Would it be feasible to get a Windows laptop with lots of hard disk, copy a DVD to disk, and have standard, unmodified Windows DVD player software play the movie in court? If so, this would very dramatically demonstrate that the encription does not prevent piracy.
"Fact: Nearly all of the Founding Fathers were non-Christians. Washington in particular was a deist (look it up). Many were atheists."
They were pretty much all 'freethinkers' (i.e. made, and encouraged others to make, their own judgement on religious matters) and many were Deists. I don't think there were many (any?) atheists however. For example, the first third of Thomas Paine's "Age of Reason" was attacking Atheism. (The other two thirds were attacking orthodox Christianity. The Bible gave him more material to work with in this section, hence its larger size.)
As a fan of Occam's Razor, my preferred model for the universe is one with baryonic dark matter only. As of a few years ago, the baryon density (determined by Big Bang Nucleosynthesis theory) and the overall density of the universe (as determined by the masses of galaxy clusters, from galaxy velocities) had error ranges that (slightly) overlapped. Has the baryonic-dark-matter-only universe been ruled out since then? When can we expect to know the nature of the dark matter, and what is the answer likely to be?
Interesting link behind the 'this one' - it appears that bleach, degreasing preparations for home use, perfume and preparations for personal hygene are in the same category. This means you can't have Chanel no 5 bleach or Draino mouthwash. Alas for the lost marketing opportunities!
I'm prepared to forgive them this for the sake of the amusement I got out of the reference to 'consecrating explosives'. To make the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch perhaps?
If you read the article carefully, you see it does *not* affect the radioactivity: "The superbug does not neutralize radioactivity in metals." (Nor could it.) Reading between the lines, it is useful here for two reasons:
It transforms heavy metals into less toxic forms (i.e. less prone to be absorbed by living organisms.) Some of those heavy metals could be radioactive.
It is able to do the cleanup mentioned above, plus neutralizing organic toxins, in radioactive environments that would prevent other biological cleanup methods from working.
This is what the Scopes trial was about (when a teacher was charged with breaking the law by teaching evolution in Tenassee(?) in about 1930.) The *intention* was to get a quick conviction so the constitutionality of the law could be challenged. It was a dismal failure - the circus the trial turned into was irrelevant to the goal, and the conviction was overturned on a technicality so that it could not be appealled on constitutional grounds as planned. The law remained on the books into the 1960s.
The theory unifying electromagnitism and the weak nuclear force has been around since 1970ish, and was experimentally proven in the late 70s, but it has produced no useful new technology. (Well, perhaps unless you are an experimental particle physicist.)
The reason is because the energies involved before the effects of the theory are felt are far greater than can be achieved outside of a major particle accelerator (or cosmic rays.) A grand unified theory only has effects at energies *many* orders of magnitude higher. I cannot have practical applications.
Incidentally, do we really know that he has $25M in investment? That may be a false claim to encourage others to invest - is there independent confirmation of this?
"these rules would modal sentences like: english: the cat chased the dog. irish: chased the cat the dog."
So English uses infix notation and Irish uses prefix notation. I hope the Polish use Polish Notation. Anyone use postfix/RPN? German?
I had to modify a stellar evolution code written in Fortran by Poles once. I was worried I'd have to read the comments backwards before I could understand them.
Popular media science articles are often difficult to interpret, as they have been dumbed down either deliberately by the reporter or through the reporter not understanding the subject. I strongly suspect that 'contains the elements magnesium, silicon and oxygen' is the result of this process.
It is most unlikely (see below) that there is elemental magnesium and silicon in the planet's atmosphere - so it must be that they detected molecules containing magnesium, silicon and oxygen (i.e. almost certainly MgO and SiO.) The reporter has reported the elements but not the molecules.
MgO and SiO are so stable that they are present as molecules in the atmospheres of cool stars - around 3000K. For them to be in elemental form in the planet's atmosphere, it must be hotter than this.
Here is a back-of-the-envelope calculation: The relationship between orbital radius and period is P^2 proportional to a^3 (a=semi-major axis of the orbit) (This is one of Kepler's laws.) Strictly speaking, we need the mass of the star in there also, but we are told the star is 'slightly larger and brighter than the sun', so I will assume it has solar mass and luminosity for simplicity.
The period is about 0.01 that of the earth around the sun, therefore the orbit radius is about cube root(1e-4) approx equals 0.05 that of the earth - i.e. 1/20 AU. The incident energy from the star goes as inverse r squared, so will be 400 times brighter than on Earth. The equilibrium temperature for a black body goes as the fourth root of this, so will be about 5 times greater than for the Earth.
The black body equilibrium temperature of the earth is below freezing - say 250K (we gain from the greenhouse effect) so this planet will be around 1250K - short of what is needed to dissociate MgO and SiO by a factor of about 3. (This is somewhat of an underestimate as the star is more luminous than the sun. This is partly counteracted by the fact that with a more massive star, the planet is further away for the same orbital period.)
