It depends on the precise wordings. There are ways to to describe the problem such that the need to allow the drop is implicit in the problem -- I.e. that the problem is to pack the egg such that it survives the impact of a 10 foot drop. In that case, designing the system to prevent a 10 foot impact would be implicitly wrong.
On the other hand, "Your egg will be dropped from a height of 10 feet. Design a system such that your egg can survive the drop." could be taken to allow a parachute.
However: if he was warned, early on, that his parachute system wouldn't be in the spirit of the contest and he insisted that he could do it anyways "because the rules don't explicitly disallow it", then he wold hae turned a physics problem into a law problem and I could see a physics teacher giving him an 'F' for being in the wrong class. -- especially if he was being a prick about it.
It sounds to me like they have a POS
'out of the box' windows solution that leaves so many holes 'out of the box' that when the company PHB's go play directly with the machines (as they're want to do) their virus-loaded machines then infect the PVR boxes.
I'm gonna guess that, if he goes to a different Windows solution, there are two fears:
(1) the new 'solution' will be as messed up as the current one, and
(2) The PHB's are going to ask "Why are we going to this new system", and if you answer 'security', they're going to point to fear #1.
(3) if both (1) and (2) happen then you are soooo DEAD.
So the best thing to do is go to Linux or Mac so that 98% of the bosses' viruses won't infect the DVR boxes.
There are about a million people on slashdot. Given that your post made it to the front page, you can expect that at least one of those one million people is going to be an jerk with an axe to grind.
The best that I can suggest is to ignore the ignorant posts -- or at least ignore the ignorant part of those posts and mine the useful parts out of them.
I got an F, despite there being no rules whatsoever prohibiting parachutes
The idea in both situations is to design something that can survive the impact -- not avoid the impact, which is what you did,
They came up with an innovative solution to the problem. You just avoided the problem altogether.
I'd say that young kids are more likely to do it in the throes of hormone love, and not consider the implications. Older lovers are more likely to demand it fully knowing how they can abuse it.
it seems more likely to me that a couple of sixteen year olds will be dating and have given each other permission to locate- . . . ..
And what does being 16 years old have to do with it? I know one fully grown woman (30s) who had an abusive B-friend who would have jumped at the chance to be able to track her whereabouts 24/7.
Thankfully she's now broken up with him, but I figure that he would have had no problem with the idea of tracking her down at work and making a public scene... just for the fun of it (or, more accurately, all the more to make sure that she towed the line so that he "won't be forced to do something like that again").
When I got my PIII in early 2000, I still had the option of buying a PII/400 -- and machines with 64MB of ram were still considered reasonably high-end (for home use).
Some people think that the main reason why both the judges and IBM are being so patient is that they want absolutely no excuse for SCO to appeal. I'm pretty sure that everybody involved knows just how weak SCO's case is.
From groklaw notes:
Judge Wells also asked SCO if they have found, after all the discovery provided by IBM, any evidence of source-code misappropriation by IBM or do they need more.
If your premise is true, then you can never conclusively prove anything -- which is what you tried to push with your other rant.
Just as you can concusively show that there is a clear link you can conclusively show that there is no appreciable link.
While it is true that you cannot absolutelu prove something that is probability driven, well-designed experiments and/or studies can provide pretty clear indicators as to what is (or isn't) going on.
Poorly designed (or described) studies, as you've noted, can describe nothing -- or be misleading. Thus it is that you need to read a study pretty carefully so that you can understand what is really being tested. That's also why you want multiple studies -- so that systemic (or just unlucky) errors can be weeded out.
On the other hand, if we were to accept your premise that nothing can ever be proven (or disproven), we'd be letting children smoke, ignore the value of seatbelts, have asbestos pyjamas for kids and continue selling leaded paint for households.
Given that this guy is the president of a university, I'm going to presume that he's got at least enough brains to recognize when a study is clearly bogusm, and that he can recognize the difference between something that shows nothing is probably going on and one that shows that there's value in continuing to study, but doesn't conclusively prove in either direction.
case. I'm sure you can FLAC an MP3 file with the right command line argument but you won't get much out of it.
