Kids today are not evil enough. Fill it with a mix of 3-methyl-1-butanethiol, 2-quinolinemethanethiol, or similar mercaptans (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk#Anal_scent_glands). Even using a dilute solution, your victim will have no friends for a week.
Indeed. Most of the/. verbiage on patents is amusingly uninformed.
Not understanding the difference between a patent application and a granted patent is a common feature of articles and commentary here. Given that level of ignorance, it is inevitible that most denizens of/. fail to comprehend the procedures in prosecuting an application, and the associated dialog between applicant's attorneys and the examiner.
Hint: I hold 12 granted US patents, and have a few applications being examined. I have some familiarity with the subject.
The life of the author plus 50/70 years is a damned long time.
Indeed. I am still waiting for a reasoned explanation as to why the copyright term should be so long, while the maximum term of a patent is 20 years.
Suppose that instead of writing stories about Pooh bear, Milne had invented a cure for malaria or a fuel-injected motor or FM radio transmission. Would royalties from such an invention still be flowing into the coffers of his heirs today?
Comparing the situation for patents and copyrights, it is clear that the balance between benefit to society and benefit to the creator is grotesquely skewed away from society in the case of copyright.
I'll also recommend the Synology boxes, based on several years with them.
They are typical SOHO NAS solutions, so they don't compete in performance with custom roll-your-own solutions or with a midrange (expensive) NAS. However, they do come with built-in RAID support. Most of them have built-in webserver, photo station, media server, and print server functions.
The down side is that every Synology NAS assumes all of its clients are either Windows or Mac boxes. The supplied backup and p2p download functions only work with those clients. However, Synology provides free add-ons to upgrade their boxes to use NFS instead of SMB and add telnet and ssh support. We've had no problems using them in a Linux-only home.
The administration interface works fine in Opera, Epiphany, and Firefox. It is supposed to work with Internet Explorer, but I cannot personnally confirm that.
even though it gets a bit ridiculous with 20+ author papers.
That's the effect of the "publication of the month club". It's a direct consequence of the publication count metric used in assessing researchers and untenured professors.
All clubmembers are entitled to have their names appended to the list of coauthors on any publication authored by another member. To remain a member in good standing, one should include other members as coauthors of your publications about as often as they include you on theirs. It is polite to notify other clubmembers whenver they are included, so they can list the publication among their achievements (they don't actually need to read or understand it)
With this social pact, if there are 20 clubmembers each publishing 2 articles per year, they can each list about 40 publications per year. The fact that each publication had 20 authors is irrelevant, they count just the same for resume-padding, as ammunition for grant applications, or as fertilizer for the tenure track.
And, thanks to his use of Newtons's rings to measure the quality of the mirrors he was grinding to build his telescope, they were the best telescopes available in the day.
Umm, "Newton's" rings were taught to him as an undergraduate. They were described in a book by Robert Hooke which was part of Newton's studies. Alas, Newton and Hooke did not get along, and when Hooke died, Newton published his Optiks in which he treated the ring phenomenon as if he had discovered it, omitting any mention of Hooke. Due to the prestige which Newton had acquired by this time, and the absence of Hooke, the rings became Newton's.
Editing formulae is a big concern for me, but my customers demand.doc format, and laTeX to Word conversion just doesn't cut it, unfortunately. For college work I use laTeX, but even that is likely to change as they are moving over to electronic submission and require.doc format too (although to their credit they are promoting OO.o as the way to generate the.doc files).
Find out why they want the doc format. Quite often, they just want some "standard" or widely-recognized document format, and will accept PDF, for example. So just convert the LaTeX to PDF; it's straightforward.
Incidentally, the science and engineering departments of many universities encourage use of LaTeX for writing dissertations, and even provide templates for that purpose. Both of my grad schools did, and the one where I'm a docent also does. Humanities departments may be different, but even they will appreciate the management of bibliographies and citation formatting capabilities of LaTeX/BibTeX.
"If God wanted us to be naked, we'd be born that way" - Oscar Wilde.
There is nothing wrong with nudity, of oneself or others.
There is not much wrong with censorship of oneself.
There is everything wrong with censorship of others.
wow..letters have different pronunciations depending on where they are in a word and the letters around them?
Yes, and while this might appear normal to an English speaker, it appears obviously and stunningly wrong to speakers of some other languages.
