To be succinct and unfriendly (it's Monday, I'm tired, and my office is out of coffee!!), this article is singularly useless. With no justification for any of the designs, they might as well be crayon doodlings on construction paper.
A question mark? What possible advantage does building a city in the shape of a question mark have? Shaped like the human body? Why? If the reactor becomes unstable, dump it in the ocean? What?
Not to mention the ridiculous assumption that most of the world will be covered by water...I realize burning fossil fuels creates water, but WTF?
Looking at cities worldwide today, it seems fairly clear that they accrete over time in whatever fashion is most functional as they grow. Form following function. This seems to be exactly the opposite, "build it and they will come" on a ridiculous level. That doesn't even work for professional sports venues, much less for entire cities.
Which, incidentally, is the problem I always have with proposals to build cities on the bottom of the sea, or on the surface of the moon, or any equally-remote location. You can't just "build a city" there, it has to develop there. Cities grow where there's a reason for people to congregate. Along trade routes - roads and rivers (as a US-centric parenthatical, I wonder if, after the apocalypse, new cities would gradually grow up around the intersections of interstates, assuming they survived...which would mean mostly where the cities already were). If we want to have a city under the sea, we have to have first, a practical and relatively inexpensive way for people to get to and from there. Second, a good reason for people to want to live there (crowding would have to become pretty bad to make living under the sea more appealing to most people). And third, a revisiting of the laws governing who owns what parts of the sea (IIRC, "territorial waters" extend 20 miles off the coast of a nation; that's not enough space to both populate with cities and maintain the buffer zone that the current "territorial waters" area provides), though this last could easily happen after population started moving there.
Oh, and: the one idea in the article that was kind of neat was the sun-following city...but without any implementation details, it's still not real useful. I mean, I could propose a city that harnessed the awesome power of zero point energy, and it's really cool, but not too helpful.
OTOH, all my problems with it could be a function of the writeup that was linked, rather than of the event itself.
You'd think between high school and college I would have learned this definitively, but...is it a parabola, or an ellipse?
It always seemed to me that a thrown ball, disregarding friction from the air, should describe an elliptic section corresponding to its orbit around the Earth's center of gravity, not the parabola that so often got mentioned.
I've never had adequately explained to me why it's a parabola instead of an ellipse (assuming that it is).
Interesting - it seems China is engaging in a sort of internal outsourcing, if that makes any sense. The pace of technological development in China was slower than they wanted, so they've farmed the job out to imported companies. Make the country more attractive to foreign investors (no, not the ones from the Hotel Royale), and take advantage of their experience and financial grounding to foster a tech development surge.
What's most fascinating about this, to me at least, is that in Western countries, this would be just a sort of emergent phenomenon, unpredicted and unplanned. But in China, odds are good that this is a deliberate strategy on the part of the Chinese government.
Which, incidentally, is something that a lot of people seem to overlook: China's economy is becoming more and more capitalistic, but China is still politically and socially very much a state-run nation. The increasing captilism is part of the government's plan to bring the Chinese economy to the forefront of the world, and I tend to believe that this surge in R&D is just as much a deliberate strategy on the part of the Chinese government.
I almost wish I hadn't posted in this thread, so I could mod this up.
This is exactly right: Microsoft isn't doing anything that isn't already being done in every other industry. But because they're Microsoft and this is/., this becomes FP news.
The practice of withholding information on vulnerabilities at all is questionable, but I was coming from the standpoint that such withholding is a given in the software industry today.
Given that such information will be withheld, allowing people to pay to get notice that some information regarding an unspecified vulnerability in a particular application three days before other people (along with the paying subscribers) get the detailed information doesn't seem to be an unethical practice.
Potentially very annoying to their customers, as you point out, but not unethical. They're saying "we'll give you a competitive advantage if you pay us." Which is much the same thing they're saying (accurately or not) when they market, say, SQL Server. The burden of scheduling and applying patches as available already lies on the shoulders of the customers. This is an add-on service to help relieve that burden.
Always with the car analogies. This isn't Pontiac only recalling and replacing a defective part if you pay more. This is Pontiac recalling and replacing a defective part on exactly the same schedule for everyone, but telling premium customers three days earlier "hey, we're going to be recalling something on the 2005 GTO in three days. Get ready."