Speaking out of my ass here but, as long as the input data is 'legal', flacc should be able to encode it to something that will decode to the same file (modulo some of the 'envelope' info which flacc may, or may not choose to save verbatim. -- however, there's no guarantee that the encoded file would be smaller than the original -- since flacc is specifically designed to compress audo data, it may not do so well with 'sounds' that aren't very listenable.
Right -- so why, then are you freaking out when I talk studies indicating 'the possibility' that wifi causes problems?
And how can a study "indicate" a "possibility" of harm ? That is a nonsensical statement.
At this point, he thinks that the jury is out on this question.. he doesn't think that it's proven conclusively -- if he did, he'd have banned all wifi on campus. Instead, he's just choosing to not 'saturate' the campus with wifi hotspots so that the people in his care dont have up to 24/7 exposure (for those who are in residence). Clearly a more conservative approach than many would have chosen, but far from flag-waving loonie.
If/when future studies show that there is conclusively no (or negligable) risk from wifi, then I expect that he'll be happy to install ubiquitous hotspots.
I'm also concinved that Elvis Presley is actually dead, and is buried in a crypt at Graceland.
Not any more. DHS was afraid that terrorists would break in and take the body hostage, so they secretly removed his body and buried it in an ostensibly unnamed grave. If terrorists manage to break in, authorities will just dig up the real body and 'find it' nearby -- claiming that the thieves were scared off and had to leave it behind.
And now, having told you, I'll have to hunt you down and kill you.
The ones with wifi really get leukemia more often, often enough that it's unlikely that this is caused by mere randomness. You've found a correlation. (notice that you've *NOT* proved causation)
You sound like a smoking apologist... -- If there's no correlation, then you've implicitly proven that wifi doesn't hurt people... but if there is a correlation, then claim you haven't proven that it does.
If statistical correlation doesn't show that wifi causes cancer, then what does?
"Repeated measurements stop the photon from entering the actual program, but allow its quantum nature to flirt with the program's components -"
Sometimes repeated flirting can get a more accurate answer to the question than just 'running the program' and dealing with the resulting fallout when it turns out that she was feeling threatened -- or too drunk to properly assent.
Radiowaves have covered most of the civilised world for 50-60 years now,....
We're using different frequencies than we did 50 years ago. Right now wireless is running around the 2-5Gz range... That's not too far from wireless frequencies that were used to fry an egg with 2 cell phones. Those frequencies don't have anywhere near the body of experience that lower frequencies do.
Also: we do have rising cancer rates, autoimune problems and fertility issues. Some of this is due to longer lifetimes, but some may be due to radiou interference. Problem is that it's hard to pinpoint the probelem specifically because the exposure is so ubiquitious. It's hard to isolate exposure which makes it hard to study the effects.
Not *one* ha shwon any harmful effects at the levels we're here talking of.
Apparently, there are studies that indicate the possibility of harm from wireless, but the studies (so far) are inconclusive.
His point was that the studies that he saw were inconclusive. Inconclusive is different than no effect. This means that it's possible that there's no effect and that there was a systemic problem with the studies. It's also possible that there is an effect and the studies so far just haven't pinpointed it yet.
while the jury is out, he's decided to err on the side of safety.
if there is an effect, it's more likely to affect youth than full-grown adults, becaust the tissues in teenagers are still growing which makes them more susceptible.
wifi is a convenience and not going ubiquitous doesn't (generally) affect the ability of the students to learn.
I'm presuming here that they will be making up for this by making public access points easy to find/connect to.
actually: (further to the previous point), he's not banning all wifi -- just ubiquituitious wireless (see this slightly less inflamatory post) -- In other words, he's not willing to saturate the campus with wireless radiation just to follow the current fad.
He's responsible for thousands of students, and seems to figure that the risk of a couple dozen needless deaths isn't wort the convenience of ubiquitious wireless.
The precautionary approach is admittedly strong, but I don't think it's entirely unreasonable, given the level of his responsibility.
There's the possibility that wifi could be problematic, so he's playing safe.
Remember the people who got laughed at in the 50's and 60's when they suggested that tobacco could be carcinogenic... or all of the clock painters who 'sharpened' their radium paint brushes by licking them.