The writer's point (it is a generally accepted position, too) was that this is precisely what's wrong with the orthography of English - and Gaeilge and French, among others. It is also why it takes much longer for children to master reading and writing in English, compared to languages with rational orthography, such as German, Italian, and Finnish. The issue is very relevant, and probably contributes to the greater impact of dyslexia on native English speakers than on native German speakers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyslexia#Effect_of_language_orthography.
In languages with rational or phonemic orthography, the pronunciation of a letter does not depend on its position in a word, and only depends on neighbouring letters in the case of unambiguous groups of letters (i.e. those which cannot represent a sequence of sounds in that language). Study Finnish orthography for a good example of a phonemic orthography. There is a one-to-one mapping between phonemes and letters (or unambiguous combinations of letters). English, on the other hand, is classified as having a defective orthography. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthography
My children are fluent in both Finnish and English (and learning French and Swedish, but I have not inflicted Gaeilge on them yet). They learned to speak both languages with equal facility, although the languages are very different in structure and in their concept associativities. However, they learned to read and write Finnish far faster than English, even with comparable parental and school inputs for both languages, and with reading material of similar quality. The difference in orthography has a significant effect.
Try doing a Google Search for this sequence [ viet nam war news picture girl running screaming ]
Notice "naked" is not on the list. Nevertheless, the first result is this link http://www.lakeland.edu/studentservices/news.asp?article=4354
A quite famous picture (won the Pulitzer Prize) is on that page. With a naked girl-child in it. Of course, you would probably tear off your clothes and run screaming/naked too, if you had a really close encounter with napalm. I'm pretty sure I recall complaints about the original publication of that picture. Probably by relatives of the same idiots who objected to that album cover.
The girl's name is Phuc. How long do you expect to be able to search for such an obscene word? Obviously, such a search could only be seeking evil images, and the nannies must prevent it...
You write potato, I write ghoughpteighbteau The rules need updating, not scrapping
GHOTI and tchoghs may not immediately strike readers as staples of the British diet; and even those most enamoured of written English's idiosyncrasies may wince at this tendentious rendering of "fish and chips". Yet the spelling, easily derived from other words*, highlights the shortcomings of English orthography. ...
*Fish: gh as in tough, o as in women, ti as in nation (courtesy of GB Shaw). Chips: tch as in match, o as in women, gh as in hiccough.
Sounds like windows is a disease. Come on don't be so critical
Windows is a condition, rather than a disease. It has unpleasant and often expensive consequences (spyware, antivirus subscriptions, etc.) for those afflicted with it and for many others (spam botnets, net worms, etc.). Luckily, it is avoidable and curable in many (but far from all) cases: just use BSD or Linux.
there is no decent model for predicting their occurrence
There is one: the Lévi distribution.
Here's a clue for an AC. The Levy distribution is not a predictive model, but a statistical description which appears to describe the historical durations between geomagnetic reversals. The statistical distribution of historical durations has no predictive value for the duration of any particular interval. It could not even predict the occurence of the last reversal, for instance.
the assertion that a magnetic reversal is "overdue" is absurd.
No, it would only be absurd for the exponential distribution.
Thanks for the laughs, AC!
Here's another clue, since you appear to need a few. The observed or inferred intervals have durations from 25 thousand years to over 50 million years, and appear to be described by the Levy distribution. However, the mathematical Levy distribution has an infinite mean and infinite variance. Therefore, if intervals between geomagnetic reversals truly conform to the Levy distribution, then there is no upper bound on the duration of such an interval. In fact, even the statistically expected value is infinite. In other words, one could never assert that a reversal is overdue. This conclusion may appear unexpected or counterintuitive, so here's summary information on the Levy distribution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9vy_distribution
That page was linked in the Wikipedia article on geomagnetic reversals. Did you even read it? You obviously did not read (or comprehend) the Physics World article which was also linked.
Perhaps the most terrifying prediction is the reversal of the Earth's magnetic field (combined with untimely solar activity), a periodic event which is currently 1/4 million years overdue.
From the record of paleomagnetism found in spreading ocean floors, the reversals are anything but periodic. Reversals recur, but the interval between reversals can be less than 25 thousand years, or longer than 35 million years. In other words, the intervals between reversals vary in duration by a factor of more than 1000.