There is some debate on the relative merits of ASCII (as used by PG) and non-ASCII (particularly HTML) formats. ASCII will always be readable and can easily be used as a base for more elaborate formats. HTML allows formatting, convenient viewing, and features such as links and illustrations.
It seems to me there is a technical solution to give us the best of both worlds: Define an authorised minimal subset of HTML to use. Write a program to automatically strip this simple HTML from the texts to yield ASCII. Write a program to do a 'diff' between an ASCII and HTML version of a text, and update the HTML version with modifications made to the ASCII. Write programs to convert minimal HTML to XML, LaTeX or whatever your favourite format is.
With these tools, you can easily maintain the HTML and ASCII versions synchronised, and add other formats as required with other conversion programs.
One problem with this approach is "what about when the language you wrote the programs in becomes obsolete". I have several answers to this: First of all, if the minimal formatting is not too complex, neither will the programs be - they can simply be rewritten. Secondly, FORTRAN and COBOL compilers are still available - once popular languages last forever. In 50 years, Perl and C++ will still be compilable.
The weather was not good, so I didn't go to a dark site, however I got to see a fair chunk (perhaps 1/4) of the sky through a hole in clouds from 4 am to 4:15 am NZDT this morning (=Nov 17 15:00 UT). I saw no meteors during this time.
Note that the story does *not* say that 50% of servers delivered by Compaq have Linux installed. It simply says that 50% of the organizations that buy a server from Compaq have at least one Linux box.
I can give some reasons to go for HP. Whether they are sufficient is up to you.
When I was an astronomy graduate student, the units system was absolutely invaluable - worth the price of the HP48 (about US$250 at the time) just by themselves. One of my professors said that a barn-megaparsec was a teaspoon, and I argued that it must be about.6 teaspoon instead. A few months later, I got the 48 and with a few key strokes entered the numbers 1 barn and 1 megaparsec, multiplied them, and asked for the answer in teaspoons and proved I was right. (Have TI caught up with this?)
(Other silly HP48 tricks: I loaded a terminal emulator and used my HP48 to point the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory. I therefore claim the CSO to be the largest, most expensive pocket calculator peripheral. Can anyone do better?)
RPN is wonderful when you get used to it. (But getting used to it makes it hard to use other people's calculators.) The keyboards are a joy to use also.
Traditionally, HP calculators have been very high quality and lasted well. I have working HP calculators back to 1972. (I have, if I can remember correctly: HP 11C, 15C, 16C, 18B, 19C, 21, 25, 32E, 34C, 35, 41C, 45, 46, 48SX, 55, 65, 67, 80, 97.)
However, you may need to go second hand to get an HP48 for under $100 - I haven't seen the prices lately.
Slashdot Mirror
Would it be feasible to get a Windows laptop with lots of hard disk, copy a DVD to disk, and have standard, unmodified Windows DVD player software play the movie in court? If so, this would very dramatically demonstrate that the encription does not prevent piracy.
They were pretty much all 'freethinkers' (i.e. made, and encouraged others to make, their own judgement on religious matters) and many were Deists. I don't think there were many (any?) atheists however. For example, the first third of Thomas Paine's "Age of Reason" was attacking Atheism. (The other two thirds were attacking orthodox Christianity. The Bible gave him more material to work with in this section, hence its larger size.)
(I'm not knocking Atheism - I am one myself.)
The problem with patenting a time machine is as soon as you use it to go back in time, you invalidate your own patent by prior art.
As a fan of Occam's Razor, my preferred model for the universe is one with baryonic dark matter only. As of a few years ago, the baryon density (determined by Big Bang Nucleosynthesis theory) and the overall density of the universe (as determined by the masses of galaxy clusters, from galaxy velocities) had error ranges that (slightly) overlapped. Has the baryonic-dark-matter-only universe been ruled out since then? When can we expect to know the nature of the dark matter, and what is the answer likely to be?
Interesting link behind the 'this one' - it appears that bleach, degreasing preparations for home use, perfume and preparations for personal hygene are in the same category. This means you can't have Chanel no 5 bleach or Draino mouthwash. Alas for the lost marketing opportunities!
I'm prepared to forgive them this for the sake of the amusement I got out of the reference to 'consecrating explosives'. To make the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch perhaps?
It transforms heavy metals into less toxic forms (i.e. less prone to be absorbed by living organisms.) Some of those heavy metals could be radioactive.
It is able to do the cleanup mentioned above, plus neutralizing organic toxins, in radioactive environments that would prevent other biological cleanup methods from working.
This is what the Scopes trial was about (when a teacher was charged with breaking the law by teaching evolution in Tenassee(?) in about 1930.) The *intention* was to get a quick conviction so the constitutionality of the law could be challenged. It was a dismal failure - the circus the trial turned into was irrelevant to the goal, and the conviction was overturned on a technicality so that it could not be appealled on constitutional grounds as planned. The law remained on the books into the 1960s.