And it's not like you really lose that much -- It means that you have to physically wire your access points I argued a long time against my roommate putting a wireless network (but I ultimately lost). I still keep most of my machines wired, just on principle. (that, and having all these freaking network cards!).
A 1 thousand megawatt station will burn 3.1 million tons of black coal, versus 24 tons of uranium......
The 1,000 MWe coal-fired power station produces about 200,000 tonnes of fly ash
In other words, ignoring the 97% recyclability of the uranium, the fly ash would only need a 120 parts/million density to 'generate' the same volume of radioactivity as a nuclear power plant. Even if you further presume that this radioactivity is pure uranium, and take into account that it takes 200tones of 'natural' uranium to produce the 24 tones of enriched uranium You've still got something only half as 'rich' as the lowest quality uranium ore that is normally mined -- and the Uranium ore is likely to have rich 'veins' where most of the uranium will be found, as opposed to the fly ash which will be very uniform.
In other words, even though it may have 'a lot' of uranium in it, the volume of fly ash is too huge to make it worth refining.
This is also an exercise in how much garbage the average coal plant produces.
Had a case like that... in an office where we often worked in the evenings, a girl across the street had this habit of bouncing around her suite with the windows open and very little on. A very pleasant distraction, but there was this underlying feeling of guilt over the implicit voyerism -- even though it took a conscious effort to avoid looking.
Finally, we sent over a girl from our office to let her know that she was very visible across the street. Her reaction was essentially a shrug.
Once we knew that she explicitly didn't mind, we could watch with a clear conscience.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, "Your egg will be dropped from a height of 10 feet. Design a system such that your egg can survive the drop." could be taken to allow a parachute.
However: if he was warned, early on, that his parachute system wouldn't be in the spirit of the contest and he insisted that he could do it anyways "because the rules don't explicitly disallow it", then he wold hae turned a physics problem into a law problem and I could see a physics teacher giving him an 'F' for being in the wrong class. -- especially if he was being a prick about it.
I'm gonna guess that, if he goes to a different Windows solution, there are two fears:
(1) the new 'solution' will be as messed up as the current one, and
(2) The PHB's are going to ask "Why are we going to this new system", and if you answer 'security', they're going to point to fear #1. (3) if both (1) and (2) happen then you are soooo DEAD.
So the best thing to do is go to Linux or Mac so that 98% of the bosses' viruses won't infect the DVR boxes.
The best that I can suggest is to ignore the ignorant posts -- or at least ignore the ignorant part of those posts and mine the useful parts out of them.
The idea in both situations is to design something that can survive the impact -- not avoid the impact, which is what you did,
They came up with an innovative solution to the problem. You just avoided the problem altogether.
I'd say that young kids are more likely to do it in the throes of hormone love, and not consider the implications. Older lovers are more likely to demand it fully knowing how they can abuse it.
And what does being 16 years old have to do with it? I know one fully grown woman (30s) who had an abusive B-friend who would have jumped at the chance to be able to track her whereabouts 24/7.
Thankfully she's now broken up with him, but I figure that he would have had no problem with the idea of tracking her down at work and making a public scene ... just for the fun of it (or, more accurately, all the more to make sure that she towed the line so that he "won't be forced to do something like that again").
When I got my PIII in early 2000, I still had the option of buying a PII/400 -- and machines with 64MB of ram were still considered reasonably high-end (for home use).
From groklaw notes: I got a good laugh out of that.
Just as you can concusively show that there is a clear link you can conclusively show that there is no appreciable link.
While it is true that you cannot absolutelu prove something that is probability driven, well-designed experiments and/or studies can provide pretty clear indicators as to what is (or isn't) going on.
Poorly designed (or described) studies, as you've noted, can describe nothing -- or be misleading. Thus it is that you need to read a study pretty carefully so that you can understand what is really being tested. That's also why you want multiple studies -- so that systemic (or just unlucky) errors can be weeded out.
On the other hand, if we were to accept your premise that nothing can ever be proven (or disproven), we'd be letting children smoke, ignore the value of seatbelts, have asbestos pyjamas for kids and continue selling leaded paint for households.
