the cameras do nothing to deter crime - in this specific case drug dealing which was the reason for the camera to be put up - but that they simply move it, whether that crime be drug dealing (the law says it's a crime, whether I agree with that or not is irrelevant in this context) or vandalism or any of the other things you mention. You won't get mugged on that footpath either, you will get mugged around the corner where the camera doesn't point. Which brings me back to the point I was making: Unless you surveil everything everywhere you can't prevent street crime simply with cameras.
Oh, and I know bad words too, you stupid cunt.
There's cameras on the footpath that runs past then end of the row of houses where I live, probably due to the amount of drug dealing that used to go on there. Handily they put up a camera so now the drug dealing goes on outside the front of the house, or round another corner - all out of view of the cameras. Unless you surveil everyone, everywhere it ain't going to work, it will just push street crime into slightly shadier corners.
When there's actually a bunch of guys with tanks and guns waiting to land on your shores and occupy your lands then you've got a war that requires serious changes to laws and rights. When a few people want to blow some stuff up your in the situation that has occurred in many countries in the rest of the world since Guy Fawkes' time and earlier.
You will _never_ have a world leading democracy that doesn't inspire hatred in the hearts of those that can't accept, understand or tolerate your freedoms. What you propose is to give up those freedoms to destroy them, when all you will achieve is to become like them.
Slashdot poll time!
I concur. I got stung a couple of times as a student. Go past your overdraft limit and all your payments stop. Get charged for unauthorised overdraft , £35. Direct debit can't be paid £35. And just to ice the cake, the next time you put some money in your account they try and take the fees. Of course they don't check if you actually have enough to pay the fees so you go past your overdraft limit and get charged another fee. It's a real vicious cycle.
I found that going to the bank and calling them a bunch of bastards worked and that there was no way I was paying the extra charges because _they_ decided to charge me when they knew full well the money wasn't there usually got most of them removed. Things like the direct debit charge though - it costs them _nothing_ to process that. They send a message back to the company expecting payment that the amount isn't available and that's it. The creditor (e.g. phone company) then sends you a letter saying they still need payment. How that costs £35 is beyond me.
Also, I can't remember exactly off the top of my head, but there is some misleading stuff being bandied around by the banks re. this High Court case. It only applies to certain kinds of charges (I think being charged for going overdrawn when a free overdraft or larger limit would have been freely available) not many of the other charges that are unfair. Of course the banks are refusing to refund _all_ charges because of the case, even if they are not part of it.
Exercise releases endorphins - opiates that are more powerful than morphine, which is what people get addicted to. My guess would be that you may become psychologically addicted to the buzz of exercising, but you can also become physically addicted to the endorphins that exercise releases. IANAD but I'd imagine the difference is that psychological addiction leads to a craving whereas physical addiction will have actual withdrawal symptoms.
Heroin and other opiates are so effective because they operate on the same pathways as endorphins. They also start to replace them: your body produces less endorphins because of the heroin, hence why heroin withdrawal is painful.
All encryption can be broken. The solution then, is to ensure that the encryption cannot be broken within a useful timeframe. I really don't care if you manage to decrypt my credit card number if the card has already expired. If I'm having a secret meeting this time tomorrow then the encryption only needs to last just over 24 hours, since by the time you work it out it will be too late.
I actually think you've got it backwards. Encrypt them strongly and you can put the data on a billboard in the centre of picadilly circus and no one will be able to work it out in a useful timeframe. Ever seen Kryptos? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptos The data is public, there are many thousands of people attempting to break it, and yet the hardest section remains unresolved. The acceptable risk is related to the minimum amount of time that you can allow for the code to be broken, which determines how strong you need your encryption.
But if _everyone_ is using encryption, how will they know what's worth looking at to demand the keys? Demanding keys from a large number of people will (hopefully) lead to a bit of resentment, which will of course force this to be repealed, in line with the demands of the populace. A bit like speed cameras,fuel tax, alcohol tax, and foxhunting...
Yeah I'll keep dreaming
You missed the additional irony of morons protesting when they decided to build wind farms in Scotland.