The oceanic record is limited to the last 200 million years, at most. It has been extended further back by correlating measurements from continental rocks formed at different times, and relying on models for tectonic drift. This naturally yields inferences with lower confidence and limited time resolution. However, the results suggest that geomagnetic field has occasionally been stable for more than 50 million years at a time.
Given that their occurrence is erratic rather than periodic, and that there is no decent model for predicting their occurrence, the assertion that a magnetic reversal is "overdue" is absurd.
The scaremongering that a reversal would lead to "the end of the world" or mass extinctions is equally puerile. Reversals of the geomagnetic field show no particular correlation with extinctions in the past.
One-Time-Password devices do little to protect against man-in-the-middle, man-in-the-browser, session hijacking, or CSRF attacks.
They are useful against some sorts of attacks, but not when the attacker is already in your browser. He just has to wait for you to log in normally, then he does what he wants with your session.
Most one-time-passwords require a password be entered to complete each financial transaction (that's the system with my bank). This does not make a man-in-the-middle or man-in-the-browser attack impossible, but raises the difficulty by a considerable amount. The attacker would have to hijack a legitimate transaction by entering the fraudulent payee account information into the real web site while spoofing the intended payee information to your browser (and the bank gets this information, obviously, so it's trackable). It would also have to spoof and reformat the transaction history which is updated in parallel in another frame. Not impossible, but quite tricky and suitable only for use on customers of a single bank.
if the military does not regard it as an asset...
on
Who Protects the Internet?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
"It had to be destroyed to be saved."
Several governments are already making progress on this game plan.
Anyway, as a Canadian I must tell you that I have seen solid beer too.
Living in Finland, I have seen near-solid vodka. Most of the water froze out as ice, which could be easily discarded. The remaining liquid was wonderfully potent.
Slashdot Mirror
Fill it with holy water
Kids today are not evil enough. Fill it with a mix of 3-methyl-1-butanethiol, 2-quinolinemethanethiol, or similar mercaptans (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk#Anal_scent_glands). Even using a dilute solution, your victim will have no friends for a week.
It might even keep the kids off your lawn.
Indeed. Most of the /. verbiage on patents is amusingly uninformed.
Not understanding the difference between a patent application and a granted patent is a common feature of articles and commentary here. Given that level of ignorance, it is inevitible that most denizens of /. fail to comprehend the procedures in prosecuting an application, and the associated dialog between applicant's attorneys and the examiner.
Hint: I hold 12 granted US patents, and have a few applications being examined. I have some familiarity with the subject.
The life of the author plus 50/70 years is a damned long time.
Indeed. I am still waiting for a reasoned explanation as to why the copyright term should be so long, while the maximum term of a patent is 20 years.
Suppose that instead of writing stories about Pooh bear, Milne had invented a cure for malaria or a fuel-injected motor or FM radio transmission. Would royalties from such an invention still be flowing into the coffers of his heirs today?
Comparing the situation for patents and copyrights, it is clear that the balance between benefit to society and benefit to the creator is grotesquely skewed away from society in the case of copyright.
Surely not! We all know here that ducks float.
Only if they weigh the same as a witch!
I'll also recommend the Synology boxes, based on several years with them.
They are typical SOHO NAS solutions, so they don't compete in performance with custom roll-your-own solutions or with a midrange (expensive) NAS. However, they do come with built-in RAID support. Most of them have built-in webserver, photo station, media server, and print server functions.
The down side is that every Synology NAS assumes all of its clients are either Windows or Mac boxes. The supplied backup and p2p download functions only work with those clients. However, Synology provides free add-ons to upgrade their boxes to use NFS instead of SMB and add telnet and ssh support. We've had no problems using them in a Linux-only home.
The administration interface works fine in Opera, Epiphany, and Firefox. It is supposed to work with Internet Explorer, but I cannot personnally confirm that.
even though it gets a bit ridiculous with 20+ author papers.
That's the effect of the "publication of the month club". It's a direct consequence of the publication count metric used in assessing researchers and untenured professors.
All clubmembers are entitled to have their names appended to the list of coauthors on any publication authored by another member. To remain a member in good standing, one should include other members as coauthors of your publications about as often as they include you on theirs. It is polite to notify other clubmembers whenver they are included, so they can list the publication among their achievements (they don't actually need to read or understand it)
With this social pact, if there are 20 clubmembers each publishing 2 articles per year, they can each list about 40 publications per year. The fact that each publication had 20 authors is irrelevant, they count just the same for resume-padding, as ammunition for grant applications, or as fertilizer for the tenure track.