Given that this guy is the president of a university, I'm going to presume that he's got at least enough brains to recognize when a study is clearly bogusm, and that he can recognize the difference between something that shows nothing is probably going on and one that shows that there's value in continuing to study, but doesn't conclusively prove in either direction.
Speaking out of my ass here but, as long as the input data is 'legal', flacc should be able to encode it to something that will decode to the same file (modulo some of the 'envelope' info which flacc may, or may not choose to save verbatim. -- however, there's no guarantee that the encoded file would be smaller than the original -- since flacc is specifically designed to compress audo data, it may not do so well with 'sounds' that aren't very listenable.
get a funnybone, bud.
True, but if you want that shipped without Windows, they'll charge you an extra $150, so the price ends up about the same.
:-/
If/when future studies show that there is conclusively no (or negligable) risk from wifi, then I expect that he'll be happy to install ubiquitous hotspots.
Not any more. DHS was afraid that terrorists would break in and take the body hostage, so they secretly removed his body and buried it in an ostensibly unnamed grave. If terrorists manage to break in, authorities will just dig up the real body and 'find it' nearby -- claiming that the thieves were scared off and had to leave it behind.
And now, having told you, I'll have to hunt you down and kill you.
You sound like a smoking apologist... -- If there's no correlation, then you've implicitly proven that wifi doesn't hurt people ... but if there is a correlation, then claim you haven't proven that it does.
If statistical correlation doesn't show that wifi causes cancer, then what does?
Or that she was properly turned on but had a 6'2" "entanglement" with a thing for aluminum bats.
Sometimes repeated flirting can get a more accurate answer to the question than just 'running the program' and dealing with the resulting fallout when it turns out that she was feeling threatened -- or too drunk to properly assent.
Feel free to argue the opinion, but please don't mark honest opinion as flaimbait.
We're using different frequencies than we did 50 years ago. Right now wireless is running around the 2-5Gz range... That's not too far from wireless frequencies that were used to fry an egg with 2 cell phones. Those frequencies don't have anywhere near the body of experience that lower frequencies do.
Also: we do have rising cancer rates, autoimune problems and fertility issues. Some of this is due to longer lifetimes, but some may be due to radiou interference. Problem is that it's hard to pinpoint the probelem specifically because the exposure is so ubiquitious. It's hard to isolate exposure which makes it hard to study the effects.
Apparently, there are studies that indicate the possibility of harm from wireless, but the studies (so far) are inconclusive.
His point was that the studies that he saw were inconclusive. Inconclusive is different than no effect. This means that it's possible that there's no effect and that there was a systemic problem with the studies. It's also possible that there is an effect and the studies so far just haven't pinpointed it yet.
He's responsible for thousands of students, and seems to figure that the risk of a couple dozen needless deaths isn't wort the convenience of ubiquitious wireless.
Remember the people who got laughed at in the 50's and 60's when they suggested that tobacco could be carcinogenic... or all of the clock painters who 'sharpened' their radium paint brushes by licking them.
And it's not like you really lose that much -- It means that you have to physically wire your access points I argued a long time against my roommate putting a wireless network (but I ultimately lost). I still keep most of my machines wired, just on principle. (that, and having all these freaking network cards!).
In other words, ignoring the 97% recyclability of the uranium, the fly ash would only need a 120 parts/million density to 'generate' the same volume of radioactivity as a nuclear power plant. Even if you further presume that this radioactivity is pure uranium, and take into account that it takes 200tones of 'natural' uranium to produce the 24 tones of enriched uranium You've still got something only half as 'rich' as the lowest quality uranium ore that is normally mined -- and the Uranium ore is likely to have rich 'veins' where most of the uranium will be found, as opposed to the fly ash which will be very uniform.
In other words, even though it may have 'a lot' of uranium in it, the volume of fly ash is too huge to make it worth refining.
This is also an exercise in how much garbage the average coal plant produces.
Finally, we sent over a girl from our office to let her know that she was very visible across the street. Her reaction was essentially a shrug.
Once we knew that she explicitly didn't mind, we could watch with a clear conscience.
(sorry: I just had to say that).