Docklands light railway in the UK
Whilst I agree with your comments that blaming everything on terrorism is counter productive and see an irony in the use of 'terrorism' to force through laws that seek to reduce our freedoms, I can't agree with the idea that terrorism is a 'real threat to the US and the western world'. I'm not denying that it is possible, or that it is a terrible thing that causes suffering and misery, but it is not a 'real threat' to the western way of life, or any others unless we allow it to be.
Contrast terrorism to any large war in the last few years: Here people were actually occupied, countries invaded, sovereignty taken. How does two buildings getting destroyed compare to nightly bombing raids, napalm, gas raids? Tanks rolling through cities and villages? That is a credible threat to your way of life. That _will_ force a regime on you that you did not choose. That _will_ take your freedoms.
Do you seriously believe that a bunch of guys in a cave somewhere are going to destroy the society you value?
I don't know about the US, but in the UK an expert witness must give completely impartial testimony, or face being held in contempt. Whilst a company may hire an expert witness to investigate a case, once they are sworn in they must answer all questions in a completely honest manner, even if it is detrimental to their employers case. We had a lecture at uni from a guy who worked as an investigative engineering consultant (or something like that). He said he'd quite often inform companies that hired him that maybe they shouldn't take a case to court as he would be obliged to give honest and impartial testimony, and that may not be a good thing for them.
Maybe, but then what is the cost of providing health insurance for employees? I know not everyone gets it, but it must be a reasonable cost.
I call BS. Do an experiment: Drive at 70 MPH in fourth gear, and drive at 70 MPH in 5th gear. Fuel comsumption decreases. Now if you are having to rev the nuts off your little engine to get enough power out of it for motorway speeds then suddenly it gets all inefficient.
Case in point: I had two Ford Fiestas, both the same age, almost identical except one had a 1.1 litre engine, and the other a 1.4. Pottering around town, the 1.1 was more efficient, but on the motorway, the 1.4 blew it away. That's because in the 1.1 slightest incline meant changing down a gear and revving the nuts off it to hold speed, whilst 1.4 had enough power to make a downshift unnecessary.
That's not to say that the very largest engine is the most efficient, but there is a balance. I think I recall reading somewhere that the 2.2 Diesel Freelander (apparently one of the most popular cars here in the UK) is more economical at motorway speeds than a 1.5 Renault Clio. In city driving this is not the case, where the extra engine size and weight of the freelander are its undoing.
I agree though, I can't see for the life of me why they don't use Diesel engines in hybrids (other than, as you said, the US regulations). You can get a BMW 320D that will do 60 UK MPG, and still have 150 bhp and plenty of torque etc. Put something like that into your hybrid and you would likely have something that's even more economical and maintains the same performance.
Not necessarily. This is the fallacy of assuming that when something is broken, it stops. What about if it is producing bad results (e.g. running too fast or slow). A Clock that runs 1% faster than it needs to will only tell the correct time once every 35 days or so*, but will be almost correct for quite a lot longer. Wasn't there a story recently about a redundant system that broke because a network card was outputting spurious data? Same problem: whoever designed it assumed that a broken card 'stops' rather than carries on but making mistakes.
(* very quick maths, almost undoubtedly wrong...)
Surely he should be offering the money to someone since he has had to flee his home country! The spam king spamming people with a scam email to trick them out of money with the offer of money he received by sending people spam email as the spam king. It's so internetty that I want to work out the round trip time for this wonderfully circuitous scenario.
On the other hand this does sound like the sort of thing that could break the internets.
I'm no expert, but essentially you need to understand how to do safe multi-threading.
Look at stuff like:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dining_philosophers_problem
Learn about semaphores, mutexes, spinlocks and other crazy magic and why you need them. Then you're set to start writing multi-threaded applications. Modern Operating Systems by Andrew Tanenbaum was a recommended book whilst I was at uni, and might be quite helpful. PThreads is used a lot on unix systems, Java has a lot of concurrency and synchronisation stuff built so there's a good few places you can play with things.