At the risk of sounding like a Microsoft apologist, I really don't see the big deal, here. It's not like they're releasing patches only to premium subscribers, they're providing earlier notice of what's going to be covered in the next security bulletin. This doesn't affect the timetable for the release of vulnerability information or the release of patches. This is just MS saying "heads up, we're going to have a patch for a vulnerability in Office XP rolling out in three days."
*shrug*
Doesn't sound like it affects overall computer security, really. It's nice for the organizations that sign on, so they have a couple more days to plan outages as necessary. It doesn't affect the vast majority of home users at all (I certainly don't plan my downtime, it just happens when I feel like it).
I can see this being irritating to customers who are unwilling to pay yet another Microsoft tax for early notification, but I don't see that it's some kind of horrible, evil practice, either.
Cool...while I was writing that, I realized I had no idea whether the center of gravity was within the sun or not, but guessed that it was based on how much of the solar system's mass is contained in the sun. Thanks for the information.
(I also didn't know the word "barycenter" existed, so thanks for that one, too;))
Don't underestimate yourself, you're entirely correct. From outside the solar system (wherever you define the boundary of that to be), the entire solar system acts as though it's a single massive body with all its gravitational pull "coming" from its center of gravity (which I assume is somewhere inside the diameter of the sun, but I could be wrong).
Just like you, standing on the planet, don't feel a separate tug from Mt. Everest and the Virgin Islands, you feel a tug from the planet's center of gravity.
From inside the boundary, however, you can easily distinguish between individual sources of gravity.
Depending on your preferences, you can think of it sort of like a signal:noise issue, or like beams of light from distant stars, which strike the Earth parallel to each other. From far enough away, the solar system acts as a point source of gravity.
(Before anyone says anything, yes, I am aware that there isn't a magic changing point as you cross some mythical barrier in space. When I say "outside the solar system" I mean "outside the solar system by a meaningful stellar distance").
Actually, that sort of follows. If you're processing letters in parallel, and you key first on the first letter, and you're better at recognizing right-end letters than left-end letters, this phenomenon is explained. Recognizing the first letter limits your word search, recognizing the last limits it drastically more. You've got the information for all the middle letters, just not in order. The paper seems to indicate that order is less important than letter recognition.
The important thing is to realize that your brain is trying to comprehend words, not analyze spelling - so, given all the necessary information, will tend to decide the right word.
Re:It's not "the end of encryption" at all
on
The End of Encryption?
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· Score: 5, Informative
True, but OTPs aren't reusable, and the key needs to have as much information as the message, so they're not an answer to digital signatures or secure transactions online. Or at least, not an answer that's easy enough for me to comprehend.
Since those are the areas in which most people encounter encryption, that's what the author was focusing on.
On the other hand, the author also didn't give any reason to think that P?=NP is even coming closer to being resolved, and certainly no reason to think that it will end up being P=NP...so I don't see how PKE is threatened, either.
It's a non-story, if you ask me. Not that anyone did.
You know, I see the claim that "you can't prove a negative" tossed around quite a bit. It sounds neat, but...
...how do you prove that you can't prove a negative??
Re:Whose task is copy&paste
on
The Power of X
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· Score: 2, Insightful
That's the kind of insular attitude that causes so many problems for Linux. Face it, whether you like c&p or not, many, many users like it quite a bit. If Linux is to be only a niche OS for the computer-savvy, then no universal c&p is just fine. If Linux is to become a commonplace OS on the average desktop, then it has to cater to what people actually want, not what superusers tell people they should want.
Besides which, the advantage to c&p is simplicity. Copying an image from a web page and pasting in paintbrush is more convenient than saving as something and then opening (rt click, copy, win+r, 'paint', rt click, paste, 'ok' on the resize to fit dialog; rt click, save as, click 'desktop', type name, click save, win+r, 'paint', file, open, click 'desktop', open). Ditto moving data from Access to Excel. Rather than save as a CSV file and open it in excel, ctrl+a, ctrl+c, win+r, 'excel', ctrl+v.
There are certainly times when saving and opening is more appropriate, but c&p is quick and easy. It's a simple tool, but for simple uses it's ideal (this is the same reason I don't buy into add-on apps that expand the size of the clipboard. The whole point for me is that it's fast).
I haven't used Linux in almost two years, but one of the two reasons I stopped was quite literally the difficulty in copying and pasting (though the ability to copy & paste at the console is spectacular, and MS has no excuse for not supporting it). The other was that I couldn't manage to get my wireless NIC working, but that's a whole different story.
It is really amazing stuff; it's fantastic to see that significant funding and progress are being made in this field. Even decades off, the very idea of having a viable solution to the problem of energy generation is incredibly exciting.
Unfortunately, I can't; pdf reader's a bit borked on my system right now.
However, yes, E=mc^2 will give me the answer, given that I know how much mass is being converted into energy. My point is that I don't know that: I don't know what fuel is being used (though other replies lead me to believe deuterium), and I (therefore) don't know how many particles are being conserved, so I can't use E=mc^2.
Granted, your link probably does provide that information, and I apologize for appearing so dense. I'll come back and read it when I get home tonight.
Exactly my point: this doesn't approach that, and that was only one percent of the output of a middling-bright star.
This is not at all to downplay how incredibly much energy is involved in one percent of an entire star; it's simply to recognize that the output of a star is so vastly much energy that any claims anyone makes about "akin to creating a star" are so exaggerated as to be useless.
No, my analogy highlights the sensationalism of the article. The energy levels involved in the star vs. the reactor are so vastly different as to be essentially incomparable. Producing 100 million degrees is simply not at all the same as producing the total energy of even the tiniest star.
Not to mention the vast complexity of a star in comparison to what they're doing.
I've got nothing but respect for what the researchers are doing, but it's not significantly akin to creating a star. It's taking one aspect of what goes on in a star, and trying to recreate it in a much more limited fashion.
After some quick googling, I can't seem to either confirm or deny the statement, but I admit that there's a little tingle in my bullshit detector when I hear them claim a ten million-fold increase in released energy.
On the other hand, I don't know enough about it to confidently say it's crap. So - anyone out there able to tell me what, exactly, this "kg of fusion fuel" is made up of? And, if possible, provide support/debunking for the 10,000,000x as much energy claim?
...is sustainability. Being a professional gamer works for a while just on novelty: corporate sponsorship, and whatnot. Over the long term, however, the money has to come from somewhere. Either companies will have to determine to their own satisfaction that gamer sponsorship generates more revenue through marketing than their spending, or the gamer him/her self has to bring in that money by way of attracting paying fans.
Either way, the whole scheme depends (just like every other entertainment industry) on developing a fan base whose money can be tapped into. And this is the potential problem I see with this.
I've watched televised gaming (UTx, MechAssault, a few others that have made it onto TechTV or G4), and there's always something lacking. In my mind, it seems like the missing factor is camera management. The usual over-the-shoulder camera view of the action is much less than ideal. Some system has to evolve such that you can be focused on the primary action (the guy carrying the flag), while at the same time being able to keep track of what else is going on nearby.
Translucent walls, to pop an idea off the top of my head, might help. The viewing audience gets to see the current focus (selected by a studio editing/camera crew, just like it is with professional sports), and can also see who's waiting just around the corner or on the other side of the door.
But that's what this will need to sustain profitability and grow: the audience doesn't want their situational awareness as limited as the player's. The audience wants a god's-eye view, just like they do for every other sporting event.
WTF? How many times does he have to explain that he called tech support and did everything they told him to do with no success? He chose a distro which actually said it worked with his hardware. He researched online to ensure that the hardware would work. He paid for it to get technical support. He had a problem with the purportedly-compatible hardware, so he called technical support. After doing everything tech support told him to, the hardware still didn't work.
Bearing all that in mind (since you can't be bothered to actually read the article, apparently), wtf are you talking about?
Slashdot Mirror
A question mark? What possible advantage does building a city in the shape of a question mark have? Shaped like the human body? Why? If the reactor becomes unstable, dump it in the ocean? What?
Not to mention the ridiculous assumption that most of the world will be covered by water...I realize burning fossil fuels creates water, but WTF?
Looking at cities worldwide today, it seems fairly clear that they accrete over time in whatever fashion is most functional as they grow. Form following function. This seems to be exactly the opposite, "build it and they will come" on a ridiculous level. That doesn't even work for professional sports venues, much less for entire cities.