And, thanks to his use of Newtons's rings to measure the quality of the mirrors he was grinding to build his telescope, they were the best telescopes available in the day.
Umm, "Newton's" rings were taught to him as an undergraduate. They were described in a book by Robert Hooke which was part of Newton's studies. Alas, Newton and Hooke did not get along, and when Hooke died, Newton published his Optiks in which he treated the ring phenomenon as if he had discovered it, omitting any mention of Hooke. Due to the prestige which Newton had acquired by this time, and the absence of Hooke, the rings became Newton's.
Editing formulae is a big concern for me, but my customers demand .doc format, and laTeX to Word conversion just doesn't cut it, unfortunately. For college work I use laTeX, but even that is likely to change as they are moving over to electronic submission and require .doc format too (although to their credit they are promoting OO.o as the way to generate the .doc files).
Find out why they want the doc format. Quite often, they just want some "standard" or widely-recognized document format, and will accept PDF, for example. So just convert the LaTeX to PDF; it's straightforward.
Incidentally, the science and engineering departments of many universities encourage use of LaTeX for writing dissertations, and even provide templates for that purpose. Both of my grad schools did, and the one where I'm a docent also does. Humanities departments may be different, but even they will appreciate the management of bibliographies and citation formatting capabilities of LaTeX/BibTeX.
"If God wanted us to be naked, we'd be born that way" - Oscar Wilde.
There is nothing wrong with nudity, of oneself or others.
There is not much wrong with censorship of oneself.
There is everything wrong with censorship of others.
wow..letters have different pronunciations depending on where they are in a word and the letters around them?
Yes, and while this might appear normal to an English speaker, it appears obviously and stunningly wrong to speakers of some other languages.
The writer's point (it is a generally accepted position, too) was that this is precisely what's wrong with the orthography of English - and Gaeilge and French, among others. It is also why it takes much longer for children to master reading and writing in English, compared to languages with rational orthography, such as German, Italian, and Finnish. The issue is very relevant, and probably contributes to the greater impact of dyslexia on native English speakers than on native German speakers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyslexia#Effect_of_language_orthography.
In languages with rational or phonemic orthography, the pronunciation of a letter does not depend on its position in a word, and only depends on neighbouring letters in the case of unambiguous groups of letters (i.e. those which cannot represent a sequence of sounds in that language). Study Finnish orthography for a good example of a phonemic orthography. There is a one-to-one mapping between phonemes and letters (or unambiguous combinations of letters). English, on the other hand, is classified as having a defective orthography. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthography
My children are fluent in both Finnish and English (and learning French and Swedish, but I have not inflicted Gaeilge on them yet). They learned to speak both languages with equal facility, although the languages are very different in structure and in their concept associativities. However, they learned to read and write Finnish far faster than English, even with comparable parental and school inputs for both languages, and with reading material of similar quality. The difference in orthography has a significant effect.
Try doing a Google Search for this sequence [ viet nam war news picture girl running screaming ] Notice "naked" is not on the list. Nevertheless, the first result is this link http://www.lakeland.edu/studentservices/news.asp?article=4354 A quite famous picture (won the Pulitzer Prize) is on that page. With a naked girl-child in it. Of course, you would probably tear off your clothes and run screaming/naked too, if you had a really close encounter with napalm. I'm pretty sure I recall complaints about the original publication of that picture. Probably by relatives of the same idiots who objected to that album cover.
The girl's name is Phuc. How long do you expect to be able to search for such an obscene word? Obviously, such a search could only be seeking evil images, and the nannies must prevent it...
When is gh ever pronounced F at the beginning of a word?
Here's a brief excerpt from The Economist magazine, 14 August 2008 (online at http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11920829 but may require login).
You write potato, I write ghoughpteighbteau
...
The rules need updating, not scrapping
GHOTI and tchoghs may not immediately strike readers as staples of the British diet; and even those most enamoured of written English's idiosyncrasies may wince at this tendentious rendering of "fish and chips". Yet the spelling, easily derived from other words*, highlights the shortcomings of English orthography.
*Fish: gh as in tough, o as in women, ti as in nation (courtesy of GB Shaw). Chips: tch as in match, o as in women, gh as in hiccough.