The reason is because the energies involved before the effects of the theory are felt are far greater than can be achieved outside of a major particle accelerator (or cosmic rays.) A grand unified theory only has effects at energies *many* orders of magnitude higher. I cannot have practical applications.
Incidentally, do we really know that he has $25M in investment? That may be a false claim to encourage others to invest - is there independent confirmation of this?
english: the cat chased the dog.
irish: chased the cat the dog."
So English uses infix notation and Irish uses prefix notation. I hope the Polish use Polish Notation. Anyone use postfix/RPN? German?
I had to modify a stellar evolution code written in Fortran by Poles once. I was worried I'd have to read the comments backwards before I could understand them.
So that would include the student who:
gets beaten up and their joint stolen whenever they try to take a toke behind the bike shed.
starts fights when drunk.
always screams abuse at the flying blue camel when LSD tripping.
gets trampled by the blue camel when LSD tripping.
gets stoned and writes psych profiles that lump bullying and drug abuse in the same category.
gets shot at by formerly top students who have turned into psychopaths by the demon weed. (It happens, I tell you! I saw it on "Reefer Madness".)
hangs about on street corners tripping up the drunks as they stumble by.
It is most unlikely (see below) that there is elemental magnesium and silicon in the planet's atmosphere - so it must be that they detected molecules containing magnesium, silicon and oxygen (i.e. almost certainly MgO and SiO.) The reporter has reported the elements but not the molecules.
MgO and SiO are so stable that they are present as molecules in the atmospheres of cool stars - around 3000K. For them to be in elemental form in the planet's atmosphere, it must be hotter than this.
Here is a back-of-the-envelope calculation: The relationship between orbital radius and period is P^2 proportional to a^3 (a=semi-major axis of the orbit) (This is one of Kepler's laws.) Strictly speaking, we need the mass of the star in there also, but we are told the star is 'slightly larger and brighter than the sun', so I will assume it has solar mass and luminosity for simplicity.
The period is about 0.01 that of the earth around the sun, therefore the orbit radius is about cube root(1e-4) approx equals 0.05 that of the earth - i.e. 1/20 AU. The incident energy from the star goes as inverse r squared, so will be 400 times brighter than on Earth. The equilibrium temperature for a black body goes as the fourth root of this, so will be about 5 times greater than for the Earth.
The black body equilibrium temperature of the earth is below freezing - say 250K (we gain from the greenhouse effect) so this planet will be around 1250K - short of what is needed to dissociate MgO and SiO by a factor of about 3. (This is somewhat of an underestimate as the star is more luminous than the sun. This is partly counteracted by the fact that with a more massive star, the planet is further away for the same orbital period.)
It seems to me there is a technical solution to give us the best of both worlds: Define an authorised minimal subset of HTML to use. Write a program to automatically strip this simple HTML from the texts to yield ASCII. Write a program to do a 'diff' between an ASCII and HTML version of a text, and update the HTML version with modifications made to the ASCII. Write programs to convert minimal HTML to XML, LaTeX or whatever your favourite format is.
With these tools, you can easily maintain the HTML and ASCII versions synchronised, and add other formats as required with other conversion programs.
One problem with this approach is "what about when the language you wrote the programs in becomes obsolete". I have several answers to this: First of all, if the minimal formatting is not too complex, neither will the programs be - they can simply be rewritten. Secondly, FORTRAN and COBOL compilers are still available - once popular languages last forever. In 50 years, Perl and C++ will still be compilable.
The weather was not good, so I didn't go to a dark site, however I got to see a fair chunk (perhaps 1/4) of the sky through a hole in clouds from 4 am to 4:15 am NZDT this morning (=Nov 17 15:00 UT). I saw no meteors during this time.
Note that the story does *not* say that 50% of servers delivered by Compaq have Linux installed. It simply says that 50% of the organizations that buy a server from Compaq have at least one Linux box.
I can give some reasons to go for HP. Whether they are sufficient is up to you.
.6 teaspoon instead. A few months later, I got the 48 and with a few key strokes entered the numbers 1 barn and 1 megaparsec, multiplied them, and asked for the answer in teaspoons and proved I was right. (Have TI caught up with this?)
When I was an astronomy graduate student, the units system was absolutely invaluable - worth the price of the HP48 (about US$250 at the time) just by themselves. One of my professors said that a barn-megaparsec was a teaspoon, and I argued that it must be about
(Other silly HP48 tricks: I loaded a terminal emulator and used my HP48 to point the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory. I therefore claim the CSO to be the largest, most expensive pocket calculator peripheral. Can anyone do better?)
RPN is wonderful when you get used to it. (But getting used to it makes it hard to use other people's calculators.) The keyboards are a joy to use also.
Traditionally, HP calculators have been very high quality and lasted well. I have working HP calculators back to 1972. (I have, if I can remember correctly: HP 11C, 15C, 16C, 18B, 19C, 21, 25, 32E, 34C, 35, 41C, 45, 46, 48SX, 55, 65, 67, 80, 97.)
However, you may need to go second hand to get an HP48 for under $100 - I haven't seen the prices lately.