Which, incidentally, is the problem I always have with proposals to build cities on the bottom of the sea, or on the surface of the moon, or any equally-remote location. You can't just "build a city" there, it has to develop there. Cities grow where there's a reason for people to congregate. Along trade routes - roads and rivers (as a US-centric parenthatical, I wonder if, after the apocalypse, new cities would gradually grow up around the intersections of interstates, assuming they survived...which would mean mostly where the cities already were). If we want to have a city under the sea, we have to have first, a practical and relatively inexpensive way for people to get to and from there. Second, a good reason for people to want to live there (crowding would have to become pretty bad to make living under the sea more appealing to most people). And third, a revisiting of the laws governing who owns what parts of the sea (IIRC, "territorial waters" extend 20 miles off the coast of a nation; that's not enough space to both populate with cities and maintain the buffer zone that the current "territorial waters" area provides), though this last could easily happen after population started moving there.
Oh, and: the one idea in the article that was kind of neat was the sun-following city...but without any implementation details, it's still not real useful. I mean, I could propose a city that harnessed the awesome power of zero point energy, and it's really cool, but not too helpful.
OTOH, all my problems with it could be a function of the writeup that was linked, rather than of the event itself.
It always seemed to me that a thrown ball, disregarding friction from the air, should describe an elliptic section corresponding to its orbit around the Earth's center of gravity, not the parabola that so often got mentioned.
I've never had adequately explained to me why it's a parabola instead of an ellipse (assuming that it is).
What's most fascinating about this, to me at least, is that in Western countries, this would be just a sort of emergent phenomenon, unpredicted and unplanned. But in China, odds are good that this is a deliberate strategy on the part of the Chinese government.
Which, incidentally, is something that a lot of people seem to overlook: China's economy is becoming more and more capitalistic, but China is still politically and socially very much a state-run nation. The increasing captilism is part of the government's plan to bring the Chinese economy to the forefront of the world, and I tend to believe that this surge in R&D is just as much a deliberate strategy on the part of the Chinese government.
Frankly, I find the whole thing fascinating.
This is exactly right: Microsoft isn't doing anything that isn't already being done in every other industry. But because they're Microsoft and this is /., this becomes FP news.
The icons are also annoying, but the quick launch/desktop/start menu icon insertion is pretty standard for software installs.
The practice of withholding information on vulnerabilities at all is questionable, but I was coming from the standpoint that such withholding is a given in the software industry today.
Given that such information will be withheld, allowing people to pay to get notice that some information regarding an unspecified vulnerability in a particular application three days before other people (along with the paying subscribers) get the detailed information doesn't seem to be an unethical practice.
Potentially very annoying to their customers, as you point out, but not unethical. They're saying "we'll give you a competitive advantage if you pay us." Which is much the same thing they're saying (accurately or not) when they market, say, SQL Server. The burden of scheduling and applying patches as available already lies on the shoulders of the customers. This is an add-on service to help relieve that burden.
Always with the car analogies. This isn't Pontiac only recalling and replacing a defective part if you pay more. This is Pontiac recalling and replacing a defective part on exactly the same schedule for everyone, but telling premium customers three days earlier "hey, we're going to be recalling something on the 2005 GTO in three days. Get ready."
This just isn't a big deal.
*shrug*
Doesn't sound like it affects overall computer security, really. It's nice for the organizations that sign on, so they have a couple more days to plan outages as necessary. It doesn't affect the vast majority of home users at all (I certainly don't plan my downtime, it just happens when I feel like it).
I can see this being irritating to customers who are unwilling to pay yet another Microsoft tax for early notification, but I don't see that it's some kind of horrible, evil practice, either.
(I also didn't know the word "barycenter" existed, so thanks for that one, too ;))
The universe is infinitely large?
When did that happen?
Just like you, standing on the planet, don't feel a separate tug from Mt. Everest and the Virgin Islands, you feel a tug from the planet's center of gravity.
From inside the boundary, however, you can easily distinguish between individual sources of gravity.
Depending on your preferences, you can think of it sort of like a signal:noise issue, or like beams of light from distant stars, which strike the Earth parallel to each other. From far enough away, the solar system acts as a point source of gravity.