...to be free of Windows
Sounds like windows is a disease. Come on don't be so critical
Windows is a condition, rather than a disease. It has unpleasant and often expensive consequences (spyware, antivirus subscriptions, etc.) for those afflicted with it and for many others (spam botnets, net worms, etc.). Luckily, it is avoidable and curable in many (but far from all) cases: just use BSD or Linux.
English is not much better
Indeed, applying pronounciation used in English words, "ghoti" could be pronounced "fish".
Samhain is pronounced approximately "sa-win" in Irish.
You don't know anyone in the US who would purchase the device for you and ship it for $20? Time to get a pen pal.
Penpals in Nigeria are waiting to serve you...
there is no decent model for predicting their occurrence
There is one: the Lévi distribution.
Here's a clue for an AC. The Levy distribution is not a predictive model, but a statistical description which appears to describe the historical durations between geomagnetic reversals. The statistical distribution of historical durations has no predictive value for the duration of any particular interval. It could not even predict the occurence of the last reversal, for instance.
the assertion that a magnetic reversal is "overdue" is absurd.
No, it would only be absurd for the exponential distribution.
Thanks for the laughs, AC!
Here's another clue, since you appear to need a few. The observed or inferred intervals have durations from 25 thousand years to over 50 million years, and appear to be described by the Levy distribution. However, the mathematical Levy distribution has an infinite mean and infinite variance. Therefore, if intervals between geomagnetic reversals truly conform to the Levy distribution, then there is no upper bound on the duration of such an interval. In fact, even the statistically expected value is infinite. In other words, one could never assert that a reversal is overdue. This conclusion may appear unexpected or counterintuitive, so here's summary information on the Levy distribution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9vy_distribution
That page was linked in the Wikipedia article on geomagnetic reversals. Did you even read it? You obviously did not read (or comprehend) the Physics World article which was also linked.
Perhaps the most terrifying prediction is the reversal of the Earth's magnetic field (combined with untimely solar activity), a periodic event which is currently 1/4 million years overdue.
From the record of paleomagnetism found in spreading ocean floors, the reversals are anything but periodic. Reversals recur, but the interval between reversals can be less than 25 thousand years, or longer than 35 million years. In other words, the intervals between reversals vary in duration by a factor of more than 1000.
The oceanic record is limited to the last 200 million years, at most. It has been extended further back by correlating measurements from continental rocks formed at different times, and relying on models for tectonic drift. This naturally yields inferences with lower confidence and limited time resolution. However, the results suggest that geomagnetic field has occasionally been stable for more than 50 million years at a time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_reversal
Given that their occurrence is erratic rather than periodic, and that there is no decent model for predicting their occurrence, the assertion that a magnetic reversal is "overdue" is absurd.
The scaremongering that a reversal would lead to "the end of the world" or mass extinctions is equally puerile. Reversals of the geomagnetic field show no particular correlation with extinctions in the past.
If you like leather and ball gags, try IE.
And guess where the ball-gag goes...
One-Time-Password devices do little to protect against man-in-the-middle, man-in-the-browser, session hijacking, or CSRF attacks.
They are useful against some sorts of attacks, but not when the attacker is already in your browser. He just has to wait for you to log in normally, then he does what he wants with your session.
Most one-time-passwords require a password be entered to complete each financial transaction (that's the system with my bank). This does not make a man-in-the-middle or man-in-the-browser attack impossible, but raises the difficulty by a considerable amount. The attacker would have to hijack a legitimate transaction by entering the fraudulent payee account information into the real web site while spoofing the intended payee information to your browser (and the bank gets this information, obviously, so it's trackable). It would also have to spoof and reformat the transaction history which is updated in parallel in another frame. Not impossible, but quite tricky and suitable only for use on customers of a single bank.
"It had to be destroyed to be saved."
Several governments are already making progress on this game plan.
Whoever makes cockroaches passed the billion mark a long time ago. And using a model with very few variations, too.
the nakedness problem
If you have a nakedness problem, you're living too far from the equator.
... national security secrete stuff ...
So what kind of stuff do they secrete?
Enquiring sick minds want to know...
Anyway, as a Canadian I must tell you that I have seen solid beer too.
Living in Finland, I have seen near-solid vodka. Most of the water froze out as ice, which could be easily discarded. The remaining liquid was wonderfully potent.