(Before anyone says anything, yes, I am aware that there isn't a magic changing point as you cross some mythical barrier in space. When I say "outside the solar system" I mean "outside the solar system by a meaningful stellar distance").
The important thing is to realize that your brain is trying to comprehend words, not analyze spelling - so, given all the necessary information, will tend to decide the right word.
Since those are the areas in which most people encounter encryption, that's what the author was focusing on.
On the other hand, the author also didn't give any reason to think that P?=NP is even coming closer to being resolved, and certainly no reason to think that it will end up being P=NP...so I don't see how PKE is threatened, either.
It's a non-story, if you ask me. Not that anyone did.
I don't know if he was first to say it, but I first saw it said in Schneier's Applied Cryptography.
...how do you prove that you can't prove a negative??
Besides which, the advantage to c&p is simplicity. Copying an image from a web page and pasting in paintbrush is more convenient than saving as something and then opening (rt click, copy, win+r, 'paint', rt click, paste, 'ok' on the resize to fit dialog; rt click, save as, click 'desktop', type name, click save, win+r, 'paint', file, open, click 'desktop', open). Ditto moving data from Access to Excel. Rather than save as a CSV file and open it in excel, ctrl+a, ctrl+c, win+r, 'excel', ctrl+v.
There are certainly times when saving and opening is more appropriate, but c&p is quick and easy. It's a simple tool, but for simple uses it's ideal (this is the same reason I don't buy into add-on apps that expand the size of the clipboard. The whole point for me is that it's fast).
I haven't used Linux in almost two years, but one of the two reasons I stopped was quite literally the difficulty in copying and pasting (though the ability to copy & paste at the console is spectacular, and MS has no excuse for not supporting it). The other was that I couldn't manage to get my wireless NIC working, but that's a whole different story.
It is really amazing stuff; it's fantastic to see that significant funding and progress are being made in this field. Even decades off, the very idea of having a viable solution to the problem of energy generation is incredibly exciting.
However, yes, E=mc^2 will give me the answer, given that I know how much mass is being converted into energy. My point is that I don't know that: I don't know what fuel is being used (though other replies lead me to believe deuterium), and I (therefore) don't know how many particles are being conserved, so I can't use E=mc^2.
Granted, your link probably does provide that information, and I apologize for appearing so dense. I'll come back and read it when I get home tonight.
This is not at all to downplay how incredibly much energy is involved in one percent of an entire star; it's simply to recognize that the output of a star is so vastly much energy that any claims anyone makes about "akin to creating a star" are so exaggerated as to be useless.
Not to mention the vast complexity of a star in comparison to what they're doing.
I've got nothing but respect for what the researchers are doing, but it's not significantly akin to creating a star. It's taking one aspect of what goes on in a star, and trying to recreate it in a much more limited fashion.
E=mc^2 will give me the number for a complete conversion of mass to energy, which I, somehow, doubt is what they're doing.
On the other hand, I don't know enough about it to confidently say it's crap. So - anyone out there able to tell me what, exactly, this "kg of fusion fuel" is made up of? And, if possible, provide support/debunking for the 10,000,000x as much energy claim?
In the same sense, my logging on to slashdot today is akin to designing TCP/IP.
Either way, the whole scheme depends (just like every other entertainment industry) on developing a fan base whose money can be tapped into. And this is the potential problem I see with this.
I've watched televised gaming (UTx, MechAssault, a few others that have made it onto TechTV or G4), and there's always something lacking. In my mind, it seems like the missing factor is camera management. The usual over-the-shoulder camera view of the action is much less than ideal. Some system has to evolve such that you can be focused on the primary action (the guy carrying the flag), while at the same time being able to keep track of what else is going on nearby.
Translucent walls, to pop an idea off the top of my head, might help. The viewing audience gets to see the current focus (selected by a studio editing/camera crew, just like it is with professional sports), and can also see who's waiting just around the corner or on the other side of the door.
But that's what this will need to sustain profitability and grow: the audience doesn't want their situational awareness as limited as the player's. The audience wants a god's-eye view, just like they do for every other sporting event.
Bearing all that in mind (since you can't be bothered to actually read the article, apparently), wtf are you